Stopping to smell the leaves as we become seniors again

Autumn is the season of college admissions. Just as the leaves are sure to fall, so too are crowds of high school students sure to descend on campus, littering the walkways like the fallen foliage whose season they share. And just as the groundskeepers will clear the pathways of most of this organic detritus, so too will the Admissions Office brush aside some ninety percent of these prospective Princetonians. They may be as outstandingly exceptional as the next student, just as a whole pile of leaves may be equally oranged by the fall frost, but leaf-blowers and admissions officers both have a job to do — only a few can stay.

The lucky ones who are not swept away become ecstatic. Four years of high school toil have paid off; they have been admitted to one of the elite shrines of success from which all good things come. Launched on the right trajectory, they now have only to hit par for the course to be ensured of all they want in life.

I would hazard to guess that this sense of having "made it," was and is shared by many students. Many of us pass through our time here still basking in the warm glow of initial success that, like a golden autumn afternoon, buoys the spirit long after the sun has set.

And then we become seniors.

With graduation suddenly looming before us, we realize that fall is not simply the time of college admissions, but also an all purpose figure-out-the-future season. Six words — "What are you doing next year" — dog our every step, chasing us back into the world of applications, interviews and standardized tests we thought we had left for good. The cruel truth sets in with the change of season: four years later we are still just leaves blowing in the nippy October wind.

Some are overwhelmed; "I just can't do it all over again," bemoaned one friend. These people are doomed to live with their parents and watch daytime television professionally. Others simply deny the possibility of graduating, sometimes creating a self-fulfilling prophecy that lines them up for a "super-senior" year of agonizing.

However, as this page documented last week, most of us polish our resumes and button up our suits, bracing for yet another round of application, selection, and — for many — rejection. This is, after all, what Organization Kids are made for: to grow up and become Organization Adults. We realize that getting to Princeton was just the first step on a very long ladder whose rungs are set progressively further apart.

Or at least that is how it seems. A brief look outside the Princeton bubble (and its cognates on Wall Street, in legal and medical schools, in Washington, and the other isolation wards of the elite) puts the senior's dismay in perspective. While our options may seem bleak on the inside, they would make most outside observers green with envy.

Fifty-three percent of the newly-graduated Princetonians who got jobs last year entered the financial services sector; many of them did so by default or perhaps out of laziness. But these "default" jobs pay two or three times the national average. If you want to travel, an array of "Princeton in" programs will send you wherever you want to go. If you want to do good, Project 55 will pay for it. If you want to go to graduate or professional school, the acceptance rate for Princetonians is an order of magnitude above the average, even at the most selective schools. In short, the sense of accomplishment we dismissed as a recent high school graduate's naivety was actually correct. We do have it made. (In truth, many of us had it made long before the YES! letter arrived in the mail.)

Such reassurances, however, are largely wasted on the senior. Success is not an objective standard; it is a state of mind. The neurosis of many Princeton students is to always focus on the next rung and never notice how high they have climbed. Clearly, some perspective is needed. So the next time you are rushing to an interview, pause to notice the leaves on the walkway, about to be swept away. At least you have it better than them. Tom Hale is a Wilson School major from South Kingston, R.I.