The most creative college sales pitch ever to arrive in my mailbox was packaged in a little chipboard box about the size of my hand. Inside was a set of 100 or so green-and-blue flashcards, which each featured a question about the college on one side and the answer on the other.

Since my only other choice of flashcards that afternoon was the list of Spanish vocab I keep on my phone (I don’t need to be reminded that I’m a nerd–instead of Words With Friends and Angry Birds, I have the Skyward app and links to my four email accounts), I flipped through the cards for a few minutes, calling on the many hours I’ve spent with the Fiske Guide to Colleges to guess the answers.

Once you hear enough rhetoric from institutions around the country, it’s surprisingly easy to fill in the blanks for them. For instance, if a college asks you to guess its average class size, it’s probably somewhere between 10 and 20. If the number were much higher than that–say, 1,000 for a freshman math course–the admissions officers wouldn’t be bragging about it.

The only card that stumped me had to do with one of the school’s recently expanded majors. Given the college’s unusual technique for recruiting applicants, I hypothesized that the major had something to do with education. Possibly early childhood education.

When I flipped it over to find the answer, I was mildly concerned to see “environmental studies.”

Environmental studies is a challenging and worthy academic field, and I have no shortage of admiration for those who pursue degrees and careers in that arena. However, considering that the college had just sent half a pound of paper in flashcards to every high school senior on its hit list, I worried that it didn’t quite understand the nature of environmentalism.

 I don’t care that the flashcards were made out of 20 percent recycled materials. That’s still 80 percent dead tree. Colleges and universities from Portland, OR, to Portland, ME, boast powerful environmental programs, but I see no shortage of dried nature pulp being pummeled into the mailboxes of every high school student between here and Alaska.

What’s worse, some of these colleges are unwittingly sending me the same piece of mail two, three, even four times under different names. I’ve received letters for Katie Guyo, Katherine Guyott, Kate Gayot, Kat Guiyot, and even one for Sarah Green (though that one may have been the mistake of the postal service).

Aside from the odd-Sarah-out, I could start my own boarding school for college-bound girls with the initials KG.

At the risk of alienating the colleges of my dreams, I will admit that I rarely flip over those carefully crafted postcards to read about why such-and-such university would be the perfect fit for Kathy Goyot. But I’m too parsimonious with paper to toss them in the garbage immediately, so I put my college mail to good use. I use my letters as drink coasters, plates for cat treats, scribble pads to get ink clots out of pens, chew toys for my rabbit, origami paper and carriages on which to escort spiders out of my house.

To the school with the flashcards: nice idea, but next time, shoot me an email. As I mentioned before, I have four email accounts. Three of these have already been commandeered by college mail (hence the fourth).

You can even send those same flashcards to me electronically. I do have the app for that.

Thanks for reading, Free State.

Katie