They say that thirty is the new twenty, but I don’t think I like those people.

December 22, 2004

The current Village Voice is running another “Generation Debt” story, about how our parents were generally married with kids and houses by our age, whereas we won’t be paying off our student loans and credit card debts until our forties, if ever.

When I was in my senior year of high school, I applied to approximately one hundred and twenty-five scholarship competitions. This was before anyone did this stuff online, so that was one hundred and twenty-five mailed manila envelopes full of applications that had been painstakingly fed through a typewriter in the high school library or, in cases of excruciating time-crunch, meticulously hand-written.

I received, I think, fourteen of the one hundred twenty-five scholarships I applied for, including one from the local Vietnam Veterans’ assocation. I was only vaguely qualified for that particular scholarship; my Dad had joined the Navy just at the tail end of Vietnam and hadn’t had to go. Plus, I wrote the essay late at night in the face of a looming deadline, and the essay topic, about “the legacy of Vietnam”, somewhat failed to inspire me. So I wrote an essay about the legacy of protest movements that sprung from the Vietnam conflict and how Vietnam had created a noble tradition of civil disobedience. I didn’t expect to win. But, apparently, the scholarship committee was headed up by the wife of one of the members, she picked my essay, and eventually I found myself holding a microphone at the local veterans’ lodge reading this essay aloud.

Other than one crack about my being allied with the Viet Cong, it went fine. Nice guys, lots of beer and pretzels.

While at Dartmouth, when I occasionally thought about these scholarships, my general opinion was that I had spent a huge amount of time applying — one hundred twenty-five applications over about six months was essentially a full-time job — and my efforts “hadn’t helped me at all.” Dartmouth itself had given me a huge grant, as it does to all of its students who can’t pay the $34,000 per year sticker price, so the scholarships “only” went to replace the loan portion of my award. That is, the scholarships made no difference to me during my actual four years of college.

Now, however, I can only imagine what kind of quandary I’d be in if sixteen-year-old Jen hadn’t been such a dork with the scholarships and monopolizing the library typewriter. I’d almost certainly owe hundreds of dollars a month that I currently do not. Not that I have a house and kids now, either. But I suppose I can look back at myself a decade ago, Jen with her glasses and braces (at the same time, poor girl) and box of vocabulary flashcards and fifty-pound backpack and her little baggies of Chex cereal because she didn’t have a lunch period, and be grateful for what I have sometimes thought of as my misspent youth.

Perhaps I could become a motivational speaker in high schools about how it really pays off to be a big nerd, and how there will be time to perform in bars and be in fashion shows later, once you’ve got your test scores and academic finances in order.

Posted by jen | Filed Under Jen says 

Comments

2 Responses to “They say that thirty is the new twenty, but I don’t think I like those people.”

  1. Anonymous on December 24th, 2004 12:05 am

    I’m 29 years old and there were computers around when I applied for college (back in 1993) . This does raise the question of whether you’re being truthful about your age or whether you really are thirty something.

  2. JenIsFamous on December 25th, 2004 3:41 am

    Of course there were computers in 1996! And the internet! But I doubt many colleges had online applications. Maybe the download-and-print-it kind, but I don’t think many colleges allowed you to actually submit online (and if they did, it would’ve been over my head at the time, because I didn’t get a computer until my freshman year in college).

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