2018’s college Captain Tryhard

Of all of the things that seems to be a thing every single year, I’m beginning to feel like “kid who applies to and gets accepted into X number of prestigious schools” is becoming one of the most insufferably arrogant things there is.  I get that if a kid is smart and has a very bright academic future ahead of them, they should absolutely be shooting for the top, but to apply to 20 schools?

Lookit, most colleges, college applications aren’t free.  Even if you want to apply to 20 schools, that’s still a lot of cumulative money going towards application fees.  And I only applied to four schools, got accepted into three of them, and barely went to one of them before I nailed down an actual job and decided that I’d rather work than keep going to school.  For someone so allegedly smart, applying to 20 schools seems almost insecure, or desperately seeking validation, since a kid with a 4.68 GPA* and a 1540 SAT** should probably be a layup to get into just about any school they’re applying to.  So he could’ve probably applied to even just the Ivy League schools, gotten into all of them, and called it a day, but instead, little Captain Tryhard here had to go ahead and apply to 20 total colleges.

I’m sure his parents were thrilled with having to pay the application fees for 20 schools, but I suspect that through some convoluted means, it might not have been as financially taxing as it probably should have been.

*how much extra credit needs to be done to get this high over a 4?**how much does it suck for the kids who had to endure the 2400-point scale only for it to go back down to 1600?

Either way, I’ve noticed that a story like this seems to emerge this time every year for the past few, and I can’t help but think how insufferably obnoxious it is every time it does.  At the root of these overachieving choices to apply to every school, I feel like it’s no different than any asshole on the internet hoping to have a reason to have 15 seconds of fame and notoriety in the event that they actually succeed. 

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