Turning Lemons into a Wall Street Journal OP-ED

December 05, 2019 :: Admissionado Team

Here’s what NOT to do if you get rejected from your dream school: call and scream bloody murder at the admissions officers, demanding answers as to why you (or your kid) didn’t get accepted, like these folks at NYU.

Here’s what you CAN do: turn lemons into lemonade. Use your frustration and exasperation to fuel a satirical essay about the college admissions process and get it published in the Wall Street Journal, become an internet sensation, be interviewed on the Today show, and get more job and internship offers than you know what to do with.

At least that’s what Suzy Lee Weiss did. After getting rejected from multiple Ivy Leagues in one day, she turned her anger into a now (in)famous article.

We here at Admissionado don’t know what went wrong with her application because, well, we haven’t seen it. Weiss seems like a qualified enough candidate, with an excellent GPA, solid SAT scores, and some good looking extracurriculars. What we don’t know is if her personality came through in her essays, or if she was able to showcase her genuine uniqueness, or demonstrate what she had to contribute to that particular college community. Those three things are CRUCIAL in your college essays.

Now, some people love Weiss’s article with its satirical tone, some people hate it and think she’s an entitled brat. Doesn’t really matter. What the article is, though, is SMART. In publishing this bad boy, Weiss did what her Ivy applications didn’t: set herself apart from the crowd. Everybody has something, but you MUST be smart about identifying it. It doesn’t have to be as big as a Wall Street Journal article. Not even close. It’s all in how you tell your story.

So while she isn’t Ivy-bound this fall, Suzy Lee Weiss DID get into some great schools: Michigan, Penn State, Indiana, and Wisconsin. With those options on her plate, we have a feeling she’ll be juuuuust fine.

(Image from blog.gourmetrecipe.com)