All About My College Apps

Hear that? The soft sigh of satisfaction. The silence of the keyboard. I'm done, done, done with the U Chicago app.

I think finishing my first college app should be some cause for celebration, even if it's just running around my house 5 times. Now is the hard part: the time for laborious finger-crossing and half-drawn breaths. I got the U Chicago course catalog in the mail yesterday and wow! I can study ancient American civilization in Oaxaca, Mexico. And rub shoulders admist a sea of lovely British accents at the London School of Economics. And take classes in dinosaur science, and transsexualism (Claudius, here we come), and the economics of crime, taught by none other than S. Leavitt of Freaknomics! And spend Friday night coffee discussing Marx and Smith. Okay, that last part is slightly less exciting.

If I don't get in, I think I'll start a massive hunt for razor blades. My dad keeps expounding that "Chicago is a safety! Duh." (He got this bit of wisdom from a random lady on the train.) People me that I'll get in without a problem, which is comforting to some degree, even if I know they just say that to be nice. Actually, what really shook my confidence was when my counselor said I had an equal chance of getting into Harvard and U Chicago. Either he grossly overestimated by chances at Harvard or he thinks my chances are so small at both schools to have little difference. Neither explanation bodes well.

Back to more positive thinking, I managed to write an essay that works on both the Uncommon and Common Apps. This is a rather remarkable feat I say. Despite the notoriety of UC's app, it's really not that bad. Hell, talking to Olga made me realize it's actually much shorter than Brown's. Through some economizing and strategezing, I only need 3 essays between 10 colleges. What I have left to write: a dozen short responses, UMich essay/Common App short, Harvard/Yale supp, scholarship essay for WashU...hey that's it. Not too bad if I leave it all to winter vaca, right? Especially because the two other essays are mostly written and the scholarship essay is on film, which should be rather easy. What is hard is answering questions like, "Why do you want to attend BU?" when the honest answer is, "I don't want to attend BU!" If all goes well, I won't even have to apply there. Hopefully.