You can find them in your local Starbucks, gaping into the abyss of the 2010 edition of The Best 371 Colleges. You might even spot them sleep-trudging their way through the hallways of a high school, manila envelopes in tow, en route to the guidance office with bloodshot eyes.

No, they aren’t part of a zombie coalition terrorizing a mid-western town in a 1980s thriller. They’re just applying to college. However, they may as well be zombies; they’ve lost consciousness and now serve a higher power: the College Board.

How did such a large population go from cheerful and cherubic to churned and chagrined? I believe it is chance.

While I’m not dismissing the college admissions process at any university or college, I sincerely believe that because so many colleges reject so many qualified candidates, it’s fair to say that there is some amount of luck involved in the modern college admission process.

Maybe the admissions counselor became violently ill from eating stale plantain chips 30 minutes prior to reading your essay about sustainable agriculture in South America. While the people who read our applications take a very neutral (and in some cases, very numeric) approach to deciding our collegiate fates, they are still people, subject to human feelings like nostalgia, disgust, astonishment, insult, and in some cases, indigestion. There’s nothing wrong with that.

What’s wrong is how personally we take these (very human) decisions.

So while the notorious phrase “I regret to inform you that…” has the potential to send high school seniors into a Ben and Jerry’s induced coma, I suggest taking rejection more lightly. For the sake of our sanity and our love handles, we need to stop assuming we were not smart enough for admission if we are not admitted. We need to put down the “Phish Food.” When one door closes, another opens, and regardless of which doorway you choose, I promise there won’t be any zombies on the other side. At least until midterms.

Postman is a prospective student of the class of 2015.