college is not the last stop

Hey guys, it's September. Woo hoo.

Forgive me if I'm a bit unenthusiastic about this glorious month. Technically, I should have been dreading August, since that's when school started for me. But strangely, August was okay. It's September that gets on my nerves.

It's particularly bad this year, because on top of my senior class schedule (which, unlike popular belief, is still extremely hefty), I have to take the ACT, finish a college application, and start studying for the SAT II subject tests in October. Oh, and I'm also working on a writing portfolio due in October. How's that for a workload?

I shouldn't complain, because I was the one who screwed up my standardized tests in the first place, but sometimes, I can't help wondering what this is all for. College is going to be only one point of my life, and yet everyone will have me believe that without a specific college on my future Resume of Life, I'll be doomed forever to an existence of pure mediocrity.

I guess it all boils down to myself, and the ambitions that come along with me. What do I really want? Why do I even want to attend certain schools? Because if it's simply for the name, for the prestige, for the "Oh, yes, I got into HarvardYalePrincetonStanfordBrownUPennColumbia, where did you get in?" I don't want to go to college. I will be supremely unhappy in that mindset, and all of my efforts will have been for nothing.

Don't get me wrong. I know why I want to go to my dream colleges, and it's not because of the prestige. True, I would like to aim for the best schools. But it's because I know that it'll only be at the schools I'm aiming for that I'll be able to see the world as I truly want to: larger, developed, and changing.

I want to meet people whose biggest concerns aren't simply how they look towards other people but truly about the vibrating relationship between themselves and the world. I want to see different lives and perspectives that I would never have considered, I want to see the intellectual journey being undertaken by such people at research facilities that are considered the best in the world.

Simply put, my goal at the moment isn't anything more than to simply develop. Sure, I have future career plans in mind, but I think my chief asset as a person is my adaptability. I like doing numerous kinds of things (although they are all oriented towards the humanities), and I'd probably be happy in any number of jobs. So there is no dream life planned ahead for me. I don't have huge ambitions of fame and success and wealth.

I would simply like to just...develop.

I want to learn. I want to experience. I want to understand, to empathize, to see things in ways that are so, so different from what's available to me right now. And frankly, I don't want this to stop simply with school. I want this to continue for the rest of my life.

So I guess that's why I would like to go to college. Yes, it'd feel really satisfying to tell people where I'm going and see their jaws drop and say, "Holy crap, you got in? Wow, you're amazing!" Hey, we're all human. We like to be told we're great. But my life will not be these people, most of whom I'll never see again. So, in truth, I need to think a little bigger. I need to see life on a larger scale.

To be so wide to fill a universe - that's the dream, folks.