2007-04-05 - 12:08 a.m.
Some really bad stuff has happened around me recently, if not to me directly. I can�t write about it yet and I don�t feel ready to anyway. Instead I�ll talk about something that I thought about last weekend. I read an article in the New York Times about high school seniors (the article focused on girls actually, although no real reason for why their cases were any different from boys� was given) trying to get into college.
The article was about how busy the kids were with activities, trying to achieve some perfect blend � academic, athletic, artsy, socially conscious, etc. � that will make them an undeniable college applicant. �The Game�, we used to call it, back when I was in high school. It was also about how arbitrary admissions decisions seem. Yeah, I�ll buy that. Certainly, any selective college can fill their entering class five times over with entirely different, but equally well-qualified, candidates.
Acceptance/rejection letters were apparently received mostly last weekend. I remember mine well, fifteen years ago. I�d applied to eight colleges and received letters from like six on the same day. Supposedly, you could tell the outcome of your application before you opened the mail. If you�d been accepted, the envelope would be a �fattie� � stuffed with an acceptance letter and all sorts of promotional material. If you�d been denied, you got a �thinnie� envelope with only a rejection letter.
Well. This seemed a bit too convenient to me and some of what I�d gotten was sort of medium-sized � not very helpful. I opened my letters (nervously, of course) and every one was a �fattie�. I�d been accepted everywhere. I remember my reaction after I�d opened them all. I cried. Not tears of joy, tears of sadness. See, I had little doubt I deserved to be accepted into elite colleges. I was just equally sure I didn�t deserve to graduate from high school.
It probably won�t surprise you to learn that I was a complete academic disaster in high school. Saint Ann�s is often romanticized for having no grades. But the written reports from teachers that we get instead were far more illuminating. I probably could have figured out just what work I needed to do to get an �A� at another school and cover up my slothful ways. Instead I got ugly written reports like: �Geoff is a real smart guy, but he really needs to come to class more. As it is, it�s totally unacceptable.�
Where was I, if not in school? It�s really hard to remember. I wasn�t drinking, wasn�t doing drugs. Some people thought I was somewhere out partying and having a good time, but I was just being depressed. Some people thought I was disappearing to do some sort of high-tech government research or something, but it wasn�t even that. I would simply disappear or at least try to. From myself, I guess, but also from the world. I do remember being very afraid to have anyone else see me so out of my head.
I sometimes had places I would go to avoid other people. Sometimes I would get on the subway, intending to go to school, and just keep going. A few hours to the end of the line and a few hours back, mostly underground. I found the darkness outside the fluorescent-it car and the gentle rumble of the train wheels strangely comforting. And the anonymity was liberating in a way. No one knew where I was and no one knew who I was, one of thousands of subway faces, somewhere under the Bronx.
But I got into colleges anyway. From a school for smart kids, great test scores, actor in school plays (and in the non-school Immigranti!, New York�s only Soviet/American Jewish youth rock musical, which played, among other places, off-Broadway a few times), fencing team, and more. My teachers� reports were actually phrased more ambiguously than the direct shot I wrote above, so that colleges could read good (or at least vague) things into them for applicants they liked otherwise.
It�s so funny that the college application process never asks the key question: why are you doing this? Because your parents/school/society expects you to? Because you can�t think what else you might do right now (maybe we don�t know either)? Have you ever even thought about this? As I�ve said, no paper test can ever really judge whether you�re actually ready to learn. Whether you have the desire and commitment for college right now. Whether now�s the right time.
I got an email today from a fellow RUE graduate, saying he had done alumni interviews of applicants to Brown. I told him that I wouldn�t know what to ask a 17-year old except: �So, are you sure you want to do this college thing right now?�
� 2007 Geoff Gladstone
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