The Admission.

As Joseph sat down on the hard, grey concrete on the front steps of his house with his Macbook Pro, he took a deep breath and composed himself. He opened the computer, input his password and found he staring at a picture of the Milky Way galaxy. “Leave it to Apple to make you feel insignificant” he muttered to himself as he started Google Chrome. While Joseph waited for the circular icon to stop bouncing on his dock, he reflected on the previous couple of days. It was the beginning of April, and his college decisions had just come back. He applied to every single Ivy League school, with the exception of Dartmouth, along with other top tier schools like Stanford and MIT. His only safety school was his state flagship. In the course of three days Joseph had gotten rejected by all of his schools with the exception of his safety a college he especially detested. The only college that hadn’t replied was Yale. Joseph adored Yale, both his parents went there, and he desired with a passion to matriculate there. When Google Chrome finally opened and Joseph clicked to his inbox, he found a surprise waiting for him: an email from the Yale office of admissions. He closed his eyes, offered a prayer to a god he didn’t believe in, and opened the email.
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Joseph’s path to this moment started a long time ago, specifically when he first started school. When he started school he was always ahead of the class, in reading, writing, math, you name it, he was ahead of every kid in his class. This intelligence gap allowed the teachers to help Joseph advance more and soon he was in math 3 years ahead of his peers and reading at a college level in 8th grade. Most of his drive to excel in school came from within, but his parents, both of who were Ph.D. researchers at a pharmaceutical company, were the ones who sowed his seed of excellence. They met as postdocs at Yale and shared a love for intellectualism and held no less of a standard for their only child.
So when Joseph started high school they, of course, impressed upon him the importance of doing well in school. He took challenging AP classes, earned all of his required credits for art and health over the summer, allowing him to take higher-level math and science classes. The truth is Joseph hated math. He was good at it sure, but he would rather be reading or writing poetry, or playing his violin. Joseph wanted to take Introduction to Journalism but instead he convinced himself that he would be better off taking yet another math class because it would boost his application. Joseph knew, as did the rest of his class, that in order to gain admittance to these select colleges, one had to be well rounded. So he volunteered in the community, he played lacrosse on the school team, he joined every honor society that would take him, interned with a professor at his local university, helped out at soup kitchens, and even founded a non-profit organization to send used and unwanted toys to India, China and other third world countries. Obviously this was not easy -- it took its toll physically on Joseph. On a good night, he would get about 5 hours of sleep. Forget about his social life. Joseph was a good-looking fellow, six feet tall, lean but toned from lacrosse, with messy black hair that gave him a surfer look. However, he rejected any and all advances that any member of the opposite sex made towards him in favor of his textbook. He didn’t attend any football games, go to homecoming or prom, or even hang out with friends. He had always been shy in middle and elementary school, but in high school, he became a recluse: not talking or interacting with anyone except his teachers and parents. Joseph was threatened at times to be broken by the horrible classes he took, the lack of sleep, the utter nonexistence of his social life, but stayed strong by imagining his ultimate goal: studying at Yale.
Joseph chose Yale as his college long before he knew what college was. His parents were something of a legend at the school as they had been a part of the team that discovered a strain of bacteria that reverses the spread of cancer in the body. So when most kids were getting asked “Where do you want to go to school?” Joseph was getting asked “So, you gonna go to Yale like your Mom and Pop?” Joseph didn’t mind it; no in fact he enjoyed it. He liked Yale. He loved Yale. He and his parents visited the campus so often he knew it better than most freshmen. He met with the professors who taught his parents, stayed overnight in the dorms, and attended classes. Most people thought he was guaranteed admission. He had double legacy, meaning that both his parents had attended, he was the sole offspring of two notable alumni, and he was a stellar candidate. His uncles and aunts all claimed “There are only three things certain in this world, Death, Taxes, and Joseph at Yale”. Joseph’s dream was to get into Yale, and he was determined to sacrifice anything to have that admissions letter.
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Joseph clicked open the email and scanned the page for that one golden word “Congratulations”. What an anti-climax. This was an email giving Joseph the login and password he needed to use to get his results. He navigated to the Yale web portal and typed in his credentials and a screen popped up. It listed his name, Pulowitzki, Joseph, and attached was his letter. He clicked on the letter and immediately found the word “unfortunately” at the top of the screen, the universal euphemism for “We’re sorry you’re just not good enough”. Joseph didn’t know what to do. He sat there staring at the screen for a good five minutes. He knew the anger would come, the embarrassment, the tears. He didn’t know how he would face his family, his friends, the ones that mocked him. He didn’t have the admissions letter he bragged about to shove in their faces. How could he explain that all his hard work meant that he was going to the same college as them. His life had lost meaning. Joseph was finally broken.
Now I wish I could tell you that there is a happy ending to this story. That Joseph inadvertently received the wrong login and password and that there was actually an admitted letter for him. That his parents used their influence at the university to pull strings and got him in, but unfortunately I can’t. What I can tell you is that Joseph, overcome by grief and emotion, decided to step in front of a Subway train and take his own life cursed by the crapshoot of college admissions.