<p>Hi there, I've been at UC Davis as an undergraduate for a little while now and wanted to come back to this site to try and help others out.</p>
<p>I tooled around College Confidential for a little while before I was accepted just to check out what other people were like because I'm naturally in everyone else's business all the time. What I found were a lot of people who were kind of anal retentive psychopaths.</p>
<p>College Confidential is an interesting case, because it's a site meant to do good that I believe does a lot more harm to the average college applicant by building up stress. There's a stigma on the internet against being a like-able and genuine person that feeds into all of this. When someone is on the internet, what they're saying is oft fueled by an impulsive drive rather than what is thought over logically. This results in a person that is extremely unhelpful at giving advice. They're blunt and brash and everything in between, and they don't make any effort to make the person who asked feel any better. For example, I was just exploring a chance thread for an extremely well-off applicant where somebody had the gall to tell them their GPA was too high to be applying where they are. You know what that does? It makes an immature high school Junior start questioning their very life existence.</p>
<p>Some people even go so far as to blatantly lie about someone's chances at a school. I've seen it on more than one occasion where someone would tell someone that they're a "high reach" for a school that they were practically a "safety" for. These people are trolls and they do what they do purely to stress you out because they have failed and it makes them feel better.</p>
<p>Let me tell you the one thing that it takes to get into the college of your dreams though.
Calm down.
College is there.
It's not as competitive as you think it is.
Sit back and take a deep breath.
Don't listen to people here unless they're currently enrolled at the school they're talking about and have been there a few years. You will survive and so will the school.</p>
<p>Don't give up, but don't lose yourself.</p>