Feels like it’s starting earlier than usual: two South Fulton teenagers accepted into 63 and 50 colleges respectively, trying really hard to not humble brag about it
It’s apparently already started, that time of year, in which throughout the country there are overachieving high school seniors who begin announcing, as loudly as they can on social media, just how many colleges they have been accepted to. Some aim for the stars and only go for the cream of the crop like just the Ivy Leagues, and usually upper echelon schools like MIT, Johns Hopkins and Stanford, and then there are others who just apply for every school under the sun, as if there were no such thing as application fees.
And once the acceptances start rolling in, if the number is impressive enough, then onto the internets they go, boasting-not-boasting and humble bragging about how many schools they’ve been accepted into, with the hopes that some media outlet catches wind of it and puts any sort of spotlight onto them at all.
Of course, it can’t be ignored the dollar amounts of all these scholarships love to be extrapolated and added together, so that there can be somewhat of a tangible number to implement a degree of success and value of their accomplishments as a whole, and regardless of if and when they inevitably choose to go to whichever school is giving a full ride, no matter how lesser-heralded it may be, doesn’t change the fact that they put themselves into a position where they could brag about how many schools, simply said yes, you may attend our prestigious institution of higher education if you are willing to pay our egregious costs for credit hours, books, boarding and other bullshit expenditures.
But let’s get #TRYHARDSZN2024 off with a bang, with these two teens in my old stomping grounds of South Fulton county, which is the area’s PC way of lumping together the hood sections of the Southwestern region of the Metro Atlanta area. But despite the fact that when watching the video in the article, there appears to be a whole legion of tryhards that have been accepted into 10-15+ colleges, these two particular teens who have hit 63 and 50 acceptances get the spotlight as being the biggest tryhards of the tryhards.
Sure, most of the schools that I was able to catch in the article are mostly smaller school, HBCUs, and schools nobody has really ever heard of, there were some notable Power-5 schools that have shown interest in them like Michigan State, Iowa, Kansas, Oregon and Mississippi State to name a few.
But the thing is that these are still merely just acceptances and definitely not necessarily full rides to any of them, because obviously the cost of college, especially if they dare to go to one out of state would be like a gozillion dollars that they’d have to sign their souls away for in order to get student loans and become victims to the same predatory scam that millions of other Americans have already fallen prey to. The result of such is the fact that in spite of getting accepted into 113 schools between the two, they’re still going to go to whomever is willing to give them a free ride, which in this case appears to be Morehouse or Howard.
And this is where I kind of become annoyed by the whole idea of kids applying to every school under the sun, because it doesn’t take a genius to see a pattern in what is going on with every single #TRYHARDSZN, where its always entirely minorities, primarily the black community that seemingly is able to apply to 113 schools at no cost, and when they inevitably get into a vast majority of them because Affirmative Action is a flawed concept, they’re essentially holding countless applicant spots hostage while they take the time to soak in their success of getting way more acceptances than the average not-black high school senior probably applies to schools.
Imagine someone who really wants to go to Oregon or Mississippi State, and they get waitlisted. While some kids on the other side of the country are basically holding those spot hostage for months while they’re running victory laps over how many cumulative schools have given them entry. And these kids ultimately end up enrolling into their safety schools and their B-options as a result of not wanting to wait, or being forced to decide, and it fucks them up.
I applied to three colleges my senior year; the application fees exceeded $300, and this was in 1999, so that’s probably like $550 today. Naturally my parents paid for those, and in hindsight it was all for naught seeing as how I gave up on college very early on, but it’s no secret that impoverished kids that go to underachieving schools do have the one advantage in that they seemingly are allowed to apply to as many schools as they want, as long as they’re not complete academic fuckups with any criminal backgrounds.
The worst part is that there’s a feeling I get that the schools themselves are encouraging this sort of exploitation of a system simply meant to encourage more impoverished kids to go to college and try to elevate their positions in life. Just looking in the background of this video, the senior hall is filled with student portraits with well more than 1-3 school acceptances, and in one frame I paused, I counted 44, 35, 25, 21 and 16 as other tryhards who clearly were gunning for the chance to be top tryhards of Westlake High.
While watching a K-drama with mythical wife, there was a scene where it showed two characters having gone to high school together. And in Korea, much like lots of other Asian cultures, have no problem in school subtly putting every kid on blast by posting academic rankings in inconspicuous places for everyone to see and size everyone else up. Personally, I think it’s a good way to try and breed some inspiration from underachievers to see how their peers are doing and want to elevate themselves, but mythical wife is a firm opponent of such a notion, because such public pressure is what leads a lot of American kids to depression, self-loathing and eventually harm and suicide.
But frankly, shit like senior wall at Westlake High is basically the same thing, and I can’t imagine how much it sucks to be any kid at the school who doesn’t get into the school(s) that they wanted to get into, or those who are not eligible for free applications, and therefore don’t get the chance to get into 50+ schools. If I’m some of the kids on the senior wall who have only 1-3 acceptances to their name, and they’re like Georgia State, Kennesaw State and Georgia Southern, while Mr. 63 and Mr. 50 are “omg touching the ground” with the number of placards they’re putting up, I’m going mental.
One of my friends said it best that the schools themselves are completely fine at creating this tokenism of their students, because it brings the school some spotlight, and whether that’s good for their careers, egos or the general political game behind the scenes in the school board, they’re fine exploiting a busted system.
Either way, much like the general downhill feeling that society is constantly rolling directionally, I have a feeling that if I took the time to put like a google alert for high school kids getting accepted into an egregious number of colleges, my writing backlog would fill up to depressing amounts in a heartbeat, and then I’ll want to kill myself for even entertaining the idea of making a #TRYHARDSZN2024, because I think there’s going to be a lot of them this year, in Georgia and everywhere else.
