the Sam Jackson College Experience

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.

Read the rest of this entry »

This was on the front page of the Exonian today, reported by my super-excellent best buddy and fellow senior Boaz Chandrasekhar: 64% of Exonians applied early to schools this fall. This is up from 58% last year. There are 315 people in the class of 2006, 30 of whom are postgraduates. Boaz wrote “early decision” in the article but I am hoping / assuming that that is a typo and that he really meant “early” in all its various forms, not that it really matters all that much. ED probably makes for a bigger portion of the applicant pie, but there are some EA schools that are no slouches for applicants. It was also unclear as to whether or not this included ED II round school applications or not, but either way… a very formidable figure. We all made estimates earlier in the term but none of us guessed quite this high.

I’m publishing this to the web since it is, after all, already out in the world thanks to the Exonian. Very interesting. I expect that with that many people applying, some must have applied early to Columbia (which put out results yesterday afternoon) but I don’t know who they are or how many of them there were.

Crazy!

I have spent far too much of my time in the last 24 hours looking for school mailing addresses to label Teacher Recommendation letters. I am in fact only giving one teacher a complete set of stuffed envelopes, since of of my two teacher rec-writers is in the Nicaraguan jungle right now and has hers on file with the College Counseling office.

The common app website “info page” is full of terrible lies. I checked for some of my schools and while some matched up with the addresses there, others were quite different. As such this page is not to be trusted in my mind so I had to go and find independent confirmation for every address. This is something that I should have done earlier but it is also something that schools should make simpler. I find myself despairing under a tsunami of paper and it’s not even as if I’m printing out any applications (yet)!

You don’t believe me, do you? Or, if you’ve spent time volunteering for political parties, you are probably scoffing at this sort of envelope stuffing. Fine. I know it isn’t that bad but it’s tedious and frustrating–especially since this is one instance where people should be really trying to help you find their address. Colleges shouldn’t make it a puzzle or riddle just to find out where to mail things. I can only imagine the misery anyone disabled might have trying to get this information. I know not everyone has 15 schools on their list, but this is still ridiculous. Even half the time I have spent is far too much. Do I blame the common app? I don’t know. It helped, certainly, for the 10 schools that used that form. A little. If I were at home the labels would be printed out and we’d just do the postage on the machine, so it would be faster. Too bad.
Look, an envelope-fan.

Remember how before Thanksgiving break I said I had to do all my essays and applications for every school on my list? I had two essays written then: one common application essay and one generic ’supplement open response’ essay. Fourteen schools left for which I had not yet prepared applications. Where do I stand now?

No farther along.

Or, untrue: I know now exactly how much I have to do, which is a lot. Not unimaginably-much, but still a significant amount of work.

I was supposed to have a) written all my essays and b) pared down my college list from 15 to something less than that over break. I did neither!

It’s b there which annoys me the most. I don’t have any legitimate reasons to take any school off my list right now, and reasons to keep them all. I don’t think of it as risk containment or choice-enabling, just as “these are all places that I could be happy attending.” If you have arguments FOR a particular school which might make me more inclined to favor it over the others (no negatives attacks here!) feel free to share them. I know lots of you go to school at places on my list, or at least work there–I can see you through the internet. So feel free to speak up.

In the meantime, I have essays to write. Sorry to abandon all you readers to the inhospitable wastelands of non-updated blogs, but it’s purely temporary. If I write my goal of two essays by tomorrow lunchtime, I should be back on track. As it is, most of my essays for these schools (those that remain unwritten, that is) are of the short-response variety. Could be worse!

Today the entire senior class spent faculty meeting (a free block for students this morning) performing ‘mock admissions’ with their counselor groups. We had three former Exonians’ common applications in front of us and were given an academic profile for a school–we were to serve as individual readers. We had 10 minutes for the first person, 7 for the next, and 5 for the last kid–this was to illustrate the crush for time that selective admissions has. The school we were simulating had a 35% admit rate the year before. Afterwards one person would volunteer (or was volunteered) to speak for one of the kids, as if they were from his / her docket, and we had a discussion… all in all very neat.

This is the first time the CCO has done this with students: it is normally done with parents over “CCO Upper Weekend” and there are real-live deans / officers from schools there for those. All the college counselors have been on such committees before, too.

It was very interesting to see what we students looked for and didn’t notice–many people overlooked some things that were important, e.g. the socioeconomic element of diversity, an especially prevalent selection factor at extra-selective schools these days. We were only allowed to admit 1 of the three students so we did the usual process of giving them ‘reader ratings’ for academics / extracurricular, so forth and so on.

Lastly Ms. Dolan asked us (our group) if we thought it was a good idea to do it now for the seniors, since it hadn’t been done before. The general consensus was that while it was an interesting and useful activity putting it the week before early deadlines didn’t really help anyone with stress–late upper year was a preferred time, my group felt.

Haven’t had time to see how other people felt about it yet, probably a range from ‘waste of my free period!’ to ‘very interesting.’