Our younger siblings have always come after us in everything — first words, first steps, first days of school — and now that we’re all older, they’re coming after us in some “lasts” of the family too — last days of high school, last graduations, and last college applications.
If your situation is anything like mine, you can remember the college application process like it was yesterday: narrowing your choices from the hundreds of unsolicited letters from colleges you’ve never even heard of, scheduling a million college visits near and far, and taking and submitting those dreaded ACT/SAT tests.
Watching my brother go through that same process is a bit like watching a train wreck.
Not for any of his own shortcomings or struggles — he’s a ridiculously smart 17 year old who built his own computer from scratch and can run a cross-country 5K in 17 minutes. He’s balanced two sports, AP classes, and playing the clarinet for the last three years of high school. If nothing else (and he is a lot more than just that), he’s a well-rounded student that will look great on applications.
Even still, I can’t help but feel like I’m watching a painful collision that’s too captivating to look away. For me, applying to college was inherently stressful. Not because I couldn’t figure out where I wanted to go, or what I wanted to do, but because I was afraid of getting in. And I can see in every conversation and every attempt at planning for his future, he’s just as afraid as I was — and then some.
He’s not afraid because his list of potential universities is too prestigious, or because our parents have put any pressure on him to attend a certain school, or even to apply to a particular program. Thanks to my mom’s job benefits, we’ve been fortunate enough to consider colleges across the nation without worrying about going into substantial debt for our undergrad degrees, so it’s not even scholarships that are worrying him.
Instead, it’s something I never even considered worrying about during my season of applications and test scores, and it’s something almost every younger sibling will likely go through several times in their lives. He’s been comparing his process — the successes and struggles alike — to mine. From every test score to every school considered, he’s brought up what I did and how it turned out for me, citing them as reasons for why something isn’t working, or why he can’t possibly get into his dream school.
So as an older sibling, it makes it that much harder to stand by and watch. All I can do is hope that he hears my advice from a place of experience, and not one of a smug, “holier-than-thou” attitude. It’s a whole new piece of the equation for me to consider, and as much as I wish it weren’t part of his experience, the best I can do is remind him that we are two different people, two different people who can’t be compared.
It’s the best any of us can do as older siblings — as the ones who have been there and done that before our younger brothers and sisters have even considered their own ideas about their future — and it’s our job to remind them that no one holds them to our accomplishments. No one thinks that we’re better. No one doubts them because we happened to get there first.
For now, I’m just hoping to help my brother (and my youngest brother after him) through the train wreck that this process is to begin with. And someday, when he’s a successful computer engineer with a multi-million dollar company, we can laugh about it while he helps me pay the rent on my poor-writer’s-salary apartment.
