As a senior in high school I get asked two ques­tions quite fre­quently. The first is “Are you a Senior now?” to which I obvi­ously respond yes. The sec­ond ques­tion that fol­lows is “Oh, where are you apply­ing to Col­lege?” Every per­son that I have met this past year has asked me that ques­tion, and answer­ing it has quickly become one of the most annoy­ing aspects that I’ve had to deal with this year. Just bear in mind, I’ve had to endure the com­bined forces of Alex Guichet’s Pho­to­blog, and this Twit­ter phe­nom­e­non that is tak­ing the world by storm,  so I know what annoy­ing is. Regard­less, I usu­ally respond with the typ­i­cal. “Oh, well I want to major in film right now so Chapman’s my num­ber one choice because they have a great Film pro­gram.” Now if I’m lucky, the per­son will have heard of Chap­man and will sim­ply stop ques­tion­ing me at that point, but more often than not they ask me where else I’m apply­ing to. Of course, this isn’t a very fair ques­tion to ask me because I’ve applied to about ten dif­fer­ent col­leges thus far, and ask­ing me to list all of them, is a lit­tle ridicu­lous. How­ever, being the polite con­ver­sa­tion­al­ist that I am I pro­ceed to list my col­lege choices.

“Well sec­ond there’s LMU, then Notre Dame, UCLA would be great to get into, but I’m also apply­ing to UCSD, and UCSB.” “What about the Cal States?” “Oh well I applied to a bunch of those too, Cal State Long Beach has a great pro­gram, so does Cal State North­ridge, in fact I just got into Cal State North­ridge” “Oh well con­grat­u­la­tions do you think you’ll go there?” “Well that depends on where else I get accepted to” “When do you hear back?” “Oh prob­a­bly around march” “Ah, so where else have you applied?” “I also applied to San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, and Cal State Mon­terey Bay, and that’s about it.” “Wow, Mon­terey Bay!?”

I think you get the pic­ture.  The sim­ple fact of the mat­ter is that ask­ing a Senior which col­lege they are going to is about as com­pul­sory as ask­ing a preg­nant woman whether she’s hav­ing a boy or girl.  In the eyes of the inter­roga­tor, it’s a sim­ple sub­ject to delve into,  and it’s also per­sonal enough and often com­plex enough to make the con­ver­sa­tion inter­est­ing. Plus there’s the added bonus that  the help­less per­son being inter­ro­gated will feel as if the inter­roga­tor actu­ally cares about where they are going to col­lege, because as well know, col­lege is very seri­ous busi­ness. The thing that the inter­roga­tor often for­gets though is the fact that per­son being inter­ro­gated has been asked the same ques­tion three times a week for the past year, and they have already heard every pos­si­ble response that some­one can give them. This obvi­ously makes the con­ver­sa­tion about as excit­ing as telling a per­son a joke that they’ve already heard. By that I mean it’s not excit­ing, and that such a con­ver­sa­tion would only serve to boost the self esteem of the per­son who is telling the joke. Which of course is sim­ply bad con­ver­sa­tion etiquette.

Putting that sub­ject aside, I’ve finally fin­ished my col­lege appli­ca­tions. It was a long, tir­ing, painful, and down­right stress­ful process, but I got it done, and a huge bur­den has been lifted off of my back. My final list of col­leges that I applied to (in order of where I want to get in) is:

1. Chap­man

2. UCLA

3. Notre Dame

4. LMU

5 .UCSD

6. UCSB

7. CSULB

8. CSUN

9. SFSU

10. CSUMB

It’s quite an exten­sive list, but it is packed with very rep­utable col­leges all which should offer me a great edu­ca­tion and a great place to live by attend­ing any one of them. As I’ve expressed pre­vi­ously, I only applied to places where I thought that I would enjoy attend­ing. The idea was to make it so that being accepted to any one of these col­leges would be a vic­tory, and so far things are look­ing really good. I’ve been accepted to Cal State North­ridge as well as San Fran­cisco State Uni­ver­sity, which are two of the nicer schools in the Cal State Sys­tem. Hope­fully I’ll be accepted to at least one of my top 5 schools as well.

As excit­ing as pick­ing a col­lege is, it’s also incred­i­bly stress­ful. Fill­ing out appli­ca­tions is like being asked to bake a cake for the fresh­man girl at Conel­ley that you really have a crush on, but are too afraid to talk to. On one hand, you know that mak­ing a good cake will make her like you. But on the other hand, you have no idea what kind of cake she wants, and if you make her the wrong one then your chances with her are screwed for­ever. This kind of sit­u­a­tion made writ­ing my col­lege essays par­tic­u­larly painful. Most essays expected that I write about an aspect of my life that was impor­tant, and influ­en­tial to me. Sounds easy enough on paper right? After all I am a blog­ger and all I do is write about myself for 90% of the time. How­ever, when it came to actu­ally sit­ting down and writ­ing the essays, it turned out that I was sim­ply crippled.

I couldn’t think of a topic that would be inter­est­ing enough to catch the atten­tion of the admis­sions rep­re­sen­ta­tives. Not only that, I often had to com­press my essay to be about 500 words long. In the inter­est of extend­ing our cake metaphor, it’s like find­ing out that you have to make the cake in less then twenty four hours, you only have 10 dol­lars to spend on it, and you’re forced to buy the ingre­di­ents at El Metate Mar­ket. It can be done of course, but it’s just not the ideal sit­u­a­tion to go about doing things. Any­ways, this kind of pres­sure meant that I ended up spend­ing six hour days writ­ing stu­pid 500 word essays for col­lege. As I keep men­tion­ing, the process was painful, embar­rass­ing, and some­times dis­grace­ful, espe­cially con­sid­er­ing that most of them turned out badly anyways.

That aside, I’m still strangely con­fi­dent in my abil­i­ties to get accepted into my top 5 col­leges. Maybe it’s the fact that I’ve already been accepted to 2 col­leges, and I’m tech­ni­cally 2–0 as far as my accep­tance to rejec­tion ratio is con­cerned. Out­side of that, I also think it has to do with the fact that I really didn’t feel the need to prove myself to the col­leges that I was apply­ing to. Obvi­ously, I tried to impress them, and I gave them my heart­felt responses to all of their ridicu­lous appli­ca­tion ques­tions, but I didn’t get des­per­ate. Look­ing back at my resume I real­ized that I’ve been involved in a plethora of real activ­i­ties in high school, and that I’ve accom­plished quite a bit in my high school career.  Nowhere in my appli­ca­tion did bull­shit clubs like Key Club, or NHS, show up, nor did I have an inflated num­ber of ser­vice hours for doing silly things at my Church (Ahem, Mr. Guichet). I guess one could say that I applied to col­lege on my own terms, I applied where I wanted to apply to, and told them what I wanted them to hear, not what THEY wanted to hear.

As March comes closer, which means a bar­rage of accep­tance and denial let­ters, I some­times ques­tion my col­lege choice. Being a film­maker is such an erratic lifestyle, with so many ups and downs. Some­times I feel as if I’m on the top of the world and seri­ously have a shot at mak­ing it big. Other times I feel as if I’m tal­ent­less and ques­tion whether I should really be pur­su­ing film. Then there’s those fleet­ing moments of artis­tic bliss, which catch me by sur­prise every cou­ple of weeks. They’re a eupho­ria of cre­ativ­ity, poten­tial, and imag­i­na­tion, and when I expe­ri­ence them, I know that major­ing in film is the right path for me.

With Col­lege apps out of the way, I’ve over­come a major hur­dle in my senior year. Now all I have to do is sit back and relax until I start get­ting accepted into place. Or in the case that I don’t, per­haps start con­sid­er­ing the air force.