Irena Smith: Success Is Not One Size Fits All

Society can make you think that going straight to an elite university after high school is the only measure of intelligence or success. Irena Smith begs to differ.

Last fall, The Palo Alto Weekly ran a cover story on a local high school student who was rejected from 16 of the 18 colleges he applied to. Instead of going to college, he ended up accepting a full-time job as a software engineer at Google. Google is a tech company headquartered here in the Bay Area. Perhaps you’ve heard of it?

You’ve probably also heard of the 16 colleges that this student didn’t get into. Being accepted to one of them is our local equivalent of scoring a golden ticket to Willy Wonka’s chocolate factory. If you get accepted, you’ve succeeded, with a capital S. Unless you get a full-time job as a software engineer at Google right out of high school, in which case you have also succeeded.

Meanwhile, there are other kinds of success: students who transfer from community college to a four-year college, sometimes with a full scholarship. Students who take a beat after graduation to think about who they are and what they want. Many of them end up living full and meaningful lives. Where are their stories?

In the Bay Area, success can often mean either attending a brand-name college or getting hired by Google right out of high school. As a former college counselor, I want students to hear other stories—to know that other possibilities exist. I want them to know that there’s no such thing as a perfect college, no more than there is a perfect job, or a perfect spouse, or a perfect pair of jeans. I want them to know that high school is just the beginning of a very long runway and that it’s OK to travel wherever they’re going at their own speed. I want them to create their own definition of success—not a name-brand definition, but a definition with their name on it.

With a Perspective, I’m Irena Smith.

Irena Smith is a former high school underachiever and the author of a recently released memoir about her life in college admissions. She lives in Palo Alto.