RD Decisions.
these coming 2 weeks, RD decisions are rolling out.
hear me out, i have been in your shoes. rejections, waitlists. "wasn't I enough?" is a question you perpetually ask.
yes, it is hard to say goodbye to a dream school. perhaps, harder than breaking up with a girlfriend.
you loved the school so much and you built all the plans and things you would do after getting in. "alhamdulillah, Harvard/Yale class of 2029," running your own channel, teaching people, starting new projects.
- only to burst in tears and silently shout at your white pillow.
but hey!
you were not rejected. it wasn't you.
you are smart, intreresting, and amazing!
what WAS rejected is the version of you that you
portrayed in your essays.
and often, due to lack of experience and guidance, you depict an average version of yourself: the one that is not sufficiently mature, not deeply personal, and not widely read.
but you are actually not that person, are you?
you are smart, you are mature, you are ambitious.
you are so good that you are aiming beyond what your early friends aim at. you are brilliant and talented.
and you should accept that you didn't work enough on presenting the best version of yourself to admissions officers.
what you should do now is to open the pdf version of your submitted application. drink a cold expresso. and with ice eyes, genuinely judge: did you present the best student version of yourself?
this happens all the time. you think you came off funny and experienced — but after the rejection you read your essays and see that instead of your love for kafka's depressive stories, you wrote about your irrelevant conversations with grandma that didn't depict your best student version. instead of showing how your activities contributed to your community engagement and purpose, you depicted narratives that you got from AI.
get down, get a piece of paper, and start writing about how those conversations with babushka changed how you approach reading books, how it changed your thinking and character. talk about things you observed about the world that hold true but people don't know it.
and then compare your current draft, which was written in just an hour, to your submitted essay. see how better it got?
you are good. you are enough. but being enough is not enough. you should present the best student version of yourself.
and this requires you to be smart, intelligent, humble, curious, and positive.
now get rid of the tears and your room, touch some grass, buy yourself a bucket of flowers or play playstation for 2 hours, sleep a lot. then get back to work.
the first step might be to finish off the applications that are still open. there are a few Asian Universities that are still open. don't underestimate them.
and if you are considering a gap year, watch the podcast that i took with jamshid:
linkthe bright future is ahead of you. #get_a_life.
levsha
p.s: repost
@levshacloser
