Every 4 years, the world stops for me. A leap year birthday you ask? No, the globe’s most popular sporting event, the World Cup, is upon us. As a lifelong soccer aficionado, countless hours of watching international friendlies and qualifiers culminates in a month long buffet of the best football/soccer. As I sat up last night catching up on the day’s results and goals, it occurred to me that my love of “the beautiful game” has interesting parallels to my professional life.
In soccer, anyone can win at any time. While this is true in other sports, it is nowhere more apparent that at the World Cup where success is never assured. Much prognostication about the matches played is based on pedigree – the global football powers who are expected to offer the upstarts who found their way into the tournament a quick dose of reality. Teams like Brazil, France, Germany, Spain, England and Argentina are expected to dominate while the South Korea’s and Honduras’ are told they should just be happy to be there. But a funny thing happens when these teams get together on a new continent – nothing is assured.
This is similar in the college selection process. From practically infancy, children are told they must strive to gain admission to the “best” schools, the schools that reputations and U.S. News tells us will offer graduates a path paved in gold to success. What conventional wisdom neglects to take into consideration though is that the students applying to colleges and universities each year are INDIVIDUALS, and need to be treated as such. What do I mean by this? Well, a student may have done all the “right” things – excelled academically, earned a killer ACT/SAT score and done all the other intangibles to earn admission to the nation’s most selective schools. But that doesn’t mean they should go there. The simple truth is if a student isn’t happy, they won’t be successful, no matter where they go. And getting into and attending Harvard isn’t a guaranteed path to anything if you can’t make the grade.
The same is true in this year’s World Cup. France, one of the most successful soccer nations of the last 20 years is out after the first round, winless in 3 matches. This is a team with some of the most talented players on the planet, yet they couldn’t even muster a win over host South Africa, one of the lowest ranked teams in the tournament. Why? The players were miserable. Infighting, instability and a lack of singular focus led to an early exit.
What’s the point? If you choose a college purely on reputation, you may be setting yourself up for failure. There is so much more that goes into the decision including who you are going to class with, what happens outside of class and frankly, the intangible “gut” feeling. Selecting a college where you will be happy and engaged in a community that will work with you to help you succeed is a whole lot better than choosing the one an arbitrary ranking system selected for you. You are a human being, full of potential and frailty. Why choose a school based solely on the numbers?
Oh, and GO USA!
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