the Sam Jackson College Experience

Getting into college is just like winning the cold war. You’re excited, everyone congratulates you and you feel like you’ve done something really great. You feel good about yourself.

The only problem is that afterwards you don’t know what to do with yourself. It’s not the free time that poses an issue, though for some that create serious trouble. Rather–and especially so with high-achieving students–it’s the sudden absence of that unseen motivation, that invisible and suppressed whispering that tainted every action: college admissions pressures. Unlike the military-industrial complex, this long-time stressor doesn’t have lobbyists to keep it alive after its purpose is fulfilled.

And so when that stress evaporates, there is a ‘vacuum’ of motivation in its place. This can manifest itself as a senior slump, or it can be more profound–if admission to one’s dream college is the ‘goal’ for a high-achieving high school student, what is there afterwards? Personally I can’t get myself all worked up about a future career in investment banking, so I’m not sure what I might be working ‘towards.’ Happiness is a good answer, but something a little more tangible than happiness / scholarly enrichment would be great. College admissions served that role for a long time for a great many people and I think it will be some time before the internal adjustment can be made out of that ‘mode’ and longer still until a good healthy motivation can completely take over.

Now, personally, I never did anything for ‘college suck.’ I didn’t join extracurriculars ‘just because,’ I didn’t sign up for courses I didn’t want to take. I focused on learning and hoped the rest would work out. Happily, it did. I took the most difficult courses I could because I wanted to learn more, and schools appreciated that.

What then is the difference to me?

Grades come out sometime later today (the 28th) and I’m confident that I’ll do pretty well. I never had to worry about doing too poorly, I’ve just always had high standards. These high standards were sometimes impossibly unrealistic so I would set myself up for disappointment. Regardless, any time I did well I would always have to ask myself if I had done ‘well enough.’ Even when my grades were ‘good enough’ for me, I had to wonder if they would they be ‘good enough’ for my future college of choice. This stress tainted a lot of my time, and I know it stole the fun away from classes for many of my peers. It was very distressing if ever I was given the choice between working for a grade and working for self-improvement, since ideals aside these were not always the same efforts.

In any event, that stress is gone now, and any work I do is purely for my own enrichment. I have only one term left of school, then a term of internship, then graduation. This kind of freedom, this unburdening, is wonderful.

I decided that in the spirit of reflecting back on the past year (wait, wasn’t that Yom Kippur?) I would dig through my “Most Popular Posts” (as determined by visitor patterns!) and the ARCHIVES and make some personal picks for entries that are as much fun now as they were the day they were written. A lot of my visitors haven’t been here for the entire year I’ve been blogging, so this should help everyone to discover some good back-content.

I don’t claim that these are the 10 best, but they’re not bad. Kill some time, click some links!

10. 51 ways College Board can mis-score your SAT and ruin your life
This is a personal favorite of mine, but only ranks 31st for popularity since it was first published back in a low-traffic lull. Quite investigatory.

9. College Board to make test using background info pt. 1
This is another post where I did a lot of reading and research but there wasn’t a big enough audience to appreciate it at the time. It was posts like this that I think have earned me these frequent visits from the ‘collegeboard.com’ domain (not referrals: visitors).

8. College Visits: Yale University
Ah, July, and a week of college visits. This post with photos detailing my visit at Yale might have been a dead giveaway that it was my first choice, but I tried to stay as neutral as possible.

7. Spend a week inside my mailbox!
This is a good read for marketers, I think, because it details individual reactions to varying forms of print marketing. Fun! For a good close-up dissection, check out my observations on UChicago’s ‘Life of the Mind’ mailing.

6. Authentic? Questioning the value of student blogging
August was, apparently, the month of ’student blogging’ in my mind and this was an exploratory look at the worth of student blogs in the minds of prospectives.

5. Donor dollars trump interests of prospective students in student blogging arena
Yes, even more about student blogging. It sure was a hot topic in my mind. That must have been why Stein Communications asked me to write that article about it for their newsletter… good times.

4. Class of 2006 Senior SAT percentile scores number-crunching!
Currently this is the “most popular” post, but that’s because ‘SAT percentiles’ is a crazy-popular google search term. Still, the post was interesting as it is.

3. WSJ asks: ‘Is Admissions Bar Higher for Asians At Elite Schools?’ [part 1]
This post is a little dry, I’ll admit, but it’s a good overview of Jian Li’s case as we know it. However, the real value is in the comments, where a wonderfully illustrative conversation took place. Check it out.

2. How I judge each piece of college marketing:
The longtime title-holder for reader popularity until about a month ago, this is still an excellent insight for marketers into how to design more effective marketing for prospective students. Honesty works, honestly.

and the number one post from this entire year to date is… drumroll, please…

1. Yale College, Class of 2011 / No Hesitation: Why I’m matriculating into Yale 2011
Sorry, but the news was so good these couldn’t be anything but number one!

Remember, there are 85 other posts, many of which are also great. So again, check them out in the ARCHIVES sometime or maybe do a search using my handy live search box. Explore around some!

Happy Hanukkah / Christmas / Holidays / December, everyone!

I sent my reply card back to New Haven almost as soon as I got it; there was no question that I would be going to Yale next year. It wasn’t that way when I sent in my application November 1st, though. So what changed?

I would not have applied early if it had been binding, but my school strongly strongly urges us to go if we get in. We’re really reminded that our early school should be our first choice school and we are more or less expected to go if we get in. This is a ‘philosophy’ and not a policy. Our CCO will still send out transcripts for EA admits, if they insist, but if you got into your first-choice school, why would you? This gives our college counseling office the ability to tell an Early Action school, ‘psst, if you admit this kid, you can go argue at committee that they’re going to come because Exeter does it such-and-such way.’ Works well for everyone–more kids get into their first choice schools, schools get better yields, and more people have more chances in RD. This philosophy might also be why the percentage of our class that applied early was lower than some otherwise similar private schools.

Why then would it have made a difference if yale were EA vs. ED? Financial Aid was not the primary concern, since I’d matriculate and be poor, if nothing else. Essentially, though Yale was, as of nov 1, far and away my first choice, I wanted to retain the possibility of choice later on. I wasn’t comfortable with the idea of being bound to attend. Hypothetically, I thought to myself, I could still apply elsewhere even if I got in, if I really really wanted to even if I had no intention of doing so. This was because even if I really, really, wanted to go to Yale Nov 1, or even Dec 16th, might things not change by May 1?

Over the course of the 45 day wait, I grew more and more emotionally attached to Yale. This made waiting really fun. By Dec 14 I almost felt that I would have applied ED had the application deadline been right then. I was, of course, dizzy from the anxiety right after finals leading into the Dec 15th decisions–so I wouldn’t exactly have called myself mentally fit to make those sorts of decisions.

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Disclaimer: I just set up my Amazon affiliates account. Remember, I have to cover my self-help portion of Financial Aid somehow…

Well, at least one who hasn’t already been admitted into their dream college!

These make excellent christmas gifts, if the recepient is a high school student and the gifter is a sadist.

Still, I’m bringing them back up again because I think that everyone who has already been admitted to college–whether you’re a graduate or just a relaxed senior–should read these books. If you haven’t been admitted yet, well–the anxiety might kill you, so wait until afterwards.

Jerome Karabel’s The Chosen is scary enough, as a history of elite college admissions. But Daniel Golden’s Price of Admission takes the cake for pure fear factor. Unless, of course, you’re filthy rich, in which case it might assuage any worries you might have that you can’t buy your way into the school of your choice.

Anyone have any other admissions “must reads”? I’ve said before that I’m not so hot on The Gatekeepers, but there must be a few more worth reading? I have lots of time, but if I don’t get suggestions soon it will just turn to political books as I prepare for my spring term internship in Washington. I’m looking at you, admissions officers and higher education marketers–I know you’re reading!

Mark Zuckerberg, founder of Facebook, is coming to my school to give an assembly on January 26th. This is because he was an alum, ‘02. Phillips Exeter Academy is running some year-long assembly series for the 75th anniversary of the Harkness method at Exeter–the discussion-based teaching around a table that was made possible through the money of Rockefeller chum Edward S. Harkness. You can be sure I’ll be asking hard questions.

If this is part of the Harkness 75th series, which I expect it is, there will also be an hour long talk afterwards. The assembly will offer me maybe one opportunity to ask a tough question whose straight answer would embarrass Zuckerberg in front of the school. More realistically any question-answering would be done with the night-time talk. I’m specifically looking for questions about privacy, something that many of my peers sometimes worry about. All the same there are lots of avenues here for lots of fun.

If you have any questions you think I should try to ask, please share them! Post them in the comments.

(Sidenote: Unlike everyone else in the world, I’d like to acknowledge that though it’s his baby, Zuckerberg had a lot of help in time and money and wasn’t some genius Zarathustra. All the same he’s got the reins right now and is the frontman whenever it comes to making absurd gestures like wearing flipflops to business functions and hugely overvaluing his company while snubbing potential partners and throwing paper billions down the drain.)