College Applications: An Experience

After 12 months of grueling headaches, 3 entire revisions of throwing all the essays I’ve written out and into the bin, 5 does-this-even-matter discussions with my friends, hours of debating whether to use ChatGPT or not, 100 cups of coffee, 5 emotional cycles, and the anger of not being able to think of something new, I’ve finally done it. I’ve finished all my college applications and turned them. All 11 privates, 5 publics, and 2 Cal states sent into the internet for the admissions officers to read and determine my future. It’s ironic isn’t it? I’ve spent days on end writing sentences for the reader to gloss over them in mere seconds. And then again, my writing might not even be good at all.

Its January 3, 2026 today, and I recently read a Substack on New Years Resolutions. One of them was starting a blog; so here I am, blogging about my life. I want to talk about my college admissions journey and what I felt, the things I thought, and my own takeaways. Keep in mind, I’m no Naval Ravikant or Sam Harris, so this is coming from the raw perspective of a 17-year-old who might be talking out of my own ass. Here we go!

Back in January 2025 my mom hired this essay reviewer to help me write my essays. She was a nice lady, Mrs. N, 5th grade teacher or something, and 60 years old. She’s an old collogue of my aunt, so she seemed trustworthy. We would meet at the H. Library on Sundays to write the essays. We started off the Universities of California (public schools). How the application works is you write 4 essays and those essays get sent to all the UCs which is really nice. I think who ever is running the admissions for California was really smart, or really proactive. Imagine having to writing a separate application per school (eye-roll). So, we got to work: I wrote away anything I thought of from engineering to coding to my Boeing internship. And I was making process, albeit I only wrote during our sessions, so it was a slow process. We kept trudging along for months now. Months I tell you. Like 7 months at least. By this time it was late September and I thought my essays were good, but I didn’t really know.

Then, one day my friend showed me these brilliant essays written by other people. And man was it crazy. It was crazy. Everything you thought about writing essays, they didn’t follow. You could feel the personality, intellect, and academic excellence leap off the page. It was insane. So, I asked him where he got it from and he said he bought this online course: Admitium. I looked it up. It was created by some 30s tanned guy with a crazy long beard. So I bought it and I was blown away. His essays were golden; The words were gold; the sentences gold; the grammar, everything. I had like a ego death. I looked at my essays and goddamn were they terrible. There was no comparison. I knew I was going to get rejected immediately. It was not even funny. My friends often laugh about how bad our essays were but we all knew we were joking. But this was different.

So, I binged his videos and began my own essays from scratch. There was literally no way I could match the writing. MCS (the guy who made the course) recommended to read intellectual books by the most famous authors (i.e. Hemmingway, H.L. Mencken, David Foster Wallace). I rented dozens of books from the library. My desk looked straight out of one of those movies were the main character is studying for a test and she’s got all her notes sprawled across her desk. Man, was it crazy. I read every night, trying to find provocative, interesting sentences to use in my essays. And that happened for an entire month.

This course was amazing. I changed everything in my application. But enough about that. Fast forward, and now its a few days before the deadlines: January 1st, Jan. 2nd, Jan. 5th. I reviewed all my applications with my mom. She combed through the PDFs (thank you mom). And then submit! On Commonapp, the website used to submit college applications, digital confetti start flying all over the screen. It was pretty cool.

Reflecting on this experience, I think it was not as scary as I thought it would be. For a lot of my high school year, I was constantly thinking and doing things I thought were good for college apps. People always say “do things you are passionate about” and everything but that might just be called a hobby. So I didn’t really listen. But now I see. College apps is literally just a PDF for a reader to determine if you should come to this college or not. That is it. I think I romanticized it or something. But maybe that’s a good thing. I think the best feelings are the ones when you don’t know the truth.

I don’t think I’m very different from were I was initially but I’ve changed somehow. I can feel it. And I am excited for the future. You only get to apply to colleges once. Goddamn I’m reflecting on how many times I’ve let these experiences just slip by. If you’re reading this in the future L., I hope you smile.