Now that I am a lightly seasoned college student, reflecting on my high school troubles has been interesting. I used to worship the gods of prep books, praying every night that my cramming wouldn’t be in vain -- that my rushed presentation risked only slight offence, that my half-baked essay was enough to get me out the door of one school and onto the waiting list of another. Back then it was easier to buckle down and get to work. We had the ultimate motivation: an end goal was always at risk of being lost: “You can't expect to get into a good college on poor grades alone,” they used to tell us. It turned out that poor grades weren't the deciding factor: we needed good references, and money too.

Procrastination came easy- staring at walls and neglecting busy work came before breathing. We even had a whole subject in our senior year dedicated to it. Dubbed “College Counseling” we met once a day to gaze deeply at computer screens, lost in lack of thought. When it seemed as if the question “is this college the right choice for me?” was etched into the student’s face, more often than not they were pondering how long they could put off the applications. Only the most prestigious schools were even considered worthy of our night-before application essays. For us, it was go big or go home a crying disgrace.

Our school administration tried to motivate us in every way possible. It was tradition put up decorations from all the colleges that each graduating class had been accepted too. Pinned to the walls of our small school’s lunch room, the flags of colleges were sorted by graduating year. Supposedly, the success of previous years were intended to drive us into bigger and better things. I found that the decorations just drove my sanity off a cliff. They were a constant representation of what I wanted and feared the most.

Thankfully,because we were a small school it was easy to accept the lack of flags on our wall. The previous graduating class was just one guy, so I was confident that more than one of us would show some potential.

Despite our lack of conviction, our year was the largest graduating class in school history, and we did end up racking up quite a few flags on the wall. The administration took this as a sign that their own last minute prayers were working, and they thought our enthusiasm came from the proper display of the college flags.

When it came down to decision week, when most of the universities picked their lucky applicants of the a hat and toss the rest aside, the staff took down all the flags and began a ritual. They would take down all the flags and stitch them together. A suit was formed, a rainbow of colors, letters, and mascot faces. Remaining flags were layered, sewn, and attached under the arms, forming lattice like, checkerboard wings. Harvard lay next to University of Arizona, Brown and Princeton stitched with Florida Memorial, and Columbia with University of Chicago. The whole left wing was University of California with Brigham Young in there somewhere.

“Its symbolic,” Ms. Ruggles, our head of school, said, “We put wings on it to represent how soon you’ll all be flying through college, rising to your goals you’re working so hard for.”
The symbolism was lost on me. How could anything fly with so many holes in the wings? The tiny engineer in my head beat down the tiny English student, and I went back to worrying. I keep hope that whoever wears this bird suit brings us luck, because it couldn't hurt.

We, the students, had it all wrong: the secret to getting in wasn't writing a good essay, it wasn't trying to be more than just a number, it was whose administration could stitch the collegiate flags together into the best bird suit possible.

The bird suited man would flap and squawk around the building, pecking at the group and searching for a good locker to roost in. We figured that the man in the costume was so entranced by the ritual, so overcome by the spiritual power of the collegiate cosmos, that wherever he chose to roost was a good omen. We tracked the bird tirelessly through campus, hoping that the spirit of our college of choice would manifest its mascot into our chicken man, show us a sign, and hand us an acceptance letter personally. But no luck. At the end of the week, just before most decisions came out, the bird man would throw himself onto a pyre, an ultimate sacrifice to bring good luck to our lives. No one tried to stop him, or even question the symbolism. We all thought of him in reverence and respect as we feverishly refreshed our in-boxes, waiting for that dreaded email to come though. Those who got into their first choice months before by “early decision” were un-rightfully free of worry. Why should they not feel the stress of waiting acceptance? Why should their timely essays have priority over ours, backed by the sacrifices of flag-bird-man?

As acceptances started pouring in through the Ethernet cables, many of us started to notice a similarities between ourselves and the early-app students. What we mistook for a mixture of confidence in themselves and pity for us was more like immobilizing fear and discomfort. The end goal was already reached: but the realization that it wasn't a true end started to dawn on all of us. College was just the next step. We clumped together and tried to rationalize it. Maybe college won’t be that hard? Maybe our pattern of waiting and rushing would still work out? We thought about starting fresh, moving out on the reservation as one big commune, but then decided that it wouldn't be fair to flag-bird-man. We couldn't bring ourselves to wasting his precious sacrifice. An egg ahead of his era, his Facebook memorial page he would live on, instilling courage in our hearts to grab the challenges of college by the beak.