Impossibly Certain

Can you ever be truly certain? Even if you very strongly believe that you are correct about something, how can you be certain you are certain? This thought came to me when I read an article last week about college admissions.

The article interviewed someone that worked for a tutoring company that offered "special services" for a little more cash after the recent Operation Varsity Blues scandal, a conspiracy in which many rich families bought their way into top universities. These services included one on one consulting about college essays, help editing one's application, and much more. In other words, you could pay people to write your college application for you, and it's not an extremely uncommon occurrence, either. Sometimes, these people don't even need to interview you. They create passions, achievements, and stories out of nothing. Now, that's not to say that the people that write these applications are completely soulless human beings. Many of them simply write them as a means to earn money. They hate the kids that pay them, hate the fact that those that don't deserve to get into good schools can buy their way in. But in a world so focused around money, they believe that if you have the writing skills to do that, what else can could you possibly do? They are able to craft characters from green paper bills that are so lifelike and full of passion that it's impossible to tell the difference between those characters and real humans. Money can create a version of you that you didn't even know existed.

So, if you can't even be certain that someone's college application, which was literally created so you could showcase your own skills and personality, is truly their own work, what can you be certain about in this world?

Expectations

Expectations are something that everyone has. You perform an action, and before any results are actually observed, you automatically come up with what you think the results will be. Sometimes these expectations can be very accurate, but sometimes they can also be way off. I experienced the latter this past Thursday when we peer graded each others in-class essays. I personally had thought that the essay I wrote was one of my better essays, and was pretty interested to see what my peers would think of it. However, at the end of class when I looked at it again, my classmates had given me a grade much lower than I had expected. My first reaction was shock - had I really performed that badly? But as I continued on the read the comments they left, I realized that I had made one fatal mistake: I forgot to cite one of my sources. This resulted in me only having two quoted sources in my essay, rather than the required three, and bumped my score down quite a bit.

This unfortunate mishap made me think about expectations as a whole. Is it better to have high expectations or low expectations? If someone has very high expectations, they would experience tons of satisfaction if it can actually be fulfilled. Conversely, though, if these high expectations can't be reached, they might feel very disappointed in themselves. On the other hand, if someone always has very low expectations, it would be much easier to attain, but it wouldn't provide the same levels of happiness and satisfaction as the goal they reach wouldn't be that hard anyways. I guess my best answer to this question is that everyone has their own unique point between the two, and that different levels of expectations may be best for different situations.