Confessions of a Cat-holic (53)

Most of the developed countries, when admitting foreign students, would not just look at your transcripts alone. America was no exception. As I repeatedly emphasized, you would need more than grades and intelligence to attain success, even in a land of plenty. Financial prosperity was not a simple equation where you put in a certain amount of hours and diligence, you would get something back of equal value in return. Life had taught me that hard work might not translate into any desirable outcomes. Better grades might not mean better careers.

Academic success was just an entry ticket to a lot of things. It could open doors for your college, your employers, and maybe the vanity fair too which many people died to break into. But whether you could come out of it alive was a different issue. I was always cagey about my plans and pursuits, because there were too many dreamcatchers around me in the environment where I grew up. It was at that point amidst the fellowship that I decided to pursue my college degree in the United States, because of our common grounds in the belief that you needed more than a diploma and a perfect GPA to get through life. I was sure that a liberal arts degree, away from all the chartered professions and financially secure salaried jobs such as law, architecture, medicine and accounting, was all I ever needed in life so that I would never need to meet these academically driven students from SPCC ever again after I finished high school. I wanted to go to America, not for the money.

SPCC was just an artificially harmonious haven for me to seek temporary peace and concord amidst the disturbance of growing up. Nothing more than that. I knew very well that after I left SPCC, I would gladly greet farewell with my schoolmates and never look back again to recollect any favorable memories during my years in this high school.

But I was thankful though, for the chance to have been educated in this top tier institution. One of the things I could take away from Maxim was that citizenship could make or break a job offer. It could be that they were nationalist, or patriotic. They might not welcome foreigners, or aliens as Americans put them that way. Maxim didn't articulate it with his audience at the time but I could sense that he couldn't let go of the fact that no companies were willing to sponsor his stay and visa as a Hong Kong citizen. Maybe he just had to realize that he needed to accept failures and rejections, and that he was just not that special, despite his perfect scores and unprecedented intelligence.

Afterall, the advocacy of welcoming and accepting talents regardless of your race, ethnicity, background, religion, country, citizenship in the free land of America could be just a notion. Nevertheless, the American dream still worked. Even though many aliens from the precious treasureland of Hong Kong were forced to leave the country and blocked from the monster trak network of job database, there were many clueless teenagers who still would do anything to try knocking on its door.

I was given an offer to Columbia University, not because I was granted an exceptional admission for my non-academic achievements. I was not yet a scientist or an inventor, or some sort of an extra-curricular all-rounder per se. I did not have perfect scores, I did not have special skills, I did not have any astonishing awards or trophies. And I would like to believe that I didn't get in because of my looks, but I would welcome such compliments anyways about my appearance. All I wanted to say was that the American colleges, especially the Ivy League, would look deeper than just grades and test scores. They wanted to find a fit to their community. Harvard alone accepted more than 50,000 applications annually, out of which students of perfect scores in SAT alone took up more than the spots it could ever matriculate. They rejected more prodigies and geniuses than it could ever give offers to. My dear friends from SPCC needed to refresh their perspectives and understand reality that not every university adopted the same policies as HKU, the most desirable destination among the island natives in Hong Kong.