I promised myself I’d write more, but it’s just so darn difficult when my full-time job is copywriting. I kind of miss the days when I’d spend hours scribbling away in notebooks — plays I started but never finished, a few lines of poetry, a short story. I just couldn’t write the words as fast as they would pour out of my brain.
It might help if I get back to writing in notebooks. But then there’s my carpal tunnel…
Anyway, I’m here. So I guess I’ll write.
Early fall is one of my favorite times of the year. It also happens to be my favorite time to hike.
My next scheduled group hike is in 2 weeks at Buzzard’s Roost Nature Preserve — a repeat of last October’s hike. I hope we’ll have some spectacular foliage this year. We’ve had an excessive amount of rain and that helps, or so I’ve heard.
I can probably plan November’s hike, too. Beyond that, I’m not sure. Since I don’t see OSU about my esophagus disorders until October 30, I don’t know yet what the next steps are in my treatment. Will they schedule me for surgery? Will they make me do more tests first? I honestly don’t know.
Last Sunday, I completed a 5k (walking) on OSU campus. Part of our route went around the Oval (what most colleges refer to as a quad), which brought back a lot of memories of my own time as a student there. So many things changed on campus, but so many of the buildings look exactly the same.
Since I work at a college admissions consultancy, I think about college a lot as it is.
In fact, my husband and I were just talking about that this morning. It is insane to me what college admissions is like now versus 30 years ago. Not just the college application itself, but spending the entire four years of high school curating a profile that shows academic and extracurricular depth. Carefully choosing what to get involved in and how to deepen your involvement over time.
That wasn’t really a thing when we applied to college. In fact, a lot of us didn’t even think about college until maybe junior year. At my school, that’s when you had to decide whether you were going to take college-prep courses or not. Kids now are applying to 10-15 schools. Sometimes more. We didn’t apply to nearly as many.
Nowadays, even the students with perfect GPAs, perfect test scores, and sustained involvement in just a few activities don’t have any guarantee that they’ll be accepted. There’s just too much competition.
College-bound students now seem to be so much more accomplished than I ever was at that age. Oh sure, I wrote for the school newspaper because I planned to major in journalism. But I was also in the choir, dance team, French Club, Key Club, and I don’t even remember what else. Most of my activities were not chosen with the intention of leveraging them to get into college. (Though why didn’t I get into choir once I was in college? It was a huge part of my life in high school.)
I started out as a journalism major. Then switched to creative writing. Then switched to English literature. I left college. I came back. I transferred. Twice. My third school being Ohio State.
Here are a couple of pics from my senior year at OSU. These were taken during my study abroad trip to Bath, England, where we studied, you guessed it, English literature. (And a bit of Irish literature, too. We spent a few days in Dublin.)
Despite majoring in a humanities discipline, I still turned out fine. I have a job that pays well and I get to write and correct other people’s writing, and honestly, that’s my strongest skill set.
Anyway, it’s fall, and high school seniors are currently applying to college. It’s our busy season at work, and the content I’ve been working on by and large is to help seniors with various aspects of their applications. How to write their essays. How to prepare for interviews. What deadlines they need to be aware of. How to not go insane when balancing college applications and senior year coursework. What previous admissions data can tell them about their chances for getting accepted. This is my life day in and day out.
And oh, when the students we work with get accepted? I watch their acceptance reaction videos and cry. EVERY. SINGLE. YEAR.
So I’m furiously updating all of our content that needs updated annually –there is A LOT — while also trying to publish new content. And when the early round decisions roll out in December, I’ll be checking all hours of the day (and night) for decision release dates. I’ve been known to update our decision release dates blog post at 3 am.
Oh yeah, there’s another big difference. We didn’t have all these decision rounds when I applied to college. Now you have Early Decision, Early Action, Regular Decision and sometimes Early Decision 2 and Early Action 2. I don’t know how these kids do it.
I just started my professional development for this year, which is how to use AI in copywriting. This is something I already do for work (I mean, you pretty much have to at this point whether you like it or not), but at least I can get a credential for it.
The call went out at work last week for volunteers to go to Guatemala for School the World next year. We’re a small enough company that anyone can go, even if you’ve already been multiple times. It breaks my heart that I had to say no. I just don’t know where this medical journey is going or the timeline. And honestly, it gets harder to raise the money each time. But I loved this year’s trip so much and I really wish I could go.
Until next time. (I hope this posts okay. At the moment, our firewall is blocking my own blog. HAHAHA. So I can’t even see what I’m posting.)
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