What College Applications Really Look Like for a Non-Cliché Student (a rant)

Sit down with a nice hot drink, and I’ll tell you the reality of how college applications really turn out, from personal experience at least.

First, a little background about me:

I’m based in Karachi, Pakistan and I’m doing my IB DP from a relatively small school. I completed my MYP from the same school and scored a 50/56 with 7s in all 3 sciences, visual arts, interdisciplinary unit, and English, 6s in integrated humanities and french, and 5s in personal project and extended mathematics (because I ran out of time and literally couldn’t finish a question worth 20 marks).

The subjects I took in DP were:

• English A: Language and Literature SL

• French ab initio SL

• Biology SL

• Chemistry HL

• Physics HL

• Mathematics HL
  

I usually get 7s in all of my HL subjects and 6s or 7s in my SL subjects with an average grade between 39 and 41 out of 42 (this is without the 3 bonus points of EE and TOK). I have 169 CAS reflections for some stupid reason, and got A* in Urdu as a Second Language and As in both Islamiyat and Pakistan Studies for my CAIES when I gave them in Grade 9 (for my equivalence). I got a 1520/1600 (790 in math) in my SATs (I admit, I only got a 15/24 score in my essay with a 3 in analysis though) and an 8.5/9 in IELTs. I gave SAT subjects and got an 800 in Math II, a 770 in Chemistry, and a 710 in Physics (I only sent Math II and Chemistry to colleges).

As for extracurricular, I don’t think I’m too bad:

• 6 week internship at a bank in a rural town in Pakistan, and a 4 week internship at a major newspaper company in Karachi during election season in the summer of 2018

• Onymous – A website designed specifically for IB students across the globe

• Strays of Pakistan – A passion project I started in Grade 9 to raise awareness about the plight of stray animals in Pakistan (I must admit my website editing skills have come a long way since then!)

• I’ve won best delegate twice, and chaired one of the three MUNS that took place in our school in 2018-2019

• Leader of the winning delegation at another college’s science competition

• Recipient of a Meritorious Award from a prestigious university in Karachi

• Attended a summer immersive program which taught a college level introductory course in coding in a college in the USA, and obtained a GPA of 3.67 (I’ve never coded before)

• Leader of the winning science fair team for two years in a row

• Member of our school rowing team, and won 1st, 2nd and 3rd places in different rowing events in a state level competition

• Vice President of student council in Grade 9

• Single handedly organized and executed a social fundraiser (basically a rave – and the first of its kind in our school), to raise money and awareness for WWF Pakistan

• Created the first Robotics Club in our school
  

Looking at my extracurricular activities, in my opinion, I tried to make the most of the opportunities I had. I kept busy throughout the past four years, balancing my academics and different activities hand in hand, trying to be an overall balanced student. It isn’t Math Olympiads or successful start-ups that I created, because I didn’t have access to resources or the knowledge to do something like that.

In my opinion there are three things when it comes to the type of extracurricular you can have:

1) Your school’s support and the resources offered

2) The time you have, your passion, and the energy you’re willing to give towards your extracurricular activities

3) The resources and opportunities available in your city/country

Now when you read about college applications, and students getting in to 5 of the 7 Ivy Leagues they applied to, or advice on Quora given by students who aren’t the best, but still managed to get in to a really great school, you start to dream of what you could be, or the things you could do. You dream about the perfect college you’ll end up in, and imagine yourself living in a beautiful dorm and making friends from all of these countries you knew nothing about. You’ll find yourself watching ‘dorm makeover’ and ‘day in the life’ videos of some random kid on YouTube in a university you really like.

Here’s the point where you think, “Hey, maybe if I try hard enough, I can get into a university like that too!” After you have that breakthrough, you start reading all of these articles that tell you to keep your grades up, to write great college essays, get 2-page long reference letters from teachers that adore you, and to do extracurricular activities that you’re ‘passionate’ about but at the same time make you stand out from the rest. You’re both daunted by the amount of work you need to put in, but young and childish enough to think maybe I can do it. I might not become leader of the winning national debate team in less than two years, but I can still try and do something with my time. So, you try, and you work hard, and you sacrifice your social life to be the type of student Harvard or MIT wants. You have multiple panic attacks a week and you sometimes struggle with balancing academics with all the difficult HLs you ended up taking (secretly loathing the students who took easy HLs to get into Business school). But when you sometimes pause and look at everything you’ve achieved so far, and think about where you will be a few years from now, you’re proud and hopeful, and that makes everything somewhat worth it. You spend hours on college applications, and doing them makes you feel excited at the prospect that in a few months you’ll hear back and know if you got in. As you’re done with your applications, you feel a pang of sadness that all you can do now is wait for schools to reply to you. You did everything you could – sure you’ll be rejected from a few places, but someone will take you right? You worked hard, and everyone around you knows that.

And here’s where everything goes to shit.

All those bullshit articles aren’t the norm, they’re the rare cases that never happen to people we know. Because you know what? College applications are bullshit. At the end of the day, colleges want to make money and earn prestige – they don’t give two shits about who you are, or what your dreams are.

Let’s take my case, for example. If my parents wanted to, I’m sure they could pay for my college education in the US, but paying $75,000 per year in tuition alone (without considering living costs, or visa and travel expenditure) to another country is ridiculous – even to me. Why spend so much hard earned money in a foreign country for an education that you could receive in less than one fourth the price in your own country. Sure the setting and people won’t be as glamorous as abroad, and maybe there will be less research opportunities, but it’s a good education – and people can do a lot with it. So before applying, my parents told me straight up – we aren’t paying a cent more than what we would for your bachelor’s education in Pakistan, no matter where you go. This approximately adds up to 25,000 USD. Ladies and gentlemen, you heard correct – you can get a 4 year quality education in Pakistan for that price.

Anyways, I took the deal.

I applied to places in the United States that gave international students need blind aid and in some cases, need sensitive. In total, I’ve applied to 17 universities with three in Pakistan, two in Singapore, and the rest in the States. I am considering applying to one more in Pakistan just to be on the safe side.

So straight off the bat, not the ideal candidate to receive financial aid – especially since I was asking for so much, but I was a female IB student from a third world country, who wanted to study electrical engineering and go back to work and improve my country. I worked hard, I had decently good grades, and some extracurricular activities too. I had passion, and a vision for what I wanted to do. All in all, not the ideal typical student, but not the worst case scenario either.

The places I ended up applying to were:

1. Dartmouth

2. Caltech

3. Stanford

4. Princeton

5. Duke

6. Brown

7. MIT

8. Yale

9. Colby

10. Seton Hall

11. Wooster

12. Denison

13. Yale-NUS

14. NUS

15. Habib University

16. LUMS

17. IBA

I applied to Dartmouth Early Decision, and got rejected. Heartbroken at that first rejection, I applied to Colby, Denison, and Seton Hall as my rebound schools thinking, ‘heck I’ll get into all of them’. Funny thing, I got waitlisted at Denison, rejected by Colby, but I was accepted by Seton Hall. I applied to Wooster because of their incessant emails, and I felt a little bit of pity for them – got accepted there too! Interesting enough, the two places I did get accepted, I didn’t apply for any financial aid! I knew I wasn’t going to go to these places, but I needed a win. I got scholarships there too, for $150,000+ dollars, but even then I’d have to pay approximately the same amount, and that was definitely not in my budget (especially not for a school I never heard about until they started emailing me).

One after the other, I started getting all of my rejections from the US, receiving Stanford’s today – marking the last school in the US. I applied to be on Denison’s waitlist just because, but I haven’t heard back from them yet. NUS doesn’t reply until July (but even if I do get in, I know I’m not going to get enough of a scholarship to go there), and in Pakistan I’ve only heard back from Habib so far but I haven’t heard from the school I like in Pakistan yet.

Now that you’ve heard how I fared in the ‘college hunt’, knowing my grades and portfolio, you can make what you want of it, but as a somewhat pissed off 17-year old, I have a few things to say too.

How is it that people with colored passports have it much easier getting into colleges? I’ve never heard anyone with a US passport or a Canadian passport worry about college. You know why? They have federal aid. Where we would pay hundreds of thousands of dollars as ‘international students’, most of these people can get in to a fairly decent college without worrying too much about the prices or their grades. They know they’ll get in somewhere, and just with the ‘stamp’ of a foreign education alone, they know they’ll get co-ops with fancy companies, and a great job guaranteed after college. All these videos about colored individuals or Asians getting their college results on YouTube, most of them already have a colored passport! They have FAFSA, and they don’t have to worry about financial aid, or apply to a select group of colleges, they’re set! And living in a first world country, they already have resources to outcompete most of us ‘international students’, and deep down we know that. All that mumbo jumbo about colleges looking at students from a holistic perspective according to where they live – that’s bullshit. A colored individual with a blue US passport, with FAFSA, and extracurricular including YaleMUN, and a summer at NASA definitely has a better chance of getting in than I would. Not only do these people fit the ‘diverse’ check, but they also happen to be easier to accommodate than actual international citizens who don’t have that blue passport.

The second type of people that have it easy when it comes to college is the people who have money, or those who’re willing to pay off student loans until their mid-forties. You see, international students need to pay a lot more in any country, than a national would. That’s just how it is. That’s why, in Pakistan people give CAIES and get their equivalence. Without giving those 3 subjects of Pakistan Studies, Islamiyat, and Urdu, you aren’t considered a national citizen and have to pay quite a bit more to any university as an international student. Have you ever noticed why there are always so many Chinese at any university?

A) There is a huge Chinese population as it is

B) Some of them are really smart and deserve to be where they are

C) They either have a buttload of money and are willing to pay, have a fully funded scholarship, or they’re okay with the idea of student loan

American and Canadian universities use federal aid to ensure a good education for their own citizens, and make from profit from international students. How else do they have buildings after buildings being created, and new state-of-the-art facilities being installed? They use us to improve themselves and go higher up the ranks, making us only crave going there more. Don’t believe me? Watch the links below:

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=EBQqLxj5OQk

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=TVCEvx8JCTQ

So if you think about it, at the end of the day we’re being conned. College admissions aren’t as fair as we think they are. Now you’ll try to bring up the argument that colleges want to create a diverse class every year. To that I say, aren’t there enough people from the two categories I listed above to create a diverse class of 500 people in every college? Do you really stand a chance against them?

Why waste so much time working so hard, when you never stood a chance? Why keep your hopes so high, only to have them crash and burn? I don’t think there’s enough honestly when it comes to college applications. There aren’t enough blog posts, or videos, or articles about the average hardworking international student, who asks for aid from a foreign university. If there was enough information online, we wouldn’t be so deluded.

I’m not saying don’t work hard, or don’t apply to your dream school if you fall into my type of category. By all means do – maybe I’m wrong, or maybe you’ll be one of the rare cases that makes it. Maybe you’re brilliant and get in on your own merits. But there is also the possibility that you are exceptional, and brilliant, and will go on to do great things in your life, yet these stupid universities will reject you. The acceptance rates they show on Google don’t apply to you. International students have a much lower acceptance rate national students, so don’t be so hard on yourself for not meeting that percentage. Your playing field is very different. All I’m saying is, let’s not make the universities that accept us the sole factor in deciding our ‘worth’. We’re all destined for great things if we put in the hard work, honesty, and passion into it.

Maybe it’s just time to accept the fact that we might have to go to a college that isn’t necessarily our first choice, and isn’t in our first choice country.

I still need to hear back from a few colleges in Pakistan, and I’m really hoping LUMS sees something in me. It may not have been my first choice, but I’m more than okay with the idea of going there for the next four years of my life. It’s one of the best colleges in Pakistan, it’s in another city, and it has a beautiful campus. I’ll just have to make the most of it myself. One roadblock isn’t going to stop me from achieving my dreams, or doing the things that I love.

So now that I’ve faced my reality, I’ve already come up with a game plan. Instead of sulking about not being able to go abroad, I’m going to make the most of my four years in Pakistan – and I mean it. Take all the risks, use all of the opportunities, and have the most fun in the process. I’m going to work on building up my CV, and once I’m done with college, I’ll try and apply for the fully funded scholarships specifically for Pakistani citizens who want to study in the US and the UK. If I get it, well and great. If I don’t I’ll come up with a new game plan. For now, all the universities that rejected me can take a stick and shove it you know where.

:)