Dear Friends,
This month's Hard Taco song, "Write Your Own Book," is a love letter to a kid who is grown up enough to know that parenting is imperfect. We will never stop wanting to give Scarlett advise, and never stop having opinions about her choices, but half of those lessons and opinions are are complete garbage. This song is about hoping she has the wisdom to recognize the good half.
This has been on my mind this week because we are in the final throes of college admissions season. After hundreds of hours of work and worry, she has a bouquet of acceptance letters in her inbox, and some tough choices to make in the next few weeks,
Along the way, she learned some effective strategies for presenting your best self in a college application. If you are a rising high school senior, I suggest you commit the rest of this digest to memory, preferably by chanting it word-for-word in a mystical drone over the school's PA system. This will obviate the need for you or your classmates to obtain a guidance counselor, a private college admissions consultant, or any other earthly companions.
Foremost, your common application must feature evidence of leadership experience. If you don't have a position in student government, consider taking a position in student shadow government. In most schools, the elected student body officials form a subservient front organization through which a cryptocratic cabal of dissidents exercises true power, shielded from scrutiny of the puppet administration. There are plenty of leadership opportunities within these covert student societies. The Student Freemasons organize school dances and assemblies. The Central Bank Club is responsible for Spirit Week. The Young Globalist Elites plan community outreach activities. And of course, the Senior Class New World Order manipulates bake sales to achieve world domination.
The next thing to focus on is your GPA. When a teacher grades your test and puts a big red F at the top, you can just get your own red pen and turn it into an A before posting the test to your refrigerator. This continues to be the #1 method to fool parents, but the F will still be on your transcript. A better solution is to leave the F, but write "cool a" in from of it, then upload the test as supplementary material to the application. The admissions reviewer will then say, "Well, this student failed a lot of classes, but shouldn't we take a chance on someone who is cool af?"
Some schools still rely on standardized test scores, even though the SAT and ACT are poor indicators of a student's readiness for college. They unfairly benefit students from wealthier backgrounds, and fail to measure problem-solving skills, critical thinking, or creativity. Recent evidence suggests that SAT scores have a strong correlation with only one thing... how delicious and tender the student is when cooked on a rotisserie. You should be wary of schools that put a lot of emphasis on standardized test scores. They are probably just trying to boost their rankings or reinforce cannibalistic fraternity hazing rituals.
Finally, you will need to solicit letters of recommendation from a trusted adult who knows you well enough to describe your skills, accomplishments, and personality. If you're hoping to pursue a humanities major, aim to get a letter of recommendation from Malala Yousefzai. If you're going for a a degree in the social sciences, a personalized letter about your character strengths from Jane Goodall will go a long way. If you're not sure what your academic focus is going to be, you should cover your bases with letters of recommendation from both Frederick Douglass and Vincent Van Gogh. Just be sure to ask for the letters at least a month before you need it, and preferably before they have been dead for over 130 years.
