Amid the chaos and stress of first semester senior year, the tears and sweat, there is one beacon of light: automated college emails. Nothing gives me more joy than scanning my phone notifications and watching those babies stack up.

These emails are fantastic! They offer me so many cool opportunities and the email titles are so entertaining. My favorites include Baylor University’s iconic “Sic ’em, Kaavya!” and the simple yet unforgettable “Kaavya” from the University of Minnesota. Even better are emails with admission officer names, like my best bud Timothy A. Wolfe from William & Mary. I once tried to find Timothy so I could email him and ask him about William & Mary’s intramural mini golf tournaments but it turned out he hid his information from the Internet. I wish I could find him. He sounded so nice.

But there’s an obvious issue with all these possibilities. I can’t respond to all 5,803 emails I’ve received, and I can’t go to all these universities. And how could I ever reject a college that asks me for a family recipe twice in 12 hours? I didn’t know Duke Kunshan University would be so interested in me, but of course they want to know my mom’s onion sambar recipe. Who wouldn’t?

Just as I wrote this article, I received six emails! Everyone’s getting in on the fun, from the big names like the Massachusetts Institute of Technology to the less known Rensselaer Polytechnic University. But I wasn’t sure why these colleges had spent their time trying to reach out to little old high schoolers like me, when they had to have so much to do running admissions offices. Luckily, though, I was able to find contact expert Nicholas O’Bradwell from Impasta University, and he sat down with me to explain why he was dying to get to know me.

“Look, Kaavya, it’s all about making sure students want to come to our school, right?” Bradwell said. “So we figured the best way is to flood their inbox so that they have no choice but to consider us. I mean, imagine how many colleges you’ve considered because they’ve sent you an email, right?”
And he was absolutely right. My college emails date all the way back to January 8, 2020, before I even turned 16, when I was a wee sophomore who barely had an idea what junior year classes I would be taking. But I had to know: was I the only one? So I used our Talon Instagram and MySpace to find the truth. Turns out 99 percent of seniors loved these emails and 330 percent of them had considered a new college because of them.

“I almost cried when I read one that was sent to me during my birthday dinner,” senior Wren Jojo said. “It told me that time was running out for me to apply to a once-in-a-lifetime architecture program at a little-known college in the middle of the desert. I immediately knew I had to swap majors from marine biology to architecture. Over the course of the evening, they sent me my address and my social security number, which I didn’t even know. I had to apply. Otherwise, I’m pretty sure I’d be dead.”
My fascination with these random emails may seem strange, but the truth is that when the little blue submit button is hanging in front of me, I think back to those emails and am reminded of what is important. These colleges hoped that I would attend their campus, take their classes, live in their dorms, meet their professors and give them exorbitant amounts of money. These email experts spent their precious time clicking “send” on these email templates. I owe it to them to spend hours and hours on their essays.

College application season is so tiring and toxic, with all the competition and comparison and frantic editing. There is such pressure to go to the right school. Despite all that, though, colleges really want students to be happy. They want them on their hallowed grounds, drinking their water fountain water, eating oatmeal for breakfast for three weeks straight and making fun of their collegiate stuffed animals. This is our first step toward that and it’s such an exciting rite of passage. Those emails will be the reason I push “submit.”