Kids at Burke and all over the country have been hearing from colleges over the past week or so. Apparently the responses come in two flavors: “Congratulations, etc., etc.” or “We have reviewed your application, blah, blah, blah.” We kids and adults place way too much faith in the judgments of these not-so-delphic admissions oracles.
Whether you’re feeling great because you or someone you love has just been accepted to an elite college – or if you’re down on yourself because you just got a rejection letter from Hahvahd, please read Paul Graham’s essay, News from the Front right now. Really, go ahead and click the link now, I’ll wait.
Paul Graham, is a successful Silicon Valley technologist, entrepreneur and investor – who takes an iconoclastic view on just about everything (check out his other essays). His essay on colleges is no different, positing that “It may not matter all that much where you go to college.” Based on his experience investing in and working with very recent grads from all kinds of different schools, he found that funding the ideas of kids from “elite” schools is not as safe a bet as he had initially assumed. Money quote:
Colleges differ, but they’re nothing like the stamp of destiny so many imagine them to be. People aren’t what some admissions officer decides about them at seventeen. They’re what they make themselves.
Read the whole thing – I think that you’ll feel better afterward.
