Waiting for the big envelope

So you wait some more.

You can imagine my pain when on vacation in Vancouver for Spring Break, thinking about all the college mail I would receive when I got back home.

And you can imagine my excitement when I scrambled out of the car and rushed to the counter to get my mail.

The upside? I would not have to wait much longer, since there were college envelopes galore.

The downside? Most of those college envelopes contained rejections. (Three, to be exact. Imagine my horror at getting three rejections in one night.)

Many seniors are going to be faced with this exact same scenario, confronted by small envelopes and knowing exactly what they're going to say inside. And yet, we still hold out hope that one of those envelopes might a teaser; in the style of "Who Wants to Be a Millionaire" ("I'm sorry to inform you that ... you are accepted! The big envelope is coming tomorrow.") But of course, most colleges don't have this kind of humor in mind when sending out their college acceptances. Unless it was some sort of clown college.

Some have equated getting rejected by a college to getting rejected by a potential prom date. Um, sure - if you have to ask your date six months in advance and wait in horrible pain with others while the date evaluates your academic standing, extracurricular activities and SATs, and asks you to write them essays about why you would be the perfect date for them.

For a prom date, I would say it's definitely not worth it.

No, the college rejection process is a system entirely independent of anything else.

At the moment, my mind is running through everything that these colleges know about me, and let me tell you, it's a whole lot easier to come up with reasons why they wouldn't want me than to come up with reasons why they would.

If rejected, seniors would be unhappy, not just for the obvious reasons (because you really liked the college in one aspect or another), but because of what it would reveal about ourselves. Yes, we know we should not take the rejection letters personally. However, college is the one clear light-at-the-end-of-the-tunnel that we've been working hard for all throughout high school. Learning in a one paragraph letter from that college that you just didn't make the cut is heartbreaking.

And yet, we'll get over it.

Truthfully, all the colleges that rejected me were ones I had never really imagined myself going to, or ones I was pretty sure I had an extremely slim chance of getting into. Since I had already written off these colleges, the rejections were a lot less painful.

On the other hand, finding out that I had gotten rejected from my favorite college did hurt. However, it was not as bad as I thought it would be. The way some seniors last year described it to me, I thought there would be fits of crying into the night and that my pillow would be stained with college rejection tears. Even though I kept my expectations pretty low (I knew I had about a snowball's chances in hell of getting in), it still hurt pretty badly, because there was always that slight glimmer of hope that I might be accepted.

But, hey, even if we don't get into the school of our dreams, there are still other perfectly wonderful, acceptable schools that we have been offered admission to - schools that are nothing to scoff at. Our hard work in high school definitely does not go to waste.

As I said before, it hurts, but I'm not crying. And I'll definitely move on. Because if you already know the direction you're going in life, that's better than an admission letter any day.

Margot Leong is a senior at Menlo School. Her column appears in the weekend edition of the Daily Journal. She can be reached at margot.leong@gmail.com.