The strategy of “maximize hard work ”, if repeated enough times in a person’s life, turns into the deeply-rooted mindset of perfectionism.Įven after high school, newly-minted freshmen still carry that high-school perfectionist mindset entering college. If you can put in another hour of work, it will get you that much further ahead than the next person, so that additional hour of work is worth it. Once the sieve of college admissions reduces 40,000 applicants to just 2,000 admitted (in the case of Harvard), confirmation bias anodizes the “maximize hard work strategy”. Surely this work-output function transfers to college? In many cases, yes. Now that we were here together in college - what effect did all of that have on us? We spent so many of our formative years fixated on getting into college. Though we came from diverse backgrounds, my peers and I all similarly put everything into producing achievements and good test scores throughout high school. I also began to notice some curiosities about the way we all conducted ourselves as students - we were all incredibly similar. Over time, my psychology changed and I gained a lot of confidence from feeling at home among my Harvard peers.
My classmates were brilliant and sometimes the children of celebrities. The school I initially experienced seemed to match the Harvard of WeChat lore. I started at Harvard as a freshman back in 2014. It was as much her dream as it was my own. All that uncertainty, all that anxiety, all that hard work - it all collapsed into a single “Congratulations” when I opened the admission result page. They wanted to have me be a student there. The executive/CEO Cameron was some far-off possibility, but it felt like life was normal and things would quickly default to policeman Cameron.Ībout three years and 10 AP tests later, I got a really nice email from Harvard.
Everything felt out of reach for a normal kid like me. In high school, everything I knew about top colleges like Harvard and Stanford was built on a foundation of internet gossip and my mom’s barrage of WeChat articles. When it came time to share with the class, I lied and shared my second-highest result instead - the survey said I’d be a policeman someday. I knew other kids with parents who were VPs at Microsoft surely, that result was probably meant for them. My top result, unexpectedly, was “business executive/CEO”.
KATIE O DAIR HARVARD SOFTWARE
After answering a bunch of questions, the software program would tell you what career you were most suited for. In 9th grade, I remember taking a “career recommender” survey with my homeroom class. More so, how does a 14-year-old freshman have any idea how capable he is? At that age, puberty was a big enough challenge on its own, not to speak of Harvard. I didn’t know anyone who went to Harvard. I worked as hard as I could, but ultimately, I had no idea if I was actually good enough for one of those top-tier colleges. Any wasted time was wasting away my chance at a better future.
KATIE O DAIR HARVARD FREE
While other students hung out at the mall or went on ski trips, I poured my free time into self-studying AP classes and trying to win state and national awards in my extracurricular activities. Don’t waste your time on 乱七八糟 (pronounced luan chi bah zao, the Chinese roughly translates to “chaotic mess”). My mom repeated it over and over: “Work hard on getting into college now, don’t mess up your one chance at a better future. An academic culture that’s so hard to put into wordsīack in high school, I remember telling myself that the only thing that mattered was getting into a good college.
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