College Hypocrisy

“It’s for my resume,” I say to myself as I sign up for a second season of junior varsity lacrosse. Athletics have always been torture to me, whether because of my asthma, my lack of motivation to exercise, or the absence of competitive drive. Organized sports and I are completely incompatible. Yet here I am, volunteering for another season of repetitive 400-meter sprints and hard projectiles whizzing past my face.

For most of my college preparatory career, I was led to believe that in order to be successful in the university admissions process, I had to be well rounded – that good grades would never be enough to gain a spot at an elite college. I interpreted this as meaning that I needed to not only do everything but to succeed as well, and as a result, I spent the better part of three years doing activities I either hated or barely enjoyed. This experience was not unique to me; most of my peers were also spending most of their free time “resume padding”, justifying it to themselves by saying that everything would all be worth it when they got into their dream school. This culture of perfection was toxic; I had spread myself so thin that even things I used to enjoy became a mundane part of my routine.

In my spiral of overcommitment, I failed to realize the hypocrisy of my actions. If college admissions are truly about the authentic individual, then any decent admissions officer would be able to see through my packed resume to my disinterest in 95% of the activities listed. Nonetheless, I ignored this seemingly obvious fact and persisted for almost three years.

It wasn’t until the summer after Grade Eleven that I had an epiphany of sorts. I had spent the whole year curating my summer with volunteering, internships, and studying – there was barely an hour in my schedule that wasn’t accounted for. I was getting ready to start the busy few months when I got a call from a friend working at a summer camp; someone had just quit, and there was a job waiting for me if I agreed to leave that night. For some reason I agreed to the position without hesitation, effectively shirking every other commitment I had made for the next two months. I had the best time of my life at camp, despite the fact that I worked everyday doing hard physical labour from morning to well into the night. I got my first taste of independence, and suddenly almost everything I had done for the past three years seemed so meaningless. I realized that I had effectively wasted my teen years doing everything to please some invisible omnipresent admissions officer even though, in reality, my passionless attempts at every activity under the sun were pretty transparent to even the most untrained eye.

I then began to question why I even aspired to go to these universities. The obvious answer was that I wanted to be successful – but what does that even entail? I had put “success” on a pedestal, seeing admission to one of the world’s top universities as a means to an end, essentially telling myself that everything would immediately fall into place after my graduation. Yet, when I really thought about it, I couldn’t see a future where I was happy at one of these institutions.

Last summer I made a change in my life: I looked at every activity I was in, and shed the ones that I wasn’t passionate about. I did the same thing with my list of universities, adding schools I had never even thought about to my list. If you find yourself in a similar position, spending your life checking off boxes on some abstract list of obligations, take a moment to reflect on whether you are truly happy. It is never too late to make a change, and I promise you will be so much better off for it.