Stories adcoms tell after hours

Parents Forum
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<p>[From UChicago Admissions Dean Ted O'Neil's Class of 2009 Convocation Speech (It helps if one has heard of the movie "The Aristocrats", but it's not required) <a href="http://phoenix.uchicago.edu/ted/classof2009.html%5B/url%5D"&gt;http://phoenix.uchicago.edu/ted/classof2009.html&lt;/a> (the whole speech is worth reading, it is a riot.]</p>

<p>Speaking of the movies: When admissions people get together after-hours they all tell this one story – everyone has his or her own way of telling it, a simple story that has made the rounds for years and years. The old timers tell it, and the new ones tell it. Usually it isn’t for the public, but since your arrival is so belated, maybe you deserve to hear a rendition.</p>

<p>Kid comes into an admissions office, says I’ve got an act for you admissions guy says, “What kind of act?” and the kid says, “A family act.” “Okay, how does it go?” Kid says, “High school junior spends $4,000 on a Princeton Review class and SAT scores go up 120 points, now he figures he doesn’t have to go to #10-15 on the U.S. News list but can get into 1-10, so the mother takes a second job to pay off the Princeton Review and buys the Platinum Package from an independent college counselor for $30,000 so Junior can be advised about when to help his fellow man and how best to package the experience, and when to take power naps, father, meanwhile, talks to the accountant, finds out that even a home equity loan won’t bring enough cash to get the kid into the right summer program to help repair castles in Carcassonne as a community service project, without which Junior won’t get into college 1-10, to say nothing of having the money to send the boy to Tibet to practice spinning prayer wheels as proof of his spirituality and concern for diversity and international harmony, and besides there is the tuition for sophomore daughter’s harp camp in Maine, so he decides to sell the car, which means mom and dad have to use the Metra to get the younger brother to his 2:00 a.m. hockey practice, which he’ll need if he wants to use the athletic hook to get into an Ivy or at least a “Little Three,” a trip which takes one parent away from Junior’s homework – the family has a pact that at least one parent will write at least one draft of each required paper due in the senior year and the first draft of the college essays - and Junior has carefully chosen the “most challenging” senior coursework – AP Stats as his math, AP Psych as his science, “The History of the Vietnam War” as the social science, “The Literature of the Vietnam War” as the English elective, and “Reading a Balance Sheet” as preparation for his college internship, which he means to be the culmination of his liberal arts education. Parents are working so many extra hours and otherwise spending so much time on the Metra train on the way to hockey practice that sister is ignored and stops practicing the harp, thereby settling for a future without a prestigious college education, hence, perdition, has herself heavily tattooed, drops out of the Key Club, joins a heavy metal harp band, and spits venomously whenever Junior pulls out his SAT word-list and adds another entry to his on-line collection of homonyms. Metra goes on strike, little brother can’t get to hockey practice, is kicked off the team, begins to think of a future at the community college or emigration to Germany where he can join an apprentice program for tool and die makers, and mom and dad begin to feel strains in the marriage, but vow to stay together to see Junior through the second administration of the SAT IIs, because they know that with support, and coaching, he will be able to get an 800 on the writing exam unless he is tempted to be either original or imaginative, which would result in a lower score, and his having to settle for, heaven forbid, a state university which means no job at Goldman, Sachs, so why bother to go to college at all? Father finds that he begins to day-dream of the time when he carried Junior’s egg on his toes beneath a flap of his own skin during the long Antarctic winter, and vows that the boy will never go to college in a windy and frigid Midwestern city where, if the egg drops, cracks will reveal the icicles which had been his not-yet fledgling son, and in his identification with the precarious, fragile frosty egg decides that we will only apply to Duke, Emory, UVA, and, of course, Dartmouth if we can get in, damn the cold, they are rated 7th in U.S. News. All the while, mother swims under the ice eating enough chum to regurgitate meals for her newly hatched chick to make him strong enough for cross country practice, which should look pretty god on the application despite the fact that his little webbed feet limit his speed, and he finds that flopping on his belly to slide along the ice doesn’t really improve his time, not at all in Raleigh, Atlanta or Charlottsville. Family meets and decides to prune away younger brother and sister to help foster the blossom that they wish Junior actually had turned out to be, they sell the home and move to Kazahkstan, hoping that geographical diversity might work the trick at any, please, just any, top 10 college or university, and they are last seen deciding to which school they will apply Early Decision.”</p>

<p>The admissions guy looks at him and says, “Wow! that’s quite an act – what do you call it?”</p>

<p>The Meritocrats.</p>

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<p>ROFLMAO!!!</p>

<p>But in MY family, we made sure to count AP Psych as a "social science," not a science! :-D</p>

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<p>Makes me wish UChicago was in our radar.</p>

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<p>Now that we've heard the joke, let's get serious: this is precisely what happens in today's college admission process -- and the requirements outlined are exactly what must be met in order to achieve those goals. More often than not, while the adcoms think this is funny because they've seen this all too often in the thousands of applications they examine, they are also the same people who are encouraging this behavior by demanding these things from their applicants. I beg to offer the following, that it is the adcoms who are the meritocrats, not the parents sacrificing their lives for their kids' futures by playing by the rules that the adcoms themselves set forth.</p>

<p>BTW, the penguin kid wound up being accepted at the Cornell Hotel School which was impressed that he dressed as a maitre d' for his interview.</p>

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<p>When does the movie come out?</p>

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<p>Wanna hear something depressing?</p>

<p>A teacher suggested to my son he look into a certain local charitable endeavor (he thought S would be well-suited for due to certain skills and interests) to fulfill schools's communtiy service requirement. My son investigated, liked the idea, and made an appointment for an interview. The first thing that the community service coordinator at school said was, "Oh, I think doing that job really helped X get in to Stanford." At the actual job interview, the first thing that the charity-runner plugged was "we'll write you a letter for college."</p>

<p>I was so disappointed, as my son's original focus had been on using his interests and skills to "give" and the ADULTS involved switched it on to "whats-in-it-for-me" college-grubbing!</p>

<p>&%$$#*!</p>

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<p>There is no guarentee that any of it will get you into college so I say do what makes you happy.</p>

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<p>Ted O'Neill is quite insightful and unique as an admissions dean. I found these other quotes from him as well:</p>

<p>From a previous speech: " How do we know you, and what gives us leave to claim you as the best? We don't know you, really, by your board scores, high as they are... Or, by the A's you earned in high school...Nor do we know you by tallying the number of you who are musicians and athletes and volunteers, that being many,many of you. In our profile we list those things on the statistics page, a page subtitled, "Notorious Liars." </p>

<p>Another great quote found at the bottom of this paragraph about admissions process: Because of Chicago's narrow appeal to brainy kids, perhaps 80 percent of all its applicants could succeed here. Far fewer, of course, will ever be accepted. This buyer's market allows the admissions staff to consider a delectable question: if nearly every applicant is qualified, then who is most desirable? For Chicago, the answer is the high-end student who embraces complex ideas and ceaseless discussion, who reads "Anna Karenina" and can't wait to tell someone about it. "We tell people we're seeking rigor," O'Neill confides one brittle December day, walking through a sunlit stone quadrangle. "What we're really seeking is love."</p>

<p>I remember another concerning a discussion of summer EC's, that to paraphrase, said, ...We would prefer it if the applicant wrote that they spent the summer reading books while sitting under a tree.</p>

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<p>My S chose a different school, but I'll always have a soft spot for the U of Chicago. Their admissions people seemed quite genuine and the application process was such that I felt they really wanted to know who my son was underneath all the data. I'm sure it's going to one of those "road not taken" questions for S1.</p>

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<p>One last comment -- S's move-in day was Sept. 13th. He was still working at our local supermarket up to the weekend before, and had several people ask him why he was still here! They just assumed that there must be a problem if he hadn't yet gone away to school.</p>