the Sam Jackson College Experience

Hey all,

Midterms have consumed my life for the last couple weeks, and continue to do so, but as soon as I finish writing some papers I will be taking a train to New York for the College Board forum, where I am doing a little presentation on Saturday! Come visit me if you are there, Matt McGann (of MIT) and I will make sure it’s worth your time. I’m missing the first two days because of classes / other obligations, but hey, fun all the same. Give a call, e-mail, or carrier pigeon and say hello if you’re there. More updates when I get back.

Sorry to have been out of the loop, it’s just midterm season here. I have been doing some other writing, though (and feel a little like I’m cheating on my blog-readers as a result) and thought I would share it to tide you over for a little bit.

My column in the Yale Herald is about ‘things that outrage me’ and is titled ‘Snakes on a What?!’ : )

The first, “Definition of rape eludes Ivy League students” is exactly what it sounds like. Here’s an excerpt:

The Yale College Class of 2011 doesn’t know what rape is. Not all 1,322 of us are completely ignorant, mind you, but a disturbing number seem to be out of the loop. During the orientation program Sex Signals, a scenario played out where the actors indicated to the audience several times that consent was lacking in a sexual encounter. When asked if we thought that a rape had been committed, the barest sprinkling of hands went up. Men and women alike rose to defend the actions of the character accused of rape, arguing that the ambiguity of the situation precipitated the rape. From a legal standpoint, there could be no question in this (admittedly fictional) case—rape had taken place. But every single Sex Signals group failed to recognize a problem with the lack of consent. This graphic failure of the newest inductees into the Yale community to collectively identify a crime is deeply troubling, but it hasn’t provoked in most of us the lingering shock which compels me to write this column now. Why hasn’t it?

The second is more lighthearted, titled “A plateful of grapes makes the long nights go by.” This one is perhaps more topical to the blog and touches back on my thoughts on the esthetic of schools and admissions offices from a few weeks ago. Excerpt below:

A bowl of grapes in the Pierson dining hall convinced me to come to Yale. The admissions office would no doubt like to know the secret of these grapes—their dark magic, and how they might harness it—but truth be told, it’s all very straightforward. My love of fruit compelled me. Visiting a school far from Napa in late fall only to find that, wonder of wonders, grapes were abundant in the dining halls, I was powerless to resist.

So… have a look, let me know what you think! I will be at the College Board forum in New York later this week (I have a little presentation on Saturday) so I am dying as I try to get everything done before I go. Hopefully I’ll see some of you readers there!

New York is the second biggest source of visitors to the site (by city or state) and I thought I would share this nice article that was in the New York Post about a very good family friend, Lynn Jawitz, who also happens to be a very good florist!

Lynn Jawitz lives in a striking home a 19th-century Upper East Side townhouse that she lovingly restored, winning an interior design award in the process. The designs she’s best known for, though, emerge from a studio in the basement, where she creates lush, distinctive floral arrangements that have earned her a reputation as one of the city’s top flower designers, and grace luxe weddings and other high-style events from the Rainbow Room to Le Bernardin.

A law school graduate and a former stockbroker, Jawitz started her business, Florisan, five years ago, after learning the ropes from master floral-design teachers at Parson’s School of Design. She’s one of the few designers around who uses the technique of “wiring” each blossom – a painstaking process that involves removing the stem and adding a miniature hydrating reservoir that keeps blossoms fresh long after others would have wilted.

I have seen Lynn at work and have also seen the final results and both are amazing! She’s also just all around really awesome and nice and has known me since before I was born : )

So, yeah. Lynn does really, really, beautiful flower arrangements… pity that article only has one picture! For more, check out the Florisan website. These all look even more amazing in person and the way that these are done, with that wiring technique, really does make a huge difference. It’s just stunningly beautiful and they last forever! At least, they do with silk flowers. They last quite a while with real blooms.

Norman Kraft of Zen Writes Inc. keeps a higher education marketing blog called “Zen and the Art of Higher Education Marketing” which I read regularly (or at least as regularly as he posts–happily, the last couple of weeks have been pretty consistent) and generally find to be very on the mark. Two weeks ago he posed an interesting question–what effect do appearances have in the context of the admissions office itself? He writes:

For many colleges and universities, admissions office space seems almost an afterthought. Too often, the office entrances are difficult to find and once found, the admissions area is hardly one of the highlights of the college tour. I’ve seen admissions officers attempt to prevent parents and students from seeing their offices by arranging meetings in open spaces on campus, or at a library or student center.

Your admissions area is your first impression, and as the old saying goes, you only have one opportunity to make a good first impression.

Let me address this question from my perspective as a student and a recent college-admissions-office-visitor. First and foremost, the admissions office is not the first impression someone has of a school when visiting. Not precisely, at least. Parents don’t blindfold their kids, drive them in erratic randomized patterns, and then lead them up to the admissions office only to then ‘unveil’ the first impression of the entire school. There is the journey to the admissions office first, and even that little step can have a significant impact. How so?

Although I knew that there were realistic constraints for space, sometimes the positioning of an admissions office alone would seem to send a message to me. Take, for example, the University of Pennsylvania admissions office: it is very convenient and easy to find because of how central it is to campus (1 College Hall, ground floor). To get there we walked through especially nice portions of the campus and a vibrant part of Philadelphia; that was the first impression of the school. My memories of the admissions office itself are not especially great because my preoccupation at the time was coping with the 105+ degree heat wave.

The real distinction between admissions offices first and foremost is SERVICE. Yes, it was a painful heat wave at Penn and that wasn’t their fault. The day before, though, the temperatures were almost as bad and I had visited both Yale and Wesleyan with my family. The biggest difference, where tour and admissions office experience was concerned (schools aside)? Wesleyan offered free bottles of water. It was also, hands down, the nicest, most accommodating, and most convincing of anywhere I visited, but that’s another story. The water was part of that. I know it’s not in the budgets for Penn and Yale to offer water to all the people who come and visit–they had rather bigger crowds–but those are some of the differences that we take away from tours. The little details that count.

Wesleyan-Yale isn’t a very fair comparison, as I’ve said. So let me use another situation with slightly more even odds: Harvard vs. MIT.

I visited MIT on March 14th, 2006–it was the first school I visited. I remember the date because it was Pi Day! Anyway, I visited MIT with my friend Greta and we got slightly lost in the infinite corridor and on campus looking around for the admissions office because MIT buildings are all designated by numbers are we weren’t paying that much attention since it was our spring break. Something like that. We found the office in the end and it was a messy place inhospitable to visitors–we were sent elsewhere for our tour and info talk. It felt like the reception / office ratio was off. All the same, we had a good time at MIT (read the visit report).

Compare with Harvard: we wandered over to Radcliffe yard and found the admissions office after some searching, but given Harvard’s visitor volume what happened next was unfortunate. We were sent from a messy office environment to what looked like a semi-dilapidated basement auditorium where we were told about how selective Harvard was before being sent out on the worst college tour in my complete touring experience.

There were many similarities in presentation and aesthetic experience, but when I ask Greta or think myself about the MIT visit we don’t think about how the office was messy. We just think about how exciting the UROP program sounded and how friendly everyone was. The aesthetic details only come into play over at Harvard when we start trying to look for something to redeem the experience.

Are aesthetics important? Sure. But they’re not the most important part of the experience or ‘first impression,’ at least not in my mind, and it’s important to remember that. I didn’t see any places that were installing gold leaf in the admissions offices while cutting back on staff, but I just thought I’d share my thoughts on this all the same.

For the record, Johns Hopkins gave out free water bottles a few days later when it was equally hot.