One Senior's Struggle With College Admissions

Senior year in high school and Gary is the middle of the pack. He has average grades and gets an average score on his SAT test. He wants to go to an average school and is just getting started in the college admissions process. The problem is he is not quite sure what he wants to do with his average life and therefore which college would suit him best. He starts out online.

He figures starting out he might as well just try to get an associates degree and see what happens after that. He looks at a few suburban areas throughout the nation and finds colleges in each of them. He spends a good deal of time trying to find each college admissions application and prints off a few of them. He decides that if he only applies to about 10-15 colleges, that should give him plenty of insurance on being accepting into at least one of them. He begins to fill one out. He gets all his information in all the blanks, writes a check for the admissions fees and seals it up in an envelope.

After finishing his first college application he starts to work on his second one. Gary gets bored with tedious work, so after finishing that one, he crashes on his couch and takes a nap. While asleep he is haunted with a nightmare where he receives both of his applications back with rejection letters and realizes that he only sent applications to two schools. He wakes up breathing hard and begins to panic until he realizes that he still has time to finish working on the rest of the applications.

He thinks to himself that there has got to be a better way to do this. He decides to keep looking for some type of help on the internet.

He returns to the college application sites and comes up with a great idea. He decides to just fill out the applications online with a little help from his browser which remembers all of his information previously stored for the same field names. Soon he realizes, however, that his computer typing skills aren't much better than his handwriting skills. His tabbing skills aren't all they are cracked up to be. He envisions a website where he can put in all the information college admission's officers need one time and send that information to all the colleges he wants.

Google comes up on his internet home page. He puts in find a college and some other phrases. He looks through some of the sites, but nothing is to his liking. He figures he might need to be more specific to a college so he types in Dartmouth College Admissions and Yale Admissions since his friends both applied there. Nothing seems to work for him. All he wants is a little helpful tool that will make the college admissions process much easier. He needs some type of service that submits his application to the colleges and universities he wants to apply for.

"How can I find that?" he says to himself. "What would I have to type in to get search results that show me how to apply to more than just one school?"

He is about to surrender to the whole painstaking process. Even though he knows exactly what he needs, looking for it has become a chore. He has been spending many hours trying to find any information and is completely discouraged and distraught. he decides college isn't really even worth it. He just decides this is just not worth the hassle and only sends in the two applications he filled out by hand earlier. He crosses his fingers and sends them in.

Gary seems to forget about his applications until all of his friends start receiving acceptance letters to their colleges of choice. Some even receive letters of approval from universities like Harvard, Yale, and Princeton. This really makes him feel left out since he didn't even try to apply to any big name schools. Finally after many weeks of waiting, he receives both of his letters on the same day, the day of his graduation. Unfortunately for him, his worst nightmare came true and both letters deny him admission into their programs. He realizes that he should have applied to more than just 2 schools, but now it is too late to get in to any prestigious school at all, and he may just have to settle for an open enrollment school instead of finding a college where he could fit in and receive the best education.

That night he graduates. His mom kicks him out of the house. He is forced to get a job at McDrivein's, where he spends the next ten years. If only he could have found something that would have gotten his name out to more colleges so he could have gotten an education.

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