Honestly, I don’t know how to start this post. I’ve always been a good student (4.0UW/4.78W/1580SAT), with several APs and national-level ECs. I also go to a highly competitive magnet school, which regularly sends people to T10s and HYPSM.
In HS, I always had the expectation to well, the drive to well, and the ambition to outclass everybody. IK it’s a toxic trait, but it’s me.
Naturally, when it came to colleges, I really shot as high as I could go. I applied to almost every T10, T20, and top LAC I could. However, at the end of this session, for what I believe due to be the excessive competitively, I simply ended disappointed in my results.
I have gotten into a somewhat decent school, JHU as well as UCLA. However, neither of these schools are the schools I see myself to be part of: I’ve just not really been all to excited about them tbh.
I applied on a whim, and now that I think about it, I really have no idea. My classmates have gotten into schools I really like, such as Brown, Duke, Berkeley, Chicago, Stanford, Yale, Penn, and Cornell and honestly I feel unhappy whenever I think about this.
Yes, I’m aware JHU is a T10 (and UCLA is a T20) (on the US News Rankings), but after researching cross admit rates and looking at reviews, JHU feels more like an Ivy Plus reject school. Honestly, it doesn’t really fit in as a T10…it’s like the only T10 which doesn’t even have a fan base here. Most, if not all, of the students who go here only are here because they got rejected from the Ivy Pluses. Baltimore depresses me and the campus depresses me even more. I just feel that I deserved better for all the hard work I put through HS.
As arrogant as I may sound, going to JHU feels like the Silver Medalist syndrome…you’re going to a great school, but it’s honestly just not at the top such as the Ivy Plus group (the Gold Medalists), which include the Ivy League, Chicago, MIT, Stanford, and Duke. It just feels so close, yet so far…