As high school comes to an end and excitement is in the air over which colleges people got into, my story is slightly different. I only applied to three colleges and didn’t get into any of them.

My GPA in high school was a slow, but upward climb starting at 1.5 freshman/sophomore years and eventually getting up to 3.4 senior year. Yet I guess I learned too late that my grades were going to hurt me. It wasn’t until the end of junior year that I finally got my act together and started working. I always felt I could get by and I maybe not get into the best college, but I’d get into a mediocre one.

What they don’t teach you in school is how to balance "work and play," and while some students have a knack for it others do not. Some kids are not able see how those hours of neglecting homework or just school in general add up and take time out of the things in life you want to do. Now I will most likely have to spend a year at NOVA boosting my grades in an attempt to go to the college of my choice.

The hardest thing though is going to such a small school and knowing everyone’s background. I can’t help but feel life is unfair when I see kids that I know have been arrested and know of the illegal things they do every weekend, yet they get into colleges that have good reputations. I want to shun the whole education system, because I feel this is a flaw. But maybe this is just an insight into life and it teaches you that people you may label as "bad," are still successful.

My biggest problem though, is not accepting what happens and instead finding excuses or ways to make a circumstance sound unfair. While I could sit all day and explain why I think so and so shouldn’t have gotten into a certain college that I applied to, because I have better grades and took harder classes, that won’t change anything. As much as I was shocked when I found out I didn’t get into my backup school I started to realize that it made sense.

All the colleges I wanted to go to were out of my price range and when I felt limited to in-state schools and even more limited because Virginia has schools that are very hard to get into, let’s just say I wasn’t very motivated filling out my applications. I’m not even sure I filled everything out.

As for high school if I could do it over again, as much as a waste of four years as I felt it was, I probably would do it over. Whining or complaining about certain things in our education program that I view as flawed won’t get me very far. As much as I feel that kids view education as the only way to succeed and how much emphasis society puts on education, why not teach how to have integrity or educate students on what a socially or morally "good" person is? Which to me seems just as important as an education; maybe I’m wrong. You can go an entire day in school being educated and yet never use your mind to think or analyze what you are being taught. You can memorize what teachers tell you, but most the time you don’t question what you are taught. With all the time you spend complaining though, you might as well use that time to make your circumstances better.


Now as I sit here typing this, I look back on my high school years and feel I wasted every year. Until senior year I didn’t open my backpack on a nightly basis and when my friends got report cards and were unhappy with a 3.4 I would lie to myself and them and say I had better grades than I ever did. I never faced the fact that I was doing piss poor in high school, just getting by.

When you think about it there really isn’t anything hard about school. It’s just time consuming and you don’t want to do it. If you study every night and pay attention in class there’s no reason that you shouldn’t be getting A’s. The only problem is school is boring and you are very limited in choosing what you are interested in, so it is hard to motivate yourself.

But in my case I wish I had worked every night and gotten good grades. It’s hard to see everyone so excited about where they are going. This September when all my friends are packing up leaving for a new adventure, I will be stuck in this small community, labeled as being a failure. Even though I have learned many social lessons in high school it seems nothing is as important as having good grades. Who cares if you have no morals or are socially challenged? Colleges don’t. I know kids that have been arrested and sent to alternative education schools, yet they are still going to decent colleges because their grades seem to be the coveted "free pass out of jail card" in Monopoly. Maybe one day their bad habits will catch up to them, but I can’t sit and wait for them to be caught, so I can say "Ha! I was right." Instead I should start focusing on what I need to do to make my situation better.

As I sit in my house of empty dreams, looking around and remembering so many bad memories, a house still scarred with the death of my sister and empty rooms after my parents’ divorce, what do I get for compensation? You win no medal or any recognition for getting over these events; it’s much better to have had a perfect life and nothing to interfere with your grades. No one is allowed excuses, either you did the homework or you didn’t. Just like life, you can’t say "Oh my mother died so I never had the opportunity to amount to anything." You are expected, like all the rest, to have done your share, whether or not your life was easier or harder than someone else’s.

I guess I had the small aspiration of getting into college after turning my grades around senior year and begging to work, and I thought that single factor would change the outcomes of my future. I delayed so long because I always convinced myself that it was too late and that it wasn’t worth the effort because my grades were already too low. But I was encouraged by a counselor that it wasn’t too late, so like a runner in the final lap I gave it my all, but came up short. You would think the thought of "I gave it my best shot," would ease the pain of not getting accepted anywhere, but it doesn’t. I guess I learned too late.

What life teaches you is that your decisions lead you to new decisions. Usually the good decisions lead you to more opportunities. In my case I have two choices, go to NOVA and work hard and get into a good college, or sit back and complain about how unfair life has treated me. The first would probably give me the opportunity of being successful and doing the things I want to do and the second choice would probably lead me to drinking in a bar every night at the age of 30, still complaining about life, to the nearest person next to me. I always liked the saying "It’s time to make your bed and lie on it," because to me that symbolizes life. Everyone has to do things that they don’t want to do, but instead of procrastinating and not doing it, you might as well get it done.

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