It's never too early!

The threat of not being accepted into a good university and thereby spending the rest of my life in my parents’ basement has been very real to me for as long as I can remember. Well, at least, ever since I realized how terribly behind I was. Did you know that the average GPA for students applying to UCLA is a 4.3? I didn’t. Apparently every other K-12 student in SMMUSD did. I realized the necessity of getting a head start far later than most, but have since done my best to catch up. Luckily, I did the logical thing when faced with impossible standards. I have based every decision since solely around my college application and am today enrolled in 912 school clubs. The only way to fight the ridiculous acceptance rates is to be the best of the best which is why you can never start too early! If you’re in second grade and you haven’t learned the SAT 1000 most common words, you’ve missed the boat. Take this as a cautionary tale: the time to begin college prep is birth, and preferably before that.On my first day of preschool, the parent helper who was filling in for our class stated that Early Years Preschool had an excellent array of extracurricular activities that looked great on a college transcript. It dawned on me that all of this -- this donated smart board, free day Fridays, tater tots in the rainbow room -- served one purpose: to hitch each and every student a one way ride to Harvard Station.  After the first week I began to notice that all my classmates were enrolled in lacrosse, French, advanced culinary arts, and ballroom dancing.  Parents bragged that their children could apply to Georgetown right then and get in.  I realized that I was far too late. After all, I was already three and hadn’t even begun to think of my GPA, SAT score or extra-curricular activities. I spoke only one language, and was planning on going to public school. While I knew the chances of my getting into any college were almost zero, I didn’t want to completely give up hope. I talked to my dad about it, and he told me that even though I was starting a little late and even though there was a chance I’d have to take a different route, like jail, I still had a small chance at getting into a less competitive school. After that I dived in, and every decision I’ve made since has been centered around making my transcript as beautiful as it had once been empty.Over the years, different methods of giving kids an early academic start have proven effective. My mother held flashcards in front of her stomach for six months while she was pregnant with my younger brother, and we are convinced that it is for this reason that his first word was opprobrium and mine was only approbation...I only got four months of in-womb flashcard practice and she learned from her mistake. At a preschool in Texas, each year the teachers have the students take a PSAT on the first day. For the rest of the semester, they must have a piece of paper with their PSAT scores pinned to the back of their T shirts so everybody knows exactly how smart they are in relation to everybody else, effectively teaching students about competition. It also settles thousands of arguments. The student with the higher score is right, and the student with the lower has to go sit in the corner for three minutes. An acclaimed  nursery has students listen to tapes of the sentence “I am success“ played over and over in different languages during nap time, which programs the kids, from the age of one, to be confident and dominant. These methods, while unorthodox, always work and rarely cause brain damage later in life. I wish my parents and teachers had experimented with more of them in my early years. A few months after my preschool epiphany, I decided to start building up my resume in the whole ‘giving back to the community’ section of the application. When I was four I started a charitable company that sold smoothie recipe books--for each one we sold, we gave another one to a starving child in Zambia. I found that my youth made it difficult to get permits to host events and my colleagues didn’t take me nearly as seriously as I would have liked them to. But while my training wheels initially worked against me, I learned how to use them to my advantage! My cuteness was a weapon and my adorable missing front teeth drove all of my neighbors into making guilty donations.  Since then I have systematically added two charities and six after-school activities per year. Princeton reps have told me that my current 17 page list of extracurriculars is fine, but it’s really just the bare minimum. I’m hoping to turn that around and really go above and beyond this year!            All I’ll be able to do once the application is turned in is pray to get on the waiting list of the college of my dreams, knowing that every other application looks almost exactly the same as mine. But after seventeen years of hard work bribery, the betrayal of friends who trusted me, and intrinsic motivation, I’ll be able to rest assured that while I may not have the shiniest application, at least I didn’t waste my youth on self-discovery, forming lifelong friendships, or making the most of this all too short window of time we call life.