Avdohnk: Teen from Modesto, California goes 21 for 34 in college applications, including four of the Ivies
Seeing as how the general culmination of #TRYHARDSZN acceptance days are now in the past, all that’s really left is to just scour the landscape of the world, searching for #TRYHARDs who are standouts in a very competitive field. In other words, schools and the news are mostly looking for kids that can help fill their Affirmative Action-like quotas of trying to represent diversity, but not realizing that by deliberately being so selective and obvious, that they’re kind of being more racist than if they weren’t #TRYHARDING so hard.
But what we have here is interesting, because we have a #TRYHARD that is a female of Iraqi descent, which I have to imagine is probably something of a unicorn when it comes to schools in America getting to put a checkmark next to in their diversity results. It probably definitely helps that this student’s family immigrated to the United States some 30 years ago, which most likely helped them get their foot in the door before America got really, really afraid of brown people.
All the same, she’s still a female of Iraqi descent, which is impressive coming from a culture that basically sees females as third-rate, and of less importance than like, fourth-cousins from their uncle’s side, or cows, and I’m surprised that she didn’t go 34 for 34 in her college applications, because I imagine the pool in which to pull Iraqi females from is probably not even shallow, but a damp spot on the asphalt on a sunny day.
The funniest thing about this particular story is her narrative of opening of response letters from all the colleges, and how her family deliberately saved Harvard for last:
We opened up all the Ivy Leagues one by one and my parents were like, okay, save Harvard for last. We opened Harvard and my mom started crying and she was like telling all of her friends in Iraq, like, my daughter just got into Harvard,”
So it sounds like Harvard was the ultimate goal, as it is for basically every Asian parent on the face of the planet – but then the article goes to explain that she’ll be headed to Yale in the fall instead, with no context or justification for why she’s switching so abruptly like that. It’s not that such is really any of our business, but it does come off as shoddy journalism to tease the whole wanting to go to Harvard angle, but then to just drop that she’s going to Yale instead.
Either way, another thing that’s interesting is the fact that this story actually mentioned the failure rate of this student; most of the time, these #TRYHARD stories are quick to round to the nearest high number, or just say the number of acceptances flat, but despite the fact that this girl got into 21 schools, she also failed to get into 13 of them.
Considering four of them were Ivies, other than perhaps the other four Ivy League schools, it leads to wonder what schools would turn this girl down, not knowing that they had already gotten into Harvard and Yale among other prestigious schools. Like it would be funny if like Cal State-Fullerton or Long Beach State were all like “ehhh, nah, pass” while Stanford, Yale and Harvard all said yes.
Anyway, at this point, I think I’m done with writing about #TRYHARDSZN2024. I think I’ve proven my point that there are a tremendous amount of #TRYHARDs that come out of the woodwork nowadays, and that most of them seem to be doing it not so much for genuine consideration for their futures, as much as it’s just a big dick Keeping Up With the Joneses competition to see who can get into the most schools, amass the most amount of scholarship money, and generally be the most obnoxiously insufferable overachievers there are, when the vast majority of these #TRYHARDs are exploiting some unfair advantages that not everyone in the country would be entitled to.
Short of some exceptional stories, we’ll mark the female Iraqi Unicorn as the closing chapter to #TRYHARDSZN2024. Until next year (maybe)!
