I Got Lucky
For the past few months, just as many other high school seniors during the fall, I was stressed. I applied to seven very selective colleges and nine colleges total. There were two important components: education and money. Obviously, people apply to selective schools because they offer a good education, but I’m also poor, so attending a college that could meet my financial need was very important. Thankfully, I was admitted to Northwestern a few days ago, and they’re paying for $65,000 of next year’s $70,000 tuition (they expect me to pay for the rest through work study and a summer job). Thankfully, I no longer have to worry about college admissions (for 4 years). I don’t have to think about test scores, typos in my application, or proving to colleges that I’m worthy of an acceptance letter.
Now that I know the college I will be attending, and hopefully graduating from, I’ve started to reflect on my K-12 career. Ever since my family heard — I told my mom and she immediately called everyone — the news about where I’m going to school next year, they’ve been telling me that I should be proud of myself. But nobody has reminded me about my luck.
My mother is an immigrant who works as a nanny; for most of elementary school, I went to a school that was eventually shut down because of abysmal performance; I spent most of my days at my grandparents’ house watching TV and eating Burger King; I was assigned to a middle school where I, and my peers, would be expected to walk through metal detectors every morning. Thankfully, I went to an amazing private school instead of one with metal detectors at the front, but the school that I was assigned to shows the path that somebody with my demographics is usually headed down. When 11-year-olds are made to walk through metal detectors every morning, they’re being told that they’re more likely to end up in a jail cell than at a school like Northwestern.
Because of the pervasive myth of the American meritocracy, I’m supposed to be very proud that I persevered through difficult circumstances, but I’m not buying it. Throughout all my life, I’ve been able to understand the content in almost all of my classes (geometry and biology were rough) and except for a few occasions, I haven’t had to work for it. I keep asking myself what I did to separate myself from some of the poor black kids I went to elementary school with, but I can’t come up with a satisfactory answer. In elementary school I was able to read faster than, add triple digit numbers before, and spell words better than most kids, but I didn’t go home every night and study in order to make that happen. I’ve come to terms with something that many people in America have difficulty admitting: I just got lucky. We have this idea that everybody born here has the opportunity to succeed, but we forget to talk about the advantages some people are born with. I was lucky enough to get the ability to do well in an elementary school classroom and to not have a tumultuous life, and because of where I go to school, nearly all of my friends were born with white skin and college-educated parents. All of those attributes will help us go to good colleges — or at least go to college at all — but now that I’ve gotten my acceptance letter, I wonder about all of the people who were born with so little going for them.
I’ve come to the conclusion that we need to do more to acknowledge chance in our lives and work to make sure people start on a more level playing ground. Was my college admissions completely serendipitous? No. I am a smart kid who deserves to a good school, but it isn’t happening because of my blood, sweat, and tears; it is happening because I got lucky.
