DISD technology hates me.

It's like a conspiracy, I swear.

Every night before thesis, I email myself the essays I need to work on and a to-do list to make sure I remember everything I plan to do the next day. Today, I had planned to continue working on cutting down my essays for UC Berkeley and completing the UT-PACT application. I also needed to get a blank envelope for a recommendation letter.

Guess which of these things I was able to accomplish.

That's right. The one that doesn't use technology.

Getting the envelope took literally less than a minute, but my files wouldn't download properly from the email - no, scratch that, they wouldn't download at all - so I spent a good 20 minutes trying all the possible ways I knew how to get around it. Eventually, I was able to download them using the right click and "save target" option.

But then, the files took another hour to open.

After a few minutes, I got tired of waiting, so I moved onto the next thing on my list: the PACT application. At first, all was well - I was able to log in perfectly and fill out a good two activities in the "Extracurricular activities" section before Internet Explorer decided to be stupid and refuse to let me type any more.

I had to log out, close the browser, and log back in at least ten times to continue working on the application. What's worse is that each time I did that, the amount of time it would allow me to type normally got shorter and shorter until I wasn't able to type anything at all.

At that point, I had to type everything into a document on Google Drive (because Microsoft Word was still opening my essays and trying to open a blank Word document just froze the entire thing), and then copy and paste each part manually (i.e. using the right-click option). Even that didn't work at times, especially when I needed to change what I'd already pasted into a box, because then I would have to cut what was in the box, paste it back into the Google Drive doc, make the changes, and then copy and paste it back into the PACT application.

On top of that, the Internet tab that had the Google Drive doc started doing the same stupid thing, so I had to close that tab and open a new document each time. To illustrate my point: I currently have ten "Untitled Documents" sitting in My Drive right now.

I am so done. Honestly, I can get so much more stuff done at home, and literally the only reason for that is because Dallas ISD has stupid technology that doesn't let me do my work.

And let's not even talk about the fact that the login box doesn't even show up on Common App anymore.

On a happier note, though, I was ultimately able to complete the PACT application (excepting the statement of motivation, for which I've found resources to help me as I brainstorm and write my first draft). I also helped a fellow student by proofreading his essay. Yay for productiveness in spite of technology issues!

It's crunch time (again!)

Well, today I realized that my UC Berkeley app is due in less than ten days, so I spent today's thesis period going over my UC application one more time. I still had to finish the activities and awards sections so I did that for a while. (I hate character limits with a passion!!)

I also opened my ApplyTexas Essay A and tried to cut it down to 500 words so that I can use it for the second personal statement on the UC app. So far, not much luck: it's still more than 300 words over. It'll get there, though.

I still wish I'd been more productive, but I was feeling so sick this morning that I actually had to rest my head on the table for a while before I could pull myself together to actually get some more work done.

All I really have left to do for the UC app at this point is copy and paste the second essay once I can get it down to meet the limit. After that, I'll need to make some serious progress on the PACT statement of motivation (yeah, I'm still applying, but only because I've been advised to keep my options open) and the Rice supplement. I need to write a few more of those short essays (including "Why Rice") and have my teachers look over them. Then, after my parents read them, I'll be able to submit.

All of this needs to happen by December 15th. I also have a ton of choir stuff going on that week (Open House on the 10th, concert on the 13th, lots of rehearsals before then) so I'm not sure how I'll be able to manage my time. I'm hoping to make some serious progress over Thanksgiving break, though - I think I'm just going to hole myself up in my room and type away at these essays all day. Hopefully then, I'll be able to make some significant progress.

Today's the day!

My Yale interview was today, so I tried not to freak out and instead spent the entire class period going over my notes and practicing my responses just to get comfortable with it and to ease my nerves. I also found a really awesome interview blog that has some really fantastic tips and advice for the alumni interview process.

The interview itself went fairly well; it was less formal than I was expecting, and I walked out of it feeling like I'd made a pretty good impression.

Now all I have to do is interview for several of the other schools I'm applying to! (No doubt that's going to be more difficult; since Yale is my top choice, it was easy for me to explain to the interviewer why I applied to Yale SCEA and why I want to go there so badly. The other colleges... Not so much.)

On a completely unrelated note: this morning, I discovered the existence of something absolutely amazing and wonderful.

South Asian a cappella groups.

They have them everywhere! Stanford, Princeton, Penn, and Carnegie Mellon are just a few of the colleges whose South Asian a cappella groups are especially popular. Not only do they perform Bollywood music, though - they also frequently create mashups of Hindi and English (Hinglish?) songs, as well as perform in some other Indian languages (including Tamil!). And there are videos and recordings and albums everywhere.

Overall, it's a wildly popular trend and it's spreading. The Yale South Asian Society actually has its very own a cappella group, as well as lots of other Indian cultural events throughout the year!

As if I needed another reason to want to go to Yale.

But oh my gosh, I can't even describe how excited I am about this. I mean, seriously! Bollywood music and a cappella - two of my most favorite things combined. What could be better?

I seriously need some Hindi a cappella music in my life.

More interview stuffs.

I spent literally the entire class period today trying to shorten my resume to two pages. I tried messing with the formatting (margins, line spacing, etc.), but I was only able to get it down from four to three and a half pages. After that, I removed the activities and awards that aren't as important to me, but then my resume was still two and three-quarters pages long.

The struggle is real.

By the end of the class period, I was able to cut it down to almost two pages. There's only about two or three lines of text on the third page, so hopefully with a few more formatting changes I can finally get it down to two pages exactly.

Meanwhile, I'm really not sure if I want to apply to the UT-PACT program anymore... I know I want to be a doctor, obviously (I literally can't see myself doing anything else in the future), but I'm not sure I want to enroll in an accelerated medical program just to get there quicker. At this point, I just want to go to college and have that full college experience. If I do PACT, I'm going to spend almost all my time during the year (summer included) taking exclusively science courses to get those pre-med requirements out of the way in three years. That means I won't get to take classes in a lot of other subjects that interest me, including literature, anthropology, and psychology. It also means I won't have any summers off for those first three years, and that I won't have as much time to participate in things outside of the classroom (like singing in an a cappella group or taking advantage of other non-medicine related opportunities) as I would otherwise.

I really don't mind applying to medical school in four years. Besides, UT Southwestern is great, but how do I know it's the right school for me? I want to have options. I'm going to apply to many of the same places again in four years (Yale, Tufts, etc.) for medical school, so I don't want to commit to a school right now when I have no idea what college will bring. Seriously, I've changed my mind about which college I want to attend so many times in the past four months that there's no doubt I'll change my mind about which medical school I want to attend in the next four years.

Also, UT Dallas... It's really not for me. (Sorry. It's just not. I can't see myself there at all.)

On another note, though, the Pratham post-Readathon congratulations party is this Sunday! I'm super excited to get the chance to see everyone again and catch up with Vineeta after so long. (Also the awards ceremony, but yeah.)

This isn't that bad.

I'm still working on the responses for my Yale interview questions, and I'm discovering that I actually have a lot to talk about. A LOT. I mean, first of all, I need to explain what TAG is like to my interviewer - and that'll probably take a good ten minutes - and then talk about all my extracurricular activities (choir and Pratham are my two main ones that I'm definitely going to talk about). Just to give you some perspective: I've written a total of 1,379 words about my experience with Pratham and the Readathon. That's 12 paragraphs.

And, on top of that, I'm hoping to tell him about my heritage/background and share my story of how I moved here when I was little and what it was like growing up with the resulting culture clash (and the identity crisis that followed). Which is basically what I wrote my Yale supplement essay about.

Also, my response to "Why Yale" is 726 words long. I think it's pretty legit, though - I connected my experiences at TAG to what I'm looking for in a college and the fact that Yale has exactly that.

I'm also writing a lot about my passion for science and talking about the experiences that made me want to become a doctor. Just in case he asks me what I want to do with my life, I have two responses. (Really, though, I'm not sure whether neonatology or anesthesiology is more interesting to me. At this point, I just like medicine in general. I'm sure once I get to medical school, I'll be able to decide for sure.)

So. Hopefully, since I have all this stuff to talk about, I'll be able to mention everything, even if he doesn't ask me the exact questions I've been answering. And hopefully, since I'm going to be talking a lot, he won't have the chance to interrupt me or ask me extremely probing questions that I won't have an answer for. Or, by the end of the interview, hopefully I'll be able to get him talking enough about his experience at Yale that I won't have to say much at all!

Whatever happens, I think I'll be okay. Even though this is my first college interview, it's not the first interview I've done. So it's not like I'm completely unprepared - I sort of know what to expect.

I also updated my Common App to include the fact that I received the Young Leader Award from Pratham USA (this morning!!) for leading the team that raised the most money on a national level. As in, Team Aishwarya raised more than $12000 total. And no other team in the United States could raise more than that. :D

Interviews, ahh!

Over the weekend, I got an email from a Yale alum in Dallas asking when I'd like to have an off-campus interview!

*screams*

Well, we emailed back and forth a few times and now I have the official date: next Tuesday, November 19th. Which means I have just over a week left to prepare.

Yikes.

Let me start off by saying interviews aren't really my strong suit. I'm good at talking about myself- that's not the problem. The problem is that I get really nervous in situations like that, to the point where I stumble over my words a lot and my face starts heating up and I sometimes lose track of what I'm saying.

Okay, maybe I'm making it sound a little worse than it is. Whatever it is, I'm just hoping the interview will just be like what most Yale alumni interviews are like- informal conversations that seem shorter than they are. And I know that even if it doesn't go that well, it's not going to have that much of an impact on my admissions decision.

Anywho, I spent all of thesis today compiling a list of 20-30 typical college interview questions and typing out answers to them. So far, I've answered about 10, so I'm about halfway through. Not bad! Hopefully I can get this done by Wednesday so that my parents and I can review the responses together and edit them so that by Saturday I'll have a finalized "Interview Q&A" list. I do plan on interviewing for several other schools (most notably TUFTS <3) so I'm sure this document will come in handy in the future as well.

I also re-wrote my Tufts supplement essays, so now I have three essentially complete essays. I gave them to Mr. Correa today, and I'm meeting with Mr. Templet Thursday at lunch to go over them. All that needs to be done is a few words need to be cut from the last essay and they need to be looked over for grammatical accuracy (to make sure there aren't any awkward phrases or anything).

More college stuffs.

Today, I worked on several different things. First of all, I called Jostens to find out exactly what the graduation order form was about and how much I needed to pay today if I wanted just a cap and gown. Once I did that, I found out that I could use the check I had and pay the rest later. That phone call cleared up a lot of confusion I had earlier about the whole graduation deal. A lot of people I knew seemed to be confused too, which I thought was rather odd.

Anywho, though, that's been cleared up now, which is good. After that, I worked on my Tufts supplement essays. I'm still struggling to decide whether I want to use the Common App or the Universal College App. Each has its own benefits and drawbacks, so I'm trying to weigh them and see which one is ultimately the best. The good thing about Common App is that it's all already filled out. The bad thing about it is that the word limits on the supplement mean I need to edit my essays (which worries me because I love my "Why Tufts" essay as it is, and I really don't want to make it any shorter because I feel like that would take away some of my voice from it). The good thing about Universal College App is that all the essay word limits are much more generous than they are on Common App, so I won't have to cut anything. The bad thing about it is that the character limits on the "Extracurriculars" and "Honors and Awards" sections are so tiny I can hardly fit anything I want to write. That means I'll have to write something for literally every single activity and award/honor in the "Additional Information" section. And that's just ridiculous.

I don't know. I'm going to try and see if I can rework my essays to meet the limit. At this point, the UCA is becoming so exasperating that I'm probably just going to stick with the Common App. (That, and my teachers and guidance counselor will have to re-input all their recs and stuff for the new app, which I feel is rather unnecessary.)

I emailed Tufts and asked them if there was any way I could get around the limit (e.g. by emailing them my essays directly), and they said no. Well, no surprise there. I guess I'll just have to work with the Common App and its stupid word limits that shouldn't even be as stringent as they are.

I also worked on writing a new short extracurricular essay for the few other schools that had a 150 word limit on it. At first, I tried cutting down my 247-word version to meet the limit but it was of no use. I guess I'll have to start anew, then. Hopefully this new one will turn out just as good as the longer one.

I'm going to college!!

Got my third acceptance today from Baylor University. Yay!

I spent today's thesis period working on (more like wrestling with, to be honest) my UT-PACT application. I thought ApplyTexas was bad, but PACT is worse! I had no idea how many awards/honors I could even list and it wouldn't let me add another award unless I had filled out all the "required fields" for the previous one. So figuring that out took literally the entire class period. Turns out I can list 20 awards/honors, so now I have to go back and figure out which ones I want to list.

That's just the awards/honors page. I still have to fill out the extracurriculars and healthcare-related experiences pages. And, on top of all that, I have to write my "statement of motivation" for why I want to pursue medicine.

Boy, am I excited.

In terms of the rest of my college apps, I still have to finalize finalize my college list. My dad took out some schools from my list (saying that my list needed to be shorter), but I'm probably going to apply to those schools anyway. I still need some match schools, and right now I have next to none. Not good.

Happy ED/EA deadlines day!

(I know, Yale extended its deadline to November 4th. But I don't care - I'm going to have all my stuff in for them by tonight.)

In thesis today, I showed Correa the few minor edits I made to my Common App essay as well as the Short Takes I wrote. He liked them and suggested a few changes, which I then made.

Do you know what this means? This means I'm officially done with all the writing I have to do for my SCEA app. Yay!

Now I only have about 20 more essays to go. How exciting.

I also went and got my supplementary recommendation letter ready; all I have to do is drop it off at the post office tomorrow morning to make sure it gets postmarked and sent in time.

I'm so glad I'm finally submitting this app. I've put a ton of thought and effort into it, and I feel like it's ready. I'm also kind of tired of revising the same old essays when I still have some that I haven't even started yet.

As for thesis, I worked on my annotated bibliography. The kind of frustrating thing about my thesis is that my resources are going to be different from everyone else's. Most people are writing research papers or studying a topic on which extensive research has already been done; for those kinds of projects, the resources they'd cite on a bibliography are things like abstracts of scientific research, newspaper/magazine articles, Internet articles, etc. Mine are completely different, though - because my thesis is specifically based on one organization (that is Pratham), it really only makes sense to use their resources and publications. Which is all well and good except for the fact that some of their publications are things I'm not sure how to cite because they don't easily fall into the typical categories. For example, one of my resources is a Pratham USA 2012 Annual Report, but there's not really a section in the Purdue OWL website that talks about that directly. So I'm going to have to do a little bit of searching to make sure I do it right. (Even then, I'm not completely sure it'll be accurate because of other weird things like authors and publishers.) A few of my resources are going to be YouTube videos as well, and I've never heard of anyone citing a YouTube video before. (Thank goodness there's a section for that on the OWL site, though.)

Anywho. Tomorrow is Diwali (my favorite holiday of the year!) so I'm probably not going to have much time to do anything, either college apps or thesis related. Hopefully I'll find time to finish either tonight or Sunday.

College apps: 5 down (technically 8), 10 more to go.

College acceptances: 2.