Pep Talk, Kind of.

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Post By Jen

Jen at Taj

In 2000, while you were in elementary school, I traveled to Asia on my first Council of International Schools tour.  If you are a student at an international school or an American school outside the United States, chances are good that CIS has done a college fair at your high school.

My first CIS tour lasted about three weeks. We traveled throughout Asia; China, India, Nepal, Singapore and Korea were all stops.  I remember our first group meeting in Los Angeles before our flight to Beijing.  The group leader told the participants what we could expect. She had arranged all the school visits and as she addressed us I thought, “How can one person coordinate this whole trip for 25 people?”  I was so happy to sit back and let someone else deal with the logistics of getting me from place to place in foreign lands.  When the trip was over, I complimented her and told her I couldn’t imagine how she managed something so complex. I couldn’t envision myself taking charge as she had, being organized in the way that she needed to be.   I couldn’t imagine myself being a leader.

Nine years later almost to the day, I finished leading 27 college and university representatives around India on a CIS tour. We visited schools in Chennai, Madurai, Delhi, Mumbai, Dhera Dun and Pune.  We spent seemingly endless hours on various forms of transportation as we made our way to schools across the vast and exotic country.  In groups of three, we took jeeps through a wild elephant preserve when a necessary bridge was washed out by monsoon rains.  We saw monkeys, peacocks, horses, cows, goats, camels and elephants–all on our way to school visits. And most importantly, we saw hundreds of bright, motivated students looking to study in the U.S.  By all accounts, the trip was a success.

You probably think that this is the part where I tell you that you too can do the things that you think you cannot do. Well, you can and you will but that’s obvious.

I’m here to tell you that if you are doing this life thing right, getting into the school of your dreams is only the first of many challenges that await you. That is the moral of this blog entry and therein lies the rub: getting into college is merely the beginning.  It is only the beginning of thinking, “there is no way I could do that” and then repeatedly proving yourself wrong.  Life done right is thinking you can’t do something because you’re not organized enough, not bold enough, not imaginative enough, not smart enough, and then proving yourself wrong.  When you allow yourself to be so daunted by something that it boggles your mind to think that anyone—much less you—could ever do it, then you are pushing yourself to your limits.

I’m back from my trip to India and eagerly awaiting my next adventure, the next thing that scares me for a moment before I tackle it.  After you get your college applications completed, I suggest you do the same.

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Filed under Admissions Life, Travel

Tags: CIS Tour 2009, India, Travel