Objectives I Hope to Achieve

Ah, the ol’ Common App. How your drab maroon and gray signaled your goal to compact the college application into a manufactured, quality-controlled product. Can’t I still recall that painful process by which years of my life were distilled and binned into your textboxes? My friendships and growing up became extracurriculars, my lessons learned at the soldering station became work experience, and my drowsy, hard nights scribbling away became AP, SAT, AIME scores.

And there was the essay—a quick scan (250 words minimum) of some deeply personal episode of my life into a desperate indirect plea to an anonymous admissions officer.

I doubt those in my generation really understand what sort of lossy compression the Common App asks of us to apply to our lives. Its goal is to concentrate a K–12 life, a real, live person, into a file, sandwiched within the confines of a manila folder. This is what looks like: Common Application 2010. That’s the paper copy, a perspective of it I’ve never personally seen¹. It really is just five pages. Imagine that: you, on three (3) sheets of paper.

And yet, here I am again, applying for a transfer offer. Some schools publish their own application, or request a supplement to the Common App. What those schools asked of me last year helped me turn those mental tools I once used to solve equations, catch Frisbees, or inspected music with, on myself. I identified parts of me that weren’t crafted by the Common App assembly line: the one on which people are produced who can perfectly sum up hopes and dreams in a 250 words minimum personal statement.

Regardless, Common App dispenses with soul-searching and self-discovery, and for us transfer applicants, even with the open-ended choice of essay topics offered to high school seniors. Instead, it presents a straightforward demand for an enumeration of “reasons for transferring.”

Right then. A straightforward essay prompt deserves a straightforward answer, which I will administer immediately, along with a bulleted list of reasons:

I wish to transfer to so that I can be happier. With that said, the following are more specific reasons:

• It’s lonely – Not lonely as in I can’t find friends or a party to go to, but because I’ve yet to find anyone with whom I could hold a prolonged conversation with on, well, anything to do with my everyday work. With the exception of upperclassmen and graduate students, who have received a college education and are prepared to enter work with the said education, does nobody really build robots or write software for fun? I really don’t have much more appetite for video games, guns, or the usual (politics, religion and school). A friend suggested that I was suffering intellectual starvation—but I wouldn’t dare call it that. Firstly, it’s extremely pretentious to claim oneself as intellectually starved, and secondly, if you feel intellectually starved, you’re not trying hard enough. You’ve got the Internet.
• GT spirit is obnoxious – “Only at Tech.” The epitome of closed-mindedness of Georgia Tech students. Walk with a group of friends and start linguistically analyzing a tongue-twister somebody had just improvised. “Only at Tech.” Figure out that it’s implausible to fit $9 billion in denominations below $20 inside a standard shipping container, as presented in some TV show. “Only at Tech.” Maybe it was cute, clever, or something you fancy to find in xkcd², but that’s no reason to be so closed-minded and elitist. Heck, OAT is even a website. I, of course, appreciate QDBs—the classy way to capture campus humor. I run my own for Stuy. My reply to “Only at Tech?” “Which Tech?”
• I’m still in high school – I like that GT is the closest I’ll ever be to the real American college experience, with the football games, the fraternities, and the parties. After all, I suppose that I never did experience the suburban high school fantasy of Sixteen Candles³. Even with the bit of regret I feel about that, Stuy has certainly primed me for the bureaucracies of college and of life. Requesting budget allocations from a committee? Online course registration? It’s all déjà vu to me. Now, with the college apps I’ve placed upon myself, I feel more than ever that I’m still living my life as a superannuated high school senior. Also, the real American college experience? It got a little old already.
• I love engineering – I also love computer science, building robots, and getting into discussions on finance, economics, and linguistics. So, I’m looking for a better education. Is there something wrong with that?
• Big, public, metropolitan – I associate much of my life with a 3,000-student school in downtown Manhattan. I’ve really had enough of the big city school. I came to Georgia Tech because it was the best education I was offered (I was rejected from nearly everywhere else I had applied to). The huge campus and the callousness with which the administration treats undergraduates is beginning to get me down a bit. The astoundingly huge lectures, nigh-unavailable professors, online homework and RF clickers—hey, they’re all things I could actually stand (though not necessarily enjoy) if it weren’t for the worst travesty of the public university: major restriction. I mean, what kind of a horrible system would prevent students from taking a class he wanted to take?
• Gender… imbalance – I’m all for the egalitarianism and meritocratic spirit GT admissions tried to show—I doubt they consider naught but the SAT Math score; heck, I think the essay was even optional—but trust me on this one. Diversity is not something you can skimp on. Other guys, textbooks, and Skype contacts (the three most common sources of dialog for the average GT student) make for terribly monotonous conversation after the first week.
• I got mugged and stabbed – Only at Tech!

If only I could express my anguish seeing my friends elsewhere having the simple things at college like having fulfilling conversations with other students. If I could go around showing everyone that yes, one can be quite clever even in places beside the Georgia Tech campus. If I could explain the shock, humor, and self-reflection of surviving a stabbing, and more, all within a personal statement… well, then I guess I wouldn’t now be applying for a transfer.

Maybe I was better off with one of these?

1. except maybe on my older sister’s desk, from a generation past of Stuyvesant strivers [↩]
2. possibly all three, of course [↩]
3. see the story of Pajama Day at Stuy [↩]