How to get Into College

You must switch high schools, and end up graduating from the one you started ninth grade in, but did not stay at. You must have your high schools refuse to communicate with each other so you end up in the wrong classes, bored out of your mind. You must take classes with the grade below and be in classes where your intelligence baffles even the teachers.

You must slack off in classes you are not good at, or occasionally skipping major tests in classes that you are good at. Your GPA must not be too high, nor your class rank. Your much stupider friend must look like the better applicant for colleges and scholarships. You must never stay in one activity for more than one year or season, and you must never be a leader in your chosen activity.

You must decide to apply to the only schools that send you paper applications (so your mom can look over them with you and make sure you filled them out). You must decide that the most important factor is location, and only look at schools in states that you like the idea of, even though you have only been there twice in a different part of the state. You must not consider any schools where you are a legacy and could actually get in despite them being a good school.

You must go to the school that accepts you first, and decide not to apply to the honors program where you may actually be challenged because your SAT scores were 50 points lower than the automatic invitation for the program. When they decide to invite you anyway because you dazzled the director with a cocky comment at the honors orientation (which you weren’t supposed to be at anyway), you must leave all of the application material in your half-way-across-the-country home state, and email them your essay. When you are accepted into the honors program, you must decide not to take any honors classes.

Your social life must be very active, including more parties than homework assignments. You must get very sick as a result of something at a party, and drop out, but still go to the specialized international program in the fall which you were accepted into as a first semester freshman, and not send the college your transcripts from the community college you attended over the summer and got 18 credits at. You must apply to other colleges from abroad, praying that the applications get there in time, and that the colleges will overlook your entire life and accept you anyway. When all of them accept you, you must decide to drop out completely, only returning to college years later, with 3 kids, a divorce and an addiction to painkillers and alcohol. At this point, you will have gone through the full college experience.