the Sam Jackson College Experience

Hope Santa treated everyone well this year, and that new year’s goes swimmingly too: I am off to New York for new year’s Sunday and then January 1st I will be jumping on an Aeroflot flight to Moscow and will be gone for about two weeks in RUSSIA! Which I am very excited about. If you or someone you know is interested in traveling to Russia and getting a Russian visa, let me know, I might try to document the sufferings I went through sometime… but just be sure to plan ahead to avoid undue suffering.

I will be going to Moscow, Cherepovets, and St. Petersburg (maybe Novgorod or some other places if time permits). My travel log on Dopplr is not very exciting because I am not a “frequent business traveler” but it’s still a really cool site which I use and will be using (thanks danah, for the invite!). Basically it’s a traveling social-y network which is very useful for seeing when you overlap with people! If you know me and use the site, let’s connect!

I may try to update as I go along and maybe get some photos up but chances are things will be quiet until I get back.

Should you worry about the collaboration between DNA test marketers and anxious students and parents eager to get their way into top schools? David over at EphBlog certainly thinks so (EphBlog is an unofficial Williams community blog which I mention here frequently as an excellent example of an unofficial school blog that adds lots of value and is a great resource even for prospective students).

There are many “chances” posts on College Confidential, requests from potential applicants for comments on their chances of getting into Williams and advice on how to do so. See here, here and here for recent examples. I am often tempted to reply: “Take a genetic genealogy test and, if it comes back black, join the appropriate clubs in your high school and check the right box on the Common Application.”

Good advice?

I don’t necessarily want to spark an affirmative action debate here as happened last year on the blog with my writings on Jian Li. What I do find interesting are the questions posed by these new technologies. As a biracial student I am particularly interested in points 4 and 5 about Williams.

4) Besides studying the trends in the number of applicants from different groups, the Record could have a lot of fun just by looking at the pictures of Williams students. There are, allegedly, 49 or so African-Americans in the class of 2011. Want to bet? I have no doubt that the admissions office is being honest — 49 students did indeed check that box. But, could an outsider look at pictures of all the members of the class of 2011 and pick out those 49 individuals? I doubt it. The Record ought to give it a try. Background information here.

5) Don’t forget that there are some administrators at the College who would actually welcome this development. The College loves to be able to claim that 10% of Williams is African-American, whatever the underlying “truth” might be. In this dimension, the College certainly practices a Don’t Ask, Don’t Tell philosophy. Even better would be having a 10% African-American class with average SAT scores above 1400. Not hard to do if a lot of applicants start checking that box.

I know that I would frequently be surprised to hear that “such and such is [insert minority here], actually” in the context of high school college admissions gossip. Sometimes this was something which would definitely have affected that person’s life experience and background and was very relevant to who they were and their family; other times, it was surprising as well as implausible just because the link could be so tenuous.

When there are DNA test marketers who are happy to give results which will tell people they are “black” and college admissions folks happy to accept those students (see point 5) statistics take on an especially distorted relation with reality… just wanted to poll you readers and see what you all thought of this.

Also, merry Christmas and happy new year!

Today, December 21st, is Samuel L Jackson’s birthday! I actually got to chat with him on his website today and wish him a happy birthday, stop by over the weekend to try to do the same! I only got in touch with him briefly, but I’ve always been a huge fan of The Man, not just because of our shared name. It was always frustrating to hear people tell me I should either have / change my middle name to be “L-something” so I could be like him, but I always appreciated the positive correlations that were made between the two of us.

I also always wondered if, now that a search for “Sam Jackson” has me as the 4th Google result,  if he ever happened upon my site? Or maybe his manager got angry that I was taking away search listings? I’m not sure–in any case, I always wanted a chance to chat with him and hopefully will be able to catch him properly sometime over this weekend. He has always seemed to be a really cool guy and if this is any indication, he’s really nice to his fans, too–spending a bunch of time on and off on his birthday to talk to them!

Sidenote: being heavily inundated with Samuel Adams commercials as a child, growing up in the greater Boston area, I always always always wanted to start a brewery and make Samuel Jackson’s with Samuel L as my spokesperson, long before Dave Chappelle did his sketch about the subject.

Anyway… I am done with finals and will be heading home tomorrow. Happy birthday to Samuel L Jackson, happy vacation to me!

I know a lot of people have recently been coming to the site via CollegeConfidential or panicked “Yale 2012 how to survive after deferral” googling. It’s amazing for me to remember where I was last year this time (Exeter, NH) what I was doing (finals) and how I was feeling (more stressed than any other time in my entire life, ever). This past week I popped my head in at CC a little to try to tell people to 1. get off CollegeConfidential at least for the duration of the waiting time and 2. to try to instill some hope and raise some spirits (things which CC often takes away and dashes, I might add).

I saw the other day a post by a fellow yalie (name withheld by request) who wrote a post that I will reprint here, because I think it sends a very good message. I will definitely be writing one of my own as soon as I am done with this massive paper weighing over my head, but for now you’ll just have to hear from an anonymous fellow yalie. I don’t agree with every word, but it’s a pretty good message.

Hi! As a class of ‘11 yalie, i can tell you that lots of people on campus are excited that in a little over a day there will be several hundred new prospective yalies! As a former SCEA applicant, i can also understand how anxious many of you are right now. So before you log on to admits.yale.edu and get what you may think is the most critical result of your life up to this point, i wanted to share some thoughts.

Yale was my absolute first choice when i applied early action. I wanted to be in the northeast, the campus is beautiful, the residential college system really does work (ie, i don’t want to imagine what this semester would have been like if i didn’t have berkeley, but that’s beyond the point of this note), and as much as i hate to admit it, the huge endowment and name are big selling points. Yale also has its share of flaws, and if you have a romantic notion of a perfect life following your admission (as i did), you’ve been misled.

I don’t mean to tell you that you shouldn’t be excited about tomorrow. Yale is a great college and you’ve accomplished something very difficult if you’re accepted. What i do think you should know is that i’ve often thought i could have been just as satisfied, if not more satisfied, with a different college experience. Yale isn’t a perfect place, and yale isn’t “the one.” So if tomorrow at fiveish (for the most eager among you, i believe you could access the results at around 4:15 last year) you don’t see a big blue screen with a bulldog replacing the A in YALE, know that life is not over. Know that for most of us there really is no “one,” and that your college experience will be what you make of it. Know that my sister, who is every bit as smart as i am but went to a college that US News and World Report ranks below their top fifty liberal arts colleges, had a more satisfying college experience than i’ve had this semester. Know that Yale is a great place with interesting people and lots of options, but know that there are lots of great places with similar resources. Know that four years from now, you’re only going to have had one college experience and the quality of that experience is mostly dependent upon the attitude with which you approach it.

So for those of you who do see the bulldog tomorrow, know this: you are very lucky. Visit Yale, live our lives for a few days, and decide if this is the right place for you. The large majority of you will come to that conclusion, and that’s a testament to the magic of Yale. For those of you who don’t see that bulldog, it’s imperative that you embrace what i could not: If you had a realistic shot at Yale, you’re in very good shape and will be admitted to many other colleges, likely including several of Yale’s peer schools. What’s more (and more important), wherever you end up, your experience is contingent upon your outlook and actions more than anything else. There is no “one”, and the one you choose is just as likely as anywhere else to be the absolute best experience possible for you.

Best of luck, wherever tomorrow takes you.

~A bulldog ‘11

[Originally on CC here]

Good luck again to everyone waiting. Try to stay sane. I know that by 24 hours until results were out, I had literally started counting minutes, and that by 12 hours before decisions I was counting–I wish I was kidding–every second… try to avoid that, and try to relax, if that’s at all possible.

So I have a big 15 page paper due next Friday, and unfortunately for me but fortunately for readers everywhere I spent a chunk of time procrastinating by redesigning this website. You could also say that it’s something like a 2-year anniversary-of-blog birthday present. Feedback much appreciated!

Some of the changes!

• Most impressively, the site is now available in thirteen additional languages thanks to Angsuman’s great Translator Plugin Pro. Some of the automatic translations are pretty ghastly, some are decent, but all should help at least somewhat to make the site more accessible to people around the world. Try it out for yourself using the flags in the sidebar!
  • Supported languages: English, German, Spanish, Russian, Arabic, Dutch, Swedish, Greek, French, Italian, Portuguese, Japanese, Korean, Chinese Simplified and Chinese
• New theme: BloggingPro with some modifications (ongoing–will change color and graphics more as time goes on, hopefully waiting until after finals…)
• New ’share this’ functionality allows you to e-mail posts without leaving the site and also gives you the ability to share on Facebook, Digg, wherever you like. If something you use is missing, let me know–I limited the options for aesthetics but can add if I took away some weird service people like.
• You can now edit your comments for five minutes after you make them! Long enough to correct typos, short enough to avoid excessive retractions in discussions. Hopefully this will encourage people to comment!!!
• Nice e-mail subscription form! If you hate or fear RSS but want to get updates with every post I make, check it out in the sidebar.

And perhaps more surprises hidden around the site! Go check them out! Tell your friends!

I’ll try to make time for a couple posts this week, for real, too–I have a lot of things I am itching to write about!