By Toby Amodeo

It’s college application season! That joyous time of year full of holiday spirit! Before we all settle in to the coming weeks of tearing our hair out by the yule log and praying all of our components were received by an ever so reliable online system, I think we all need to sit back and enjoy the friendly messages sent by hundreds of quality universities across the country.

College mail is the backbone of collegiate advertising. Featuring its informative pictures of students in their normal habitats and enormous font ensuring you don’t miss a single detail, most college mail can appear comical. But I feel we need to accept it as it’s really intended, a praise of our successes and a warm holiday greeting. I recently received a letter from a New Jersey university specializing in horse and veterinary studies, due to my extensive skills and interest in the equestrian realm. Then of course there is the polite “Happy Thanksgiving” message from Stonehill College, reminding me on Turkey Day of the seven more essays still to be written. I know of no better way to celebrate the holiday than by being thankful my colleges are so thoughtful as to remind me I’ll soon be sending each of them seventy dollars.

And let us not forget my personal favorite, a message from my close friends at the University of Denver in Colorado. Their holiday message? A personal invitation to apply with the manly Pioneer Scholarship! I’m told I only received that invitation due to my extreme interest in their college, and my recent campus visit. While I’ve never actually been to the University of Denver, I hear it’s very rugged, and I appreciate the invite. I hope whoever did visit their campus did not miss out on the Pioneer application. I’ll re-gift it, if you need it. While I love Colorado and have extreme interest in the school, I’m afraid I won’t be making the trek westward to celebrate the holidays with Denver Boone, the school’s most recent mascot. Too bad, I hear the Christmas trees out that way are enormous and bountiful.

Instead of cursing the college spam we receive this year, let us revel in it. Forget the contradictory position taken by the schools, attempting to “go green” while still sending out three postcards per student per week. Those cards are necessary to remind you that while on campus, you’ll be recycling if you want to be taken seriously. And don’t let the selectiveness of your schools get you down. If they’re sending you mail, that means they want you due to your academic ability and service to the community! We all need to relax just a little and appreciate the time it took for admissions officers to enter our names into printing software, and smile a little at their humorous misspellings of our names, a little college humor. I personally will be hanging my mail next to my Christmas cards this year. Every holiday reminder is a special one, even if you don’t know who it’s from. Just remember how close we all are to never receiving college mail again. How will we know it’s the holiday season? How will we know when the next round of prospective students will be sending in their applications? I can only hope someone will remind me it’s time to dig out the old ornaments and sit by the roaring fire built of advertisements to all the schools I didn’t apply to.