“The Lord prefers common-looking people. That is why he made so many of them,” Abraham Lincoln said. The Lord must also prefer B students because he made a lot of them too.
The worst advice you’ve ever gotten has been from the people who know you the least.
“Take a fifth year of Spanish;” “Do more community service hours;” “Join more clubs;” “Build a nuclear submarine in your basement;” “Remove your own appendix;” “Wash behind your ears.*”
This advice may be right for somebody; but it certainly can’t be right for everybody. Yet all high school seniors get the same advice about applying to college as if each and every one of them presented the same profiles and were applying to the same schools.
Consider the generation-defining advice, “Plastics!” (Extra credit to anyone under 40 who can identify the movie from which the phrase originates.) The well meaning lout invites the recent college graduate to sink into the same anonymous lifestyle from which many in the community wish to extricate themselves.
My admiration for Randy Sparks remains undiminished. But in the gym, he and I are doing different workouts. Otherwise, I’m going to leave in a wheelbarrow.
In 1982, one of my young friends–subsequently admitted at Brown–was told about the “myth of the well rounded student.” “Top” colleges don’t want a class of well rounded students, she was informed. Colleges want a well rounded class of lopsided students. In the 1990s, this advice morphed into “the hook metaphor:” Triumphant applicants at “top” schools had to be a concert violinist or a star water polo player or senior class president.
A decade later, this advice has evolved once again. Now part of the accepted popular culture in admissions is that successful applicants will be “an inch wide and a mile deep.”
Kids who do a little bit of a lot of things have no chance.
Same song. Same verse too.
But each school has only one valedictorian (Garrison Keiler’s protestation that in Lake Wobegon all students are in the top 10% of their class notwithstanding,) the symphony only one first chair violinist, the Space Travel Team one captain, the Nerd Society one spokesperson.
Is this advice, that successful applicants to top schools be exceptionally good at only one extracurricular, true? Yes, the well rounded kid who is “only” a member of the student council, the National Honor Society and the “Don’t Club the Seals Club” has no chance at the “top” schools. So where do these kids go? Aren’t they doomed to lives of quiet desperation? Won’t the first line on their resumes read “Drank Wine in the Gutter”?
Not so much. The majority of colleges in this country admit virtually every qualified applicant. You’re not dialing direct? (Math and Critical Reading scores both 800.) Neither am I. You can go to college anyway.
Remember too that admissions to college in this country only became competitive after WWII. Before the G. I. Bill, the application to Harvard was only one question long: “Can your fahthah write a check?” When Warren Buffet was rejected from Harvard two generations ago, only one student in three was getting the thin envelope. Today, Harvard rejects 10 of 11 applicants.
In short, admissions advice for top students, “Get all As in AP classes and be truly extraordinary in one arena, preferable trombone” doesn’t apply to all applicants. “Take challenging courses, study hard, learn a lot, and sample a number of intrinsically interesting activities not all of which involve brass instruments” might work just as well. And while you’re exploring and learning about yourself, you can make our 16th president proud.
* I find this hygiene guidance particularly suspect. As Shel Silverstein pointed out: No one can see behind your ears.
