I am not bitter
After three years of study at Andover, I was rejected for college admission by the following schools: MIT, Yale University,Harvard University and Brown University. I might also have been rejected by the University of Chicago, had I not withdrawn from their waiting list.
In high school I was a national merit finalist, my SAT score was 1580 and I had gotten a grade of 4 or 5 on seven AP tests as well as coming in first in a national Spanish competition, winning the school geography competition, and being the captain and high scorer on the school's college bowl team. I also was on the wrestling and track teams and managed to read over 400 books outside of school in the three years that I was in high school.
At the time, this situation made me quite furious and left me a bit perplexed. I attributed my failure to gain entrance to the aforementioned institutions to the fact that my GPA in high school was too low, coupled with the fact that there was a lot of competition in my high school with other students. - why had I bothered taking such hard courses if they just deflated my GPA and in the end kept me from getting into a good college? I could have taken easier courses, gotten high grades in all of them, and easily gone to something a lot "better" than where I am now, UMass, my "safety" school.
But then I thought about what I had done.
I asked myself, what am I interested in in life?
After thinking about passed events, I realized that what I want to do is not necessarily a great degree or a lot of money- rather it is intellectual freedom, and the ability to pursue my own studies that I prefer. Hence, I don't want to change what I did, nor , given the opportunity, would I go back and take easier classes to get a better GPA.