Dear MIT Admissions:
So, waitlisted, eh? I'm pleased to say that it's not affecting me
quite as much as one might expect-- going from "deferred" to "waitlisted"
doesn't really cause that much of a change in my life, really, because my
status is still essentially indeterminate. The question, however, remains:
Do I want to stay on the waitlist?
Because this is becoming a lot like an abusive relationship, guys.
After a while, one has to stop crawling back.
Let me tell you-- I went to grad school. I'm running for office. I'm writing a novel. I am the most active and self-aware teenager that you
will probably ever meet. I can explain this in a thousand ways that relate
to anybody. I carry everyone I've met inside me.
I know that it's a limited admissions pool. I saw friends that I
felt really deserved to get in who were rejected outright, and I saw some
people that I really felt didn't opening their acceptance letters. I'm not
bitter on my own behalf, here-- I undertstand that it's the perogative of
the admissions committee to make the best possible decisions.
And maybe I didn't accurately represent myself, because you don't
understand exactly what I go through on a daily basis-- not as a
complaining teenager, but as a man who feels three times his own age and
is weary with the world. I'm weary. I'm weary and I want to change what I
see.
This is why I liked MIT. If I wanted to change this world (it
makes me sick, sometimes, to watch the way that we destroy ourselves and
hurts its inhabitants), there's a thousand ways there that I could do it.
Design a better city. End poverty. Mobilize education. Certainly I can't
end human suffering, but I could poke a few holes in it. Save a few
people.
Do you understand this? Do you?
I took a bus most of the way across this country and I met some of
the poorest people I've ever seen-- and some of the richest. I stood in
the shadow of Nashville while families dissolved and people changed for
the worse, I feel them inside me when I'm by myself, these people who have
been damned for one reason or another that are so far away-- You're not
human if you don't want to help everybody. Maybe you're not perceptive,
can't understand yourself, can't find humanitarian desires, I don't know.
But I entirely grasp this need within myself, and God does it eat
at me. I wanted to change things, guys, really I did, but I'm not going to
pick the scraps of an admission from the floor. You made the wrong choice
(I don't brag. Ever. But here I'm going to) and I'm not going to clean the
mess up, come begging to you for the slot somebody rejected. I'm going to
give it to someone else who cares and move on to where I'm wanted.
Take me off the list, guys. Sorry.