There's a friend of mine who graduated from her high school this year and was heading off into a good, prestigious college after working so hard for it. Unlike most teenagers, she didn't have the luxury of a supporting family. All she had was heavy homework from school, hours of work, and her ex's house that couldn't be called a home. Not only did she supported herself, but she also maintained good grades, took the hardest classes, and faced all the challenges life thrown at her alone with only anti-depressants by her side to help her temporarily. It didn't get any better as the health insurance given to her by the state was shut down while she kept getting harassed by her ex's girlfriend. Her grades in second semester of senior year dropped into an all time low but she was still able to receive an admission letter to a highly prestigious university thankfully. She explained the situation of her grades in senior year and the admission office implied to be fine with the reasoning, yet just a few weeks ago the admission office decided to rescind her admission because of her grades which she has warned them about. In the official email the office claimed that her grades didn't reflect what the university expects of its students, which is basically claiming that she isn't hardworking solely from looking at her grades.

I have no intention of bashing that university nor questioning how the education system in America values its students. I'd like to simply ask whether or not my friend deserves to be in that college, whether or not she works hard enough to be given an opportunity to study in that university. Without even conducting a poll I fairly certain that the majority of you readers will agree that she has earned her place in that university. It wasn't because she didn't try, in fact she tried harder than most if not all high school students in the country, yet her efforts resulted nothing but a rejection letter.

We always aim to create an equal opportunity for everyone, let no one be deprived of an opportunity because of their race, gender, disability, etc., yet equal opportunity could never be achieve when nature itself discriminates. It's like a lottery, some win and gets born into a rich, nice family while others are born into a poverty stricken family. Those that are born rich don't need much work seeing that all the hard work had already been done for him/her. Those that are born poor fight among each other to get to the top and even then those that work hard won't get the results they hoped for.

Today we have so many people who deserve to be successful, people that worked their tail off to gain sweet success but failed not because they didn't try hard enough. We also have people that are rich but didn't have to move much more than a finger to get there. Luck plays too much into a factor for a word such as "deserve" to exist. We could work hard to increase our chances of success to get to the top, but in the end it's really luck that decides who gets to win. I'm not suggesting that we should all give up and let luck decide where we go as effort will still have an effect.

So to those that still believe that we get what we put in, think again.