Congratulations, Yalie. It seems you reside among the masters of the statistically improbable, who succeed in achieving the seemingly impossible. 

College application advice all too often sounds like a scholarly rendition of America Ferrera’s “Barbie” monologue: do a lot but not too much, show channeled dedication but be good at everything, have direction but don’t be pigeonholed, embrace failure but avoid failing, excel academically but take the time to cultivate yourself as a full human. 

Despite the dizzying paradoxes and the deluge of advice that ultimately said so little, you did it, you toed that line and cleared those enigmatic hurdles. The people sitting at that sacred envisaged admissions roundtable nodded their approval and enthusiastically exclaimed, “yes!” 

But wait a moment before you barrel forward in pursuit of achieving the next calculably inconceivable feat. Meeting and surpassing these invisible metrics does not mean you have mastered them. One cannot master that which they do not know, and one cannot know that which is intentionally kept from them. 

You jumped so high to clear the bar, but you never knew just where that bar rested below you. Did you exceed it by a mile? Clear it by a millimeter? You can view your admissions profile, but do you even want to know? Uncovering the exact truth, knowing where you objectively stand, doesn’t eliminate intrinsic insecurity. Discovering that you far surpassed the bar creates pressure to effortlessly do it again. Discovering that you barely made it at all generates a dangerous inferiority complex. 

These are the thoughts that keep us awake at night, fueling self-doubt and fostering ambition, fomenting intolerance toward failure.

Being here is an incredible testament to you. Mathematically speaking, your unique variables plugged into the equation perfectly. I wholeheartedly believe — and I hope you do, too — that you deserve to be here. 

But you must remember: you did not discover or derive the elusive, all-encompassing Success Formula. You cannot hold yourself to the rigid notion that, “If I did it once under X circumstances, I can do it again under Y circumstances.” In the case of college admissions, you possessed one suitable key for a viciously volatile lock. 

We equate achievement with mastery, and mastery implies the ability to generate predictable outcomes. However, surpassing the bar, meeting these invisible metrics, is a game of intertwined skill and fortune. Prior successes do not yield future guarantees but we often require ourselves to sustain an exponential achievement trajectory, forgetting that it is swayed by influences beyond our control. 

Rather than hold ourselves to the impossible standard of consistent outcome achievement, we must recalibrate our conception of our relationship to these metrics of success. We are not the masters of these invisible standards, the sole determinants in this complex formula of acceptance or rejection. Our attainment of success is not contingent upon a linear “If I do X, I will achieve Y” process.

This is especially true in this environment of fellow statistical outliers and insurmountable feat undertakers. In a hotbed of seemingly infinite candidates and definitively finite space, rejection is inevitable. And this is not at all a reflection of you or your worth.

It is painful to accept when your all isn’t enough, and even more difficult to remember that your all is not you. Most of you reading this assign great value to what you produce; in truth, it probably helped us all get here in the first place. But we are not the work we submit, the A’s we earn or the clubs that accept us. We are not the stumbles we make, the F’s we earn or the clubs that reject us.

We feel less than everyone else, yet simultaneously cheated out of what we deserve. We wonder how we could have possibly failed that exam or been rejected from that club when we got ourselves here, to this place of impossibly high entry hurdles and invisible, almost — but not quite — unmeetable standards. 

It is so absurdly easy to fall into a state of imposter syndrome at Yale. And rather than remember that we got ourselves to this place, rather than hold that as a beacon demonstrating what we can achieve, we question whether we belong here. 

My mother always tells me, “The most important thing you can have is perspective.” She’s right. Look around you, at all of the incredible people existing in your wildly enriched world. You are one of them. You met those invisible metrics with grace and drive. It’s what got you here. 

You do not have to prove anything else. You intrinsically possess that unique ability to clear hurdles into oblivion as you become all that you undertake. If you want to meet and exceed the next set of invisible metrics, continue being you. You possess the talent but you must relinquish the belief that you control the situation and its outcomes. And when — not if — we have setbacks in the future, we must remember that they do not constitute failures on our part or reflections of our value.

I will leave you with a much more manageable rendition of the “Barbie” monologue: feel deserving, but never entitled. Be ambitious, but give yourself grace. Most of all, get to know you, beyond the producer facet of your identity. If that was the sole aspect of who you are, you wouldn’t be here. 

Go back to that orientation day early in your Yale career, when the dean of your college told you, “Yale does not make mistakes.” Remember that?

Remember that.

MIA GORLICK is a first year in Pierson College. She can be reached at mia.gorlick@yale.edu.