Taking a Break from A Day of Essay Reading!

Every line of work ebbs and flows based on a calendar of deadlines. When no imminent projects are on the horizon, employees enjoy their downtime, taking vacations and going home early from the office. When clients call in with urgent requests, employees reluctantly do overtime, trying to get through all the tasks while their managers and customers breathe down their necks for constant updates. The deadlines vary greatly from industry to industry, with expectations being three months for management consultants to three minutes for the fry cook at McDonald's.

But as a general rule of thumb, no matter in which industry, the most predictable the deadlines, the longer the heads-up employees get before the output is due, the less those deadlines would cause stress for the employees. After all, if the employees know they have a few months before the deadline arrives, they can break the work up into consistent chunks that they spread evenly over their many work hours. That consistency can be made even more accurate when the employees know exactly how likely it is for an unexpected piece of work to come in that disrupts that original working planning schedule.

The college admissions preparation industry, I have come to find, is a major exception to this general rule of thumb. The deadlines for this job are transparent, predictable, and reasonable. Students know exactly what they need to submit months, if not years before the deadlines. And the deadlines, whether for the transcripts, tests, or the applications themselves, are often the same year after year. Yet, students scramble days before the deadlines, trying to get through as many essays as possible before the clock strikes midnight. And I, as someone tasked with reviewing and polishing their last-minute essays, sit in a hotel room all day two days before New Year's.

What gives? One is the sheer size of the expectations that colleges have for what they consider to be suitable applicants. As high school students start to think that publishing research papers, winning scholastic awards, and taking extra classes outside high school are de facto prerequisites to be seriously considered by top universities, they squeeze more and more time into doing these activities rather than the all-important process of putting these achievements on paper. So rather than divvying up the work throughout the school year, students are forced to use the school year to do what they need to write about.

The other, probably more prevalent, reason for the last-minute scramble is a fundamental belief in that all tasks, can be done at the last minute at sufficient quality, leading to systematic procrastination. This is not simply an issue with college applications. Because of that belief in the last-minute quality, everything on the schedule gets pushed back, making it largely pointless whether or not there is indeed a long time to do the work before the deadline shows up. Almost as a matter of fact, college applications become a last-minute task because there are so many other last-minute deadlines to hit right beforehand.

For workers in the college admissions preparation industry, then, the last-minute squeeze by their customers (i.e. the high school students) means that they will not be exempt from the last-minute scramble either, no matter how willing they are to get the work done much before the deadlines. Unlike workers in many other industries, clients here are also partners in work rather than people who are simply paying for output that they wait to receive. And customers being customers, the hired hands only have so much they can say about the students' behaviors without risking the business' reputation.

As dark as the situation sounds from a work-life balance perspective, it does also provide interesting insights about the adolescent mind that few other industries can expose those who are much older. Amidst the ambitious hopes and dreams adults find both fascinating and worthy of envy, there is also an exhilarating bout of "can we make the deadline" adrenaline rush that hardly any well-organized pencil pushers doing paperwork weeks in advance can feel. Cynical as it seems, feeling teenage anxiety firsthand reminds everyone of the sheer weight of everyday decisions and efforts. 

Perhaps one day I will look back on my day of sitting in the hotel room two days before New Year's Day reading essay after essay as a time of good memories. It is, to put it in the best way, a reminder of youthful potential, visualized in a final dash toward a closing door that hosts a bright future on the other side. It is like a parent put so simply: for the adults, filing a college application may just be a task among many; for the young and ready, they are the representation of everything they have done up until that point. Knowing the gravity of the situation, I cannot help but be more lenient with those last-minute essay review requests.