the Sam Jackson College Experience

Looking to study for the SAT or just expand your vocabulary generally? Do you like words, and find them fun? Turn your back on those who might call you strange and keep reading…

1. Read a book online! You can get loads for free on Google Books (a lot? who knows!) or the Gutenberg project (over 20,000 free books). Or you can of course order one online from Amazon. Sorry, I know, books are a gimme, but people don’t read enough these days so I wanted to put it on the list.
2. Play Scrabulous! on Facebook or off it. Scrabble, even more addictive and accessible than ever. Always a great way to learn words. Look up what you don’t know, all while you try to make new words! If you aren’t familiar with the Facebook application which lets you play against your friends, check it out now. There goes your productivity. Sorry.
3. Play FreeRice. You guess words’ meanings and every correct answer donates rice to the United Nations towards ending world hunger. Feel good about learning new words… really really good!
4. Eric Barnes of ePrep sent me a link to their new WordSmith vocabulary game, which inspired me to make this post about a couple ways you can learn new SAT words. Key feature here is a ladderboard which adds a nice competitive element, so also worth checking out.

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.

What would college be without participation in random psych experiments?

I won’t be able to personally answer that question because I’m going to have to be a guinea pig in some experiments in order to meet the pretty easy lab requirement for my intro psych course, taught by the excellent Marvin Chun. Signing up for the ‘experiments server’ there is a one hour intro survey which counts for a credit of participation. Some of the questions were normal, but some were pretty weirdly specific. The first two big sets were about spiders and snakes, which questions like:

If I came across a spider now, I would get help from someone else to remove it. T/F

Although it may not be so, I think of snakes as slimy. T/F

I am terrified by the thought of touching a harmless snake. T/F

I would be somewhat afraid to enter a room now, where I have seen a spider before. T/F

And I’m just thinking to myself… are most of the studies the psych department is doing this fall about spiders and snakes? Maybe this is the norm for such things; I have no idea. Some of the sociological questions were pretty creepy, too: “Its OK if some groups have more of a chance in life than others.” (1-7) or “Some groups of people are simply inferior to other groups.” Scary.

Lastly, I kept finding the phrasings really funny as the later sections used the term ‘close others’ to describe some weird friend-romantic-family-amalgam with whom one might share secrets, turn to for support, etc.

Anyway I didn’t sign up for any of the first few studies because of timing, but hopefully I’ll have some fun ones to report back about. I can’t get any money for anything I do for credit, but some could be fun on their own. Hopefully.

I was looking through my folder of old posts and I saw one from ePrep mentioning some Senate pressure last December for the ACT. I had a very interesting discussion about the SAT with some midwestern readers last year, and I thought I would just make a quick post for the record to explain why I never took the ACT.

There are two reasons I didn’t take the ACT, aside from its lack of trendiness here in the Northeast.

• Reason number one is that I had good SAT scores in hand by the time I had the opportunity to ever sit for the ACT.
• Reason number two is that although looking at practice books made the ACT look like a better and more fun test than the SAT, it was almost impossible to take from my then-HQ in Exeter, NH. There were one or two changes to take the ACT throughout the entire year–and both meant getting up around 4:30 and driving to Maine. I don’t know how bad the situation is back home around Boston, but the unavailability of testing centers in the Northeast scuttled my desire to take the ACT.

Now you know!