The Color Blind Test: What Getting Rejected From My Dream School Taught Me About Yours

I did everything right. I had the nomination. I had the acceptance. And then a routine physical took it all away. Looking back, I wouldn’t change a thing.

Every year around this time, I get a kind of PTSD scrolling through social media. The posts are everywhere — kids signing letters of intent, holding up pennants, grinning in front of banners for the schools they’ve chosen. And every single time, it takes me back.

Back to when I was one of those kids. Back to when I had it all figured out.

My buddy and I had a plan. We were going to be Goose and Maverick. We were going to the Naval Academy. We were going to set the world on fire and serve our country and have the kind of future that felt bigger than anything we could see from where we were standing. I did the work — all of it. I earned the nomination. I got the acceptance. I checked every box there was to check. My future felt like a done deal.

Until it wasn’t.

Then they put a book down in front of me. A color blindness test. Of all the things I had prepared for, all the ways I had anticipated the road ahead — I never saw that coming. I failed. Acceptance revoked. Just like that, the future I had built in my head was gone.

I was devastated in a way I didn’t know how to handle. I had done everything right. I had controlled everything I could control. And it still fell apart. That’s a particular kind of pain — the kind that comes not from carelessness or failure to try, but from realizing that doing everything right doesn’t guarantee the outcome you planned for. Nobody tells you that when you’re seventeen.

Perspective only comes with time — and you can’t transfer it

Here’s what I know now that I couldn’t have known then: that moment was one of the best things that ever happened to me.

I know how that sounds. And I also know that if someone had said that to me the day my acceptance was revoked, I would have tuned them out completely. That’s the painful truth about perspective — it only comes with time. You cannot hand it to someone. You cannot speed it up. You cannot download it from someone else’s experience, no matter how much they love you or how hard they try to help. It has to be lived.

Which is exactly why I think about this every May, when I watch families navigate the hardest part of the admissions process — not the applications, not the essays, not the waiting. The part where the plan doesn’t go as planned. The waitlists. The second choices. The schools that felt like settling. The letters that said no.

I see parents trying to fix it immediately — spinning it into a pep talk, problem-solving before their kid has even had a chance to feel the disappointment. And I see students convinced that the wrong turn at eighteen has somehow ruined everything. I have been that student. And I want to tell you — both of you — what I wish someone had found a way to make me believe back then.

The door isn’t closed — it just looks different than you expected

If you’re reading this and you still haven’t landed where you thought you would — if May 1st came and went and you’re still not sure, still not settled, still looking at your options and feeling like none of them are right — I want you to hear something.

There are still schools with open applications. There are still possibilities. The path you planned is not the only path forward. It never was. And the students who figure that out — the ones who take the detour and make something remarkable out of it — those are the ones who end up with the best stories.

I went to a different school than the one I planned. I built a different life than the one I had mapped out at seventeen. And somewhere along the way, through the teaching and the coaching and the consulting and the writing and the walking and the stumbling, I found the work I was actually meant to do. I’m not sure I would have found it on the path I originally planned.

Five things worth remembering when the plan falls apart

I never made it to the Naval Academy. I never got to be Maverick. But I got to be something else — something I couldn’t have predicted or planned for — and the unexpected road that took me there gave me more material, more perspective, and more genuine understanding of what students are going through than any straight path ever could have.

The color blind test didn’t end my story. It just changed where it went next.

Yours will too.

Carpe diem.