Getting into Pomona!

I woke up at 4 PM from a nap after an all-nighter. I missed the reading club Mao reading.

I guiltily got out my laptop and scrolled through my email and Slack. I had also missed a podcast I was supposed to record with two TKS friends. I had submitted my TKS challenge deck that morning and simply felt empty afterwards, with nobody to celebrate with and nothing to celebrate.

Eventually I found an email from Pomona as I was scrolling — "an update to your application." The decision date was April 10, was it not? Surely this was just something administrative. But no, as I clicked into the portal it seemed like a decision letter. With literally zero expectations, I clicked through the last link, as casually as if I were checking Twitter.

It was an acceptance letter.

It's such an unfamiliar sight to me, and so unexpected, that it took me a moment to process. Then, a moment to unbottle my happiness just a bit, my eyes growing wide and an astonished laugh escaping, me shaking around in disbelief a bit sitting in bed. I sent excited messages to Messenger GCs, to the Edyfi Slack, to a bunch of other people I thought would be interested. I texted my mom.

"I got into college!"



The feeling is more complex than simple jubilation, though. In some ways, it feels like a step backwards from where I'd been.

This makes sense — I'm at a point in my career that most reach towards the end of or after going to college. I had the kind of thing going that I could drop out of college for, and indeed I was seriously considering dropping out of Georgia Tech before the fall. To become an incoming frosh at Pomona feels like a demotion as much as a new opportunity.

Pomona is also a much slower-paced liberal arts school, a far cry from the city and New England elite grind I've lived in all my life before. Thinking back to Andover would reveal that I can thrive and be really happy in such an environment — that's why I applied to Pomona in the first place, and resolved to myself that I would go over Georgia Tech if I got in — but it also feels guilty to leave the more ambitious, unstable pace of hustling behind.

"So are you going for the humanities then?" Tessa asks me. "Or sticking with STEM? Or going business?"

"Definitely humanities to some extent," I reply. "I'll keep doing software/entrepreneurship stuff probably."

Me: idk liberal arts college just sounds like a place to have fun for four years rather than career development

kid in a candy store vibe

Tessa: Lmaoooo this fits for you hehe

Kid in a candy store — that's what Pomona seemed like, and seems like now. I would go and indulge my artistic passions, become a theater kid, take creative writing classes, study critical theory. It feels indulgent, downright indulgent compared to the hard grind at an engineering school that would give me real hard skills to change the world with.

But maybe I'm getting blinded by fear of change, or sunk cost fallacy from this past year's pivot. I'm not presently naturally excited by engineering and hard science research. I'm much more excited by humanities work. There's plenty of room for ambition in humanities: I could go into journalism or politics, and start a million initiatives on various scales. America is very much in need of more competent social leaders at the moment.

My reputation within tech would suffer. Kid at a liberal arts school, not even studying CS? What right do they have to say anything about tech, especially offer social commentary? Right now, being a hard tech kid lends be a foundational credibility that I would be sacrificing in pursuit of this liberal arts dream. I'm really throwing compounding off-track here, huh? Never gonna settle for one thing.

Still, life is much bigger than chasing career advancement. One of the top five regrets of the dying reads, "I wish I'd had the courage to live a life true to myself, not the life others expected of me." Another, "I wish I hadn't worked so hard," and a third "I wish that I had let myself be happier." I want to be a theater kid. I want to indulge in artistry. I want to dive into critical theory, if only for my own fulfillment. The pressure to work hard and advance is valuable, but external and arbitrary, and I might actually do better to heed my more indulgent desires.



Thinking about my application, I also had the thought, "it's stupid that I got in. I definitely didn't deserve to."

It's the first time that I've had such a thought. Before I always maintained that college apps are a crapshoot, everyone simply has to scramble for what they can get, there is no fairness or deservedness involved. In other words, there's nothing to feel bad about. I told Ashley this about her Andover acceptance.

But for some reason, this acceptance brings me a sense of guilt and impostor syndrome. I guess I had finally broken my confidence that I am the best, I can take on the world, there is no one better than me. Over the past year I had humbled myself, working hard to accept myself and thrive in a place other than the traditional apex of early-life achievement.

My common app resume was exaggerated this year, as is everyone's on all years. But this year particularly brings me guilt, because I have such college-y things on my list: founding board member of a food rescue non-profit. Researcher in a public health NGO doing work in rural Nigeria. They're so...college-y, and the hard work in both of these cases was done very much by others who I'm lending credit from.

It all feels very fake. I'm hoping the fakeness will carry me just a little further, to Brown and Cornell. Maybe then, returning to that familiar twisted bubble of Ivys and New York and New England, it'll feel less fake, or the fakeness will feel authentic, it being my home and upbringing after all.