This letter is dedicated to the Class of 2027 and beyond.
The college application process is a journey of self-discovery. To better convey it in writing, many students here find a private counselor, myself included. Looking back, while I was initially shocked by private counselors’ seemingly-bottomless wisdom, the allure soon wore off. Specifically, when they assigned me 15 essays due within a day, new research assignments on schools and an hour-long meeting every few days, I went ballistic.
In order to deal with this increasing madness, I needed a coping mechanism. Mastering the art of “ragebait,” a technique most frequently used by members of Gen Alpha to anger older generations, requires a delicate balance of weaponized audacity and feigned ignorance.
Step 1: Choose appropriate safety schools
Begin by making a list of safeties, targets and reaches. When asked for a balanced list of schools, ensure you include some safety schools like Harvard, MIT and Stanford. Whether it be the cold weather that drives you to Boston or the warm Bay Area climate, looking at the surrounding environment is a great way to build your list.
Step 2: A personal statement of pure brilliance
Once the list is finalized, the next phase involves the Personal Statement. For maximum impact, wait until three days before the Early Action (EA) or Early Decision (ED) deadlines to submit a draft about how your Minecraft server’s economy inspired you to pursue economics, or a 650-word meta-commentary about why you refuse to write a personal essay to reflect your mindset.
When your counselor starts grilling you about the contents, respond with “you just don’t understand.”
Step 3: Ensure timely communication
Communication is key. Professionalism dictates that counselors need to respond within 48 hours, give-or-take. Students can always optimize their response time by responding at 2:45 a.m. on a Saturday, ensuring that the counselor always has something to keep them busy. The subject line should always be vague, and the body of the email should ask if they sent the “thing” yet, without specifying which of the 15 documents from the previous meeting you’re talking about.
Step 4: Final Step
Remember to exaggerate whenever your counselor asks you for an update. This involves reframing a three-week $10,000 “entrepreneurship” program targeted at building a “company,” where simply coding a chess bot turns you into a Founding Director of Strategic International Relations Technologies. When your counselor realizes that the “global scale” was your botted Discord servers, it will be far too late — they will have no choice but to accept it.
Dear Class of 2027, as the Nov. 1 deadline approaches next fall, remember that acceptances do not measure success. Rather, success is measured by how many deep sighs a student can evoke during a single hour-long meeting with your counselor.
