Pre-College Complications

Hi! I’m Molly, an intelligent, under-motivated, eighteen-year-old, almost–college student. I will be a freshman at Cal Poly Pomona in the fall. I will be living on campus, taking classes with friends from my high school, and will be less than an hour’s drive from my family and home. A week ago, I would have told you that I was going to be a freshman at San Francisco State University in the fall, living off-campus with two roommates I had never met, six hours away from anyone I knew, without a car or any experience with the San Francisco public transit system. A month ago, I would have told you that I was staying home for a year, working, and possibly taking some art classes at the local community college.

While it may sound like I’m really indecisive, the reason for all these changes of plan is actually because the colleges want to screw with me. Or at least, that’s what I’m telling everybody. Probably it has more to do with my inability to swiftly and effectively navigate college application bureaucracy—paying fees here, meeting deadlines there—all without any clear instruction. Or in my case, NOT paying fees and NOT meeting deadlines.

In junior high school, I was a powerhouse student, earning a 4.0 while submitting articles to online news sites, writing short stories, participating in several school clubs, and keeping a steady stream of paintings and sketches flowing into my online art portfolio. I tested into an International Baccalaureate program, and entered high school bright-eyed and bushy-tailed, vomiting enthusiasm onto anyone who would listen. Then . . . I got my first C+ (79.6%) in my freshman honors geometry class.

By sophomore year, I was a little disillusioned. By junior year I was really no longer trying. I failed pre-calculus my first semester, and my transcripts were not the spotless, shiny, straight-A things they had once been. Going to a difficult high school had pounded the motivation out of me, and I approached applying for colleges the same way I approached my senior year – lackadaisically.

I started off all right. I made a list of the colleges I was going to apply to, I signed up for an account on the College Board website, I sharpened my pencils and straightened the papers on my desk into neat little parallel piles. And then what? The magnitude of the task ahead hit me over the next few weeks like a slow-moving ton of bricks. Deadlines dawned, my confusion grew, and I could practically feel the noose of a community college and a career in the fast food business slipping around my neck. Every form I filled out seemed to lead to another.

I was walking, then running, then sprinting through a labyrinth of tax forms and volunteer hours, and essays on my paltry achievements (which I now realized were completely meaningless), while my friends seemed to be having no trouble at all. In fact, all of my friends turned in their college applications months, heck years, ago.

I think this process must be a lot of fun to watch from the outside. In fact, the main reason I want to have children is so that I can watch them struggle in their turn with the college application system. In the end though, it all got done. Not always well, and not always on time, but it got done. I applied to several Cal States and two of the Claremont colleges (more to indulge my parents than because I thought I had any chance of getting in). When the rejections and acceptances all came in, I decided I wanted to be a San Francisco State University Gator.

I went to Orientation, signed up for my classes, bought a raincoat. This was the point when my slacking during the application process caught up with me. Because I had submitted my application for housing late, the SFSU Housing Department told me it looked like I would be living on the streets this year. They hoped I had connections with local hobos, and was not too picky about what I would use as a blanket. I had a little panic attack, and after a lot of coaching and consoling from my mother, resigned myself to the idea of staying home and taking a couple of community college classes for a year, maybe focusing more on my painting and my job at Jamba Juice.

A couple of months later, I found an e-mail in my inbox from a girl with an apartment next door to SFSU. She’d seen my ad pleading for a place to stay on a roommate site, and she and her friend needed one more roommate for their apartment. So it looked like I was going to college after all! I started making lists of things I needed to buy, and packing up or giving away everything in my room.

I think a Cal Poly Pomona admissions officer had planted a camera in my room. They were watching me closely, and when I had taped up the last box filled with all my clothes, they gave the signal. I received an e-mail saying that I had been accepted to Cal Poly Pomona from the wait list. Also, they mentioned gleefully (which is a hard thing to get across in an e-mail, but they managed it) that Cal Poly Pomona’s start date was a full month after SFSU’s. Which meant, of course, that I would need to unpack all the clothes and books I had carefully packed away.

So now I had to choose between two very different options. San Francisco would be more of an adventure—it would be city life, new friends, far away from the safety net of my family. Cal Poly Pomona, however, was a better school, and the idea of living on campus appealed to the pack creature in me. After a weekend of my parents trying to disguise their blatant desire for me to stay close to home, and my boyfriend not trying to disguise it at all (he will be attending Cal Poly Pomona with me this year), I decided on the latter. And then I unpacked.