By Amy Flis

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After pouring my heart into a 500-word essay, spending hours filling in the countless tiny blank boxes and trying fruitlessly to infuse in a five-page document some personality that might be a reflection of my own personality and accomplishment, it’s incredibly disheartening to open up my Gmail to an e-mail that very succinctly rejects me. It has happened more than once already, and I still live in fear of another one of those oh-too-polite messages from a college or scholarship committee.

The season is nearing when more of those decisions, if they haven’t come yet, will be here.  With everything from college admission decisions to financial aid and coming up, the anticipation and nerves are certainly present in the Senior Class, excluding the lucky few who were admitted early or who have already decided where they will be next year. As more students apply for college and more people return to school after loosing their jobs, college admission has become increasingly more competitive.

Even Petersen’s, a Nelnet company which produces review books and other student aid materials, admitted this in its online advice on overcoming college competition.

“Even with your best efforts, you could still be turned away not due to any deficits, but solely to volume,” the Web site stated. This is true not just for college admission but for everything that goes along with that, including financial aid and scholarships. Add in the present economy, and you have the recipe for a very stressful year to be applying for college.

With all this on the table, I would like to offer a few words of caution to those who are still waiting and consolation to those who have already been disappointed. If you are like me, the mass e-mail sent to all rejected applicants just isn’t satisfying enough an explanation, and although the explanation of increased competition may not be enough either, I’d like to re-iterate to those rejected applicants that a negative response does not mean your accomplishments are any less valuable, and you are no less worthy an individual, but it is simply impossible to convey all that a person is and offers on a piece of paper.

Especially concerning the most competitive schools and scholarships, perfect academic records and extensive extracurricular activities will only buy you a ticket to the raffle; luck is the only assurance you have of actually getting your name drawn from that bin of qualified applicants. Keep all this in mind as you receive the rest of your college and scholarship decisions, and I wish you good luck.