Don't you just hate it when you log into your email account, and your main page says you have 5 new entries in your inbox, and you open it and it's ALL online college brochures? There you were, all excited that your pen-pal from Scandinavia has finally written back to you, only to have your hopes shattered by a mechanical message sent to you from some university that you've never heard of. How did they even get my email address? And how dare they think they have to right to intrude like that and get my hopes up?

            That's one of the annoying things about the college admittance process. Unless you fill in the little “no” bubble during the SAT registration, colleges are going to send you lots of brochures and emails beckoning you to look into their schools, ask for more information and come visit. Actually, my college counselor recommended that I add myself to the mailing lists of colleges I liked, since it looks good to the admissions committee if you already start looking into colleges your junior year, so I did.

Was that a mistake! A mere two hours after I gave them my name, email address, and year of graduation I saw that shining 1 near my “inbox” link and got the mechanical letter “thanking me for my interest in *fill in the blank*”. Yes, yes, I know they can't write personalized letters to all of the people that are on their mailing list, but it's still pretty annoying; especially when it starts piling up. I end up deleting messages before I even open them to read them.

Just from the title I can see it's just another meaningless college email. All of these schools promise a “personalized setting” and “individual attention”. Wouldn't it be nice if that personalized attention was extended to the process of recruiting, too? I know I'm being unrealistic, but can we just indulge for a minute? Imagine how successful they'd be at getting people to enroll if they targeted them with information that was particularly relevant to the person's personality and hobbies! It would be perfect. And the sporty schools can target the sporty people and the artsy schools can target the artsy people, but the rest of us... we'll still have to sort through the jumble, I guess.