734: The Campus Tour Has Been Cancelled
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Okay, Lorraine, 17 years old, wants to be a dentist, which I didn't even know that was a thing anybody wants in high school, but shows what I know. Apparently, there are armies of teenagers who want to put on a white coat and enlist in the international war between human beings and plaque. I was in Saturday Academy, which is NYU's dentistry program for high schoolers. It was virtual. What was the best thing about that? What did they do? Part of it. Their part was filling cavities. They sent like a fake tooth model thing, like decay on the teeth and you have to scrape it off. They sent it. I was an actual dentist. They sent like the tools. It was fun. It was so much fun. So last spring, junior year, Lorraine started to get serious with her college applications. She's a good student, great GPA, but she had a problem. Her dream colleges, Cornell, Columbia, NYU. She all wanted SAT scores two or three hundred points higher than Lorraine's SAT scores. Then Lorraine got this crazy break. All over the country, SATs were being canceled because of coronavirus. There's no safe way to fill a room with high school kids to take the test. Colleges started to change their admissions requirements. So I heard that a lot of schools were going test optional, especially on TikTok. That's where I would see everything like college updates, like test option updates. Test optional means the SAT test is optional. You can apply it without submitting SAT scores or ACT scores for that matter. If Lorraine's dream schools were to go test optional, it would magically vaporize the only obstacles standing between her and them and a life drilling into the millways of her fellow citizens. But most of the early schools to go test optional seemed to be out west, she said. All three of her top picks were in New York. Every day she'd go online to check the lists of test optional schools. And I would keep refreshing, keep looking to see every single day, see if any new schools were added. And were they changing every day? Yeah, I feel like two, three schools were added every single day. And then I remember it was spring break because I like dedicated my house break to studying for SATs. And then I remember I got the notification a little bell from Gmail, from Columbia University because I signed up for their mailing list. And it was like, "Oh yeah, we're going test optional." And I sort of like, I think I was studying, I had the SAT book open. So I threw it across my bed, my mom was the first person I told. So I ran to her, I was like, "You don't mess with the Koya SAT, I don't have to take the SATs." And stuff, I was like, "I gave her a hug, we like junk." And then I called my friends and I started like screaming on the phone, which was like
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