What I Wish I Could Say In That Goddamn CalTech Essay

The college application process is, without a doubt, difficult for everyone. We all stress to get the best scores and the best class ranking, and then pour our hearts out in our essays in an attempt to make up for any shortcomings in the numbers that define us. And that situation is exactly what makes this process difficult. We all know that, in the eyes of some colleges, our class ranks and SAT scores are all that define us, yet we still obsess over crafting the perfect essays that may give us the slightest chance to be granted admission into the most elite colleges. 
 But for those colleges, our essays don’t matter. The most selective schools don’t care about us. The most selective school don’t care about the diversity that I would bring to their campus as a low-income, pansexual, female engineer because my Math 2 subject test score is a 690. These schools don’t care about the fact that some of their potential applicants have been awake in the middle of the night, crying and contemplating suicide because their 33 on the ACT seems subpar in comparison to the 50 percent of applicants that have a 35 or higher. The difficult situation here is that these schools don’t care about us. They give us 200 words to talk about ourselves, but 500 to sing our praises for them. If our numbers aren’t perfect, they don’t care.
There really is no solution to this. On the one hand, I could shell out hundred of dollars for ACT preparatory classes and take the test again and get a 35. I could make sure that my numbers were perfect, and then feel confident that there’s a chance I could get into an ultra-selective school. Or, on the other hand, I could accept the fact that I’m not perfect, and that I don’t need to go to an elite school to be successful. I could learn to be happy with the scores I have and realize that I can get into plenty of good schools with my 33 and my 2050. The latter option is the one I took.