One in a million... or 18 million

Written by Carter Johnson
Thursday, 03 February 2011 00:00

I don’t really remember when I first started thinking about college, when the idea of it crept its way into my head and made itself at home. Now it seems to dominate everything I do, especially as I come off midterm exams and face the spring semester of my junior year, a pivotal time by all accounts. Every grade now is not just a letter — it is a signal to work harder, to keep apace and in front of a growing pile of work and goals. The playwright Tennessee Williams said, “The future is called ‘perhaps,’ which is the only possible thing to call the future.” Upon finding those words, I took solace in the idea that I’m not the only one uncertain about the future, especially as it’s applied to the college process ahead.

It seems to me impossible to go through it without feeling doubts and uncertainties, and I know I’m not the only teenager who feels that anything could lie in wait around the next turn.

The whole process will leave me with doubts and questions, but I can’t deny that it’s exciting in its own whirlwind kind of way.

Having watched two older siblings endure the process of applying to college, I like to think I have few misconceptions about what lies ahead. But the truth is, I don’t have the faintest clue what’s in store for myself and others who will graduate next spring. I can only take solace in the fact that I am in the same boat as millions of others.

In 2007, 18 million enrolled in an institution of higher learning, or 6% of the nation, according to a study by the National Center for Education Statistics.

Those numbers have been and will continue to increase, and college enrollment has never been as competitive as it was, and continues to be, in recent years.

As teenagers, we are always urged to be the best we can be, to always try and attain the unattainable. The college process may be the first time some teenagers taste failure or fall short of their goals, (for most of us, myself included, this has already happened) but there can also be no doubt as to the positive consequences that come out of this whole process. Even in failure, a word which is itself quite subjective, we are forced to take a long look at ourselves in all our shortcomings — the process is no doubt a dose of humility.

It is ultimately a sign that there is a real world out there, waiting to judge and analyze you based on a set of test scores or how well you can cram “yourself” into 500 words.

All is not to be lost, however, for just as millions like us are going through the college process, so too have millions already been there and done that, now engaged in the pursuit of knowledge (or something like it) at colleges and universities throughout the land.

And so while we teenagers busy ourselves with making it through high school unscathed, we are undergoing a college process that involves perhaps the first momentous decisions we make in life.

Ultimately, though, it’s best to embrace the uncertainty, to realize that there are things controllable and uncontrollable, and to figure out which is which.

Carter Johnson is a junior from Greenwich at Brunswick.