the Sam Jackson College Experience

all the exciting parts, none of the heavy debt burden

Jan 23, 2006 0

The Futility of SAT Workshop-time

So I attended tonight’s College Counselling Office-offered SAT 1 workshop on Math and Grammar. Entirely as was expected–almost entirely useless. I was reminded to factor out interesting things, and besides that, nothing was accomplished (though some time was wasted). Seniors and students who had gone to previous sessions told us, urged us, not to go. Still we went. When we got there, Boaz had just gone to one 30 minutes previous–and he told us it was a waste of time. Still we stayed. It was a waste of time. It was useless. And we still went, knowing all this beforehand…

Our Powerpoint presentations were all presented by one Ms. Tasker; we were reminded of this fact as the start of each, as the title slide included her name and “presented by.” Why anyone would want to be associated with that sordid affair, I know not why. She was fine until 10 minutes in she ran out of words and started reading off the slides.

One note on grammar: I wish the SAT asked fun grammar questions, like “What should the correct complete predicate be?” or “how do you use a semicolon, you stupid teenager?” You know, useful things.

I think I may go to the next one, which covers the reading and essay–n.b. I got a 12 on the essay when I took the SAT last spring for fun, and did fairly well on the reading… yet I persist.

Jan 15, 2006 1

More about Me

So today I’m drowning in work, which would be a nice change of pace if only it was more exciting work. I got more than 8 hours of sleep last night, which I consider a success given the circumstances, and today we also spent less than 30 minutes at brunch. Another success, given the circumstances.

Tonight there is an all-Upper meeting where we begin our journey on that yellow brick road of College Counselling into the academic institutions of our dreams. We received our counselor assignments earlier this week, and in the interest of revealing obsequious amounts of information about myself, I’ll share the fact that I have Ms. Dolan. Ms. Dolan is the director of the C.C. Office which sounds pretty good, and I hear only good rumours and gossips about her. Envy. Delicious jealousy.

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Who is Sam Jackson?

photo headshot sam jacksonI'm currently a junior at Yale University and I've been blogging about college admissions and higher education marketing trends since I began my college application process in 2005. I now also write about my experience here at Yale. I just got back from studying abroad at Peking University this past Fall 2009 in Beijing, China! Click here to read my 'about' page.

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