Goals and College Admissions

Goals and College Admissions September 2, 2013 Take inspiration from American distance swimmer Diana Nyad. set extraordinary goals. And work, work, work to achieve them (photo credit: Diana Nyads website). Today, we got to witness an extraordinary woman, Diana Nyad, make history by swimming from Cuba to Key West without the aid of flippers or a shark cage or even a wetsuit. She accomplished the feat not on her first attempt but on her fifth attempt. In her mid-60s (at 64). She swam over a hundred miles (110 in fact) from one country to another in the open water with stinging jellyfish aplenty because she wanted to achieve a goal that had evaded her for decades. When she reached the shore, she said that she had three things that she wanted to get across: Never give up, its never too late to achieve  your dream, and swimming out there may look like a solitary sport but its very much a team sport. We thought that Diana Nyads extraordinary achievement and perseverence could be a valuable lesson to high school students as they go about the college admissions process. Set goals. Work to achieve them. And dont set ordinary goals. Set extraordinary, albeit feasible  goals (if your goal is to get into Harvard with a C average, know that its not going to happen). If you dont set extraordinary goals, youre certainly not going to achieve something extraordinary. Think outside the box and devise a list of goals youd like to achieve. Maybe some of these goals can even help differentiate your candidacy from the candidacies of thousands of other applicants to highly selective colleges. Wouldnt that be nice? A high school student who achieves an extraodinary goal and it doesnt have to be as ridiculous as swimming over a hundred miles from Cuba to Florida will impress college admissions officers. And beyond impressing admissions officers, theyll be able to say to themselves that they achieved this goal for years and years to come. There is nothing more satisfying. We salute distance swimmer Diana Nyad for making history today. But let us not forget that she didnt achieve her goal right away. Movies often make it seem like goals are achieved after a short montage. But, in reality, sometimes it takes five times to do something that is truly extraordinary. We hope high school students take inspiration from Diana Nyad. We know we do.