Lifemaxxing Mogs Collegemaxxing
By TMP 43rd Editorial Board
On September 10, 2025, soon after The Milton Paper released its staff-writer applications, mostly for sophomores and freshmen, someone surprising requested access via Docs to our application template: a private college counselor with a “Crimson Education” email address. We ignored the request, but the thought that, more likely than not, at least one underclassman was leaning on a paid consultant to construct their application—not to Harvard but to our own student-run pages—left a rancid taste in our mouths this year.
We understand “playing the game” to get into a selective college. Some of our families have paid for non-Milton college resources, and we all attend a “college preparatory school” that boasts its matriculations at the front door. However, we have noticed a rapidly worsening trend toward assuming that a strict formula—requiring obsessive, self-destructive attention to the college process throughout all four years of Milton—determines college outcomes. Increasingly, we find underclassmen aggressively admitting to—even taking pride in—seeking success solely for college applications, a once-shamed practice.
Not only does this culture justify bad attitudes and worse mental health practices, it also makes promises it cannot keep. You can “do everything right” and still get rejected by your top school. So, we should spend time preparing to face the world beyond decision day. Discouraging that kind of preparation is the four-year grindset’s gravest sin, because excelling at college preparation neither guarantees admissions outcomes nor prepares students for life beyond decision day. Thus, with many of our editors on the “other end” of the college process, we advise younger students: put effort into growing socially, finding your voice, and, most of all, discovering authentic interests.
Recent events, from the Supreme Court’s ban on race-based affirmative action to President Trump’s attacks on university funding, have rendered the promise of a “formula” for college admissions dubious at best. Even within one year, institutional priorities oscillate so wildly that predicting what colleges want is nigh impossible. Moreover, an acceptance letter does not define who you are nor guarantee success in the future. Rather, what endures far beyond any institutional name are the lessons and skills we gain in high school, where we are allowed to search for styles, interests, friends, and convictions with a flexibility that the rest of our lives will likely lack. Given this timeframe, we should fear graduating from Milton without a well-developed sense of self at least as much as we fear graduating without a “Top Twenty” acceptance letter, and we can only recommend simply living high school to the fullest.
What does it mean, substantially, to do this? The Milton Paper believes that the mindset shift most of us need is to, paradoxically, be okay with doing more but also doing less.
Do more, meaning opening yourself to new experiences without dropping them when they fail to fit into a clean “narrative” for your application. Stick to a sport no school will recruit you for, and you will learn to lead a team. Dedicate yourself to diverse activities—be they Sports Analytics Club or The Milton Paper—and whole new worlds will await you.
Do less, meaning reject the pressure to do every extracurricular activity you see your peers doing. As you choose which clubs to regularly attend, try to keep that number below four and prioritize the person you want to be after the college question is resolved.
One day, where we attend college will be just a single tile in the mosaic of our personhood. By that point, we will value our unique backstories and personal fulfillment much more than our having painted a clean picture for an admissions officer. Milton gives us a singular opportunity to carve a path to personal identity, and that path certainly will not tell the singular story of a model college applicant. Be grateful, though: you can attain something that the model applicant never could—a story about your purpose with chapters beyond graduation.