What One Student Wishes He Knew While Applying to College

Noah Lenkin is like many of us who have gone through a stressful experience. Once we come out on the other side, we look back and wonder why no one told us that most of the stress could have been avoided had we only done “X”. Well, Noah has done just that for the classes that will follow in his footsteps and launch into the college application process next summer.

One of the first things Noah realized, with the help of the pandemic, is that there are any number of ways to get information about a college that do not involve visiting the campus. The internet has always held an inexhaustible amount of information, and the pandemic motivated colleges to add a tremendous number of creative ways to interact with prospective applicants. Noah also came to understand that his resume and application needed to reflect his best efforts. The applicant looks to the colleges the way their documents look. If they are unorganized and incomplete, you may appear to be an unlikely candidate to an admissions committee.

The importance of test scores was another “ah ha” moment when Noah learned that they were just one of the pieces used to evaluate the application and not the only thing that mattered. That’s when it became clear that a good balance between activities in the application and resume along with good writing could make all the difference in the world.

Near the end of the process, Noah realized that there was no reason to have a “dream school” he applied to 13 colleges and with the amount of research done for each of them, he discovered that he could be happy at any of the schools on his list. Instead of being anxious and afraid of making the wrong choice, Noah was happy to have so many opportunities to choose from. The school he eventually chose, he felt fit him best and the decision was made without doubt or reservation.

A bit of wisdom he shared was to keep it all in perspective. Don’t forget to step back now and then and remind yourself that where you go to college doesn’t define your path in life. “Every student should remember that their college is not setting their life in stone, and that it just provides certain opportunities.”