Begin, of course, with hello. In your second or third year of high school — give or take a few based on your level of precociousness / misery — buy that giant book of America’s Best Colleges. Pretend to be looking as closely at average GPA and SAT score as at the campus, dining, party rating or male-female ratio. Somehow, both of these factors never seem to correlate. You will likely learn this all too late.

Try to ignore your parents hovering over your shoulder as you fill out applications on the computer they have just learned how to turn on. Be thankful technology is good for something. Fail to realize parental figures have the canny ability to make you feel their hovering presence from any distance, at any age.

I hated beer, my jeans were too loose and I was scared of dancing in public. It’s hard to remember much else from four years ago because so much in my life has changed (e.g., I would now kill to be able to fit into those jeans). I arrived at Cornell with the self-image of a true high school nerd. I had been to band camp, five consecutive math fairs and every midnight Star Wars premier. Left to my own devices, I probably would have spent my freshman year hiding in my dorm room with my stuffed animals, leaving only for classes and my a cappella group’s rehearsals. Thankfully, two things saved me from this disturbing fate: a preference for really geeky guys shocked by the prospect of a girl noticing them let alone hooking up with them, and my incredible roommate.

To the Editor:

Re: “Hotel and ILR: Two Diametrically Opposed Entities on the Hill,” Opinion, March 11

Every summer my parents sent us to summer camp in Bumfuck, CA, in the central valley. No man’s land, if you will, where a crisp 104 degrees is just how the malaria-carrying insects like it. I would write home every day in the stationery they gave me to plead with them to bring me home. When that didn’t work, they certainly regretted giving me my grandparents’ addresses. My nearly-90 year old grandfather barged into their living room one Saturday in early July demanding to know why they sent me to a place where they made me eat spiders.

The debate over college rankings took off earlier this year, when an article in The Washington Post revealed that U.S. News and World Report was using an arbitrary average SAT score to rank Sarah Lawrence College after the school stopped requiring SAT scores from its applicants.

On Sept. 7, 19 presidents of top liberal arts colleges signed a statement that discouraged the use of college rankings. Colleges that signed the statement aimed to reduce bias in the admissions process.

The statement read, “We commit not to mention … rankings in any of our new publications.”