Keep going
← Back -I stand before you, like 11,833 others, ready to read what the folks in the MIT Admissions department have for me.
Like about 8,000 others, I’m hit with the most anticlimatic result of them all: the dreaded deferral.
The meaning is simple; I wasn’t good enough to get in out of the bat, but I wasn’t bad enough to get outright rejected. They’ll look me over again in a few months, and I’ll hear back on Pi Day.
What now? MIT’s the first school I heard back from. They didn’t say anything. I won’t hear anything, from anyone else, until February.
Keep going.
What now? I’m done with my college applications. I’m too burned out to submit any others, I have a winter trip to look forward to, and I really, really don’t want to write any more essays.
Keep going.
The process is brutal. It’s the same for every school. You take your world, your life, everything you’ve cared about for the last 4 years or more, package it up into a thousand words or so, and send it off. It heads into the blackhole that is the Admissions Committee, the unfriendly, uncaring beast that will decide your immediate future. And then you wait. And wait. And wait, and wait, and wait some more. What do you do while you wait?
Keep going.
Eventually, a few months later, there’s an announcement. Decisions are out next week. Well, there’s a week until then. What now?
Keep going.
I go to school, I go to work, I go to the gym, I go home. I work on my physics homework, prepare for a presentation in US Government, and bake cookies for a Microeconomics project.
Keep going.
Go back to school. Go back to work. Go back to the gym. Go back home. Orchestrate an elaborate reveal for the robotics team. Plan the set build for the musical. Read about how the telephone switching network functions, because that sounds fascinating. Build a CNC machine in your garage. Fly planes. Do everything that makes you, you.
Keep going.
And then the day comes. You spend the whole day, nervous, thinking about how you’ll react. What if?
What if you get in? What then?
What if you don’t get in? What then?
And what if they tell you to keep waiting?
What then?
You look at the clock; the decisions are out. You don’t really want to know, so you panic and do an entire physics lab instead. The physics is done. I still don’t really want to know; lets learn some calculus instead. The calculus is done; might as well look.
So you do. And they tell you, well, they don’t tell you anything in particular. They tell you, to keep waiting.
You feel strange. You were expecting this outcome, but it still stings. You’re not really sad. At least you didn’t get rejected. At least I didn’t get rejected. But you’re not really sure how to feel.
So you ask yourself a simple question. What now?
Well, I have to get to finish that physics homework. Might as well do that.
I have to get to write some study materials for the Computer Science class I help teach. Might as well do that.
I have to get to go fly a plane on Friday. Might as well do that.
I am lucky. I get to do all of these incredible things, and yet reading one letter that starts with ‘Unfortunately’ is enough to mess up my day, even though I knew it was coming.
You check the internet. You know it’s a bad idea, but you do it anyway. Unsurprisingly, the 600 that got the happy letter are posting about it.
Let’s not look at that. It’s not helping.
You think about it some more. You had some more homework to do, but that’s not happening anymore.
You think about it some more. I think about it some more. The best, smartest people in the world didn’t think I was good enough. Or did they? You don’t know yet. I don’t know yet.
I think that’s the problem. I don’t know yet. And I don’t like not knowing things.
So I read it again, and think it over. It hurts, I think, but what do I have left?
Myself, and all the incredible things, experiences, and people, I choose to surround myself with.
Right now, as I find myself in the depths of trying to process whatever emotion it is that I am feeling right now, even though I’m not entirely sure what it is yet, I come back to some words of advice I once heard. As the good man Chris Boden once said, It Gets Better.
So for now, when I ask myself, “what now?”, the answer is simple.
I’ll go back to what I was doing, and keep going.
I’ll go finish that physics homework, and keep going.
I’ll write those study materials, and keep going.
I’ll go fly that airplane, and keep going.
I’ll talk to my friends, and keep going.
I’ll go build something in the garage, and keep going.
I’ll look at the clouds, and keep going.
I’ll keep going, and then keep going.