Advice about college admissions

I had to write an article about the famous and attractive ladies of the Eroica Trio, who play classical music, and there wasn't much new to say about them except to observe that in March they'd they'd begun a blog, and it had all of two postings in it for the entire year. I should take a lesson already; one per month is sort of sparse.

This morning I was wasting time on Yahoo Answers and got an interesting one for some poor Asian kid who I think is about ready to slay himself at age fifteen. Here's the exchange:


i'm a sophomore in high school with a relative high sat score (2020) and a high gpa(4.0) in a rigourous course (IB). I actually moved from seattle to orange county area several months ago during my sophomore year. It was because of my dad's job. However, I was able to adjust quite well and get another 4.0 at the end of the second semeste at this new school. Will the college notice that? How much would that have impact on my college entrance by showing that i can adapt at new environments well? Another thing is that my parents are quite poor(make less than 3500 a month) and i'm going to this normal public school surrounded by multiple magnet schools that have sent kids to ivy schools. I couldn't transfer to those magnet schools because they didn't accept any nor did i know anything about them before I moved in. How would going to a relatively decent public school, rather than a fancy private school or a magnet school affect my college admission? do i have a higher chance if im asian?

To which I replied:

Let's see. You're in the tenth grade, meaning that you're what, fifteen? What you ought to be worrying about is being fifteen, which involves a great deal more than what some college admissions committee is going to think of you in three years.

It sounds very much as if you're being primed to attend an Ivy League school, or have otherwise placed some very high expectations on yourself. This is fine unless you devote your life to worrying about it, and there's a tone to your well-written question that indicates that this may indeed be the case.

College admissions decisions are based on any number of things, not all of them entirely rational. A school like Yale can easily take the best of every class, and they generally do. But beyond that, they'll look at where you live, what sorts of interests you seem to have, your family, and try to judge your particular talents in an effort to ensure that you'll benefit from the school and that the school will benefit from you. In any school, the students learn as much from their peers as from their professors, and so it's helpful to have a diverse group.

I'll tell you something: one thing that scares the hell out of any selective college is the kid who pins their rejection letter to his shirt just before he hangs himself. The school you went to is just not that big of a deal in the US, or at least it shouldn't be. Asian nations have a really swell tradition of subjecting their kids to The Big Exam of Life, and if you flunk it you'll be painting manholes for the rest of your life. We don't work that way here, though a lot of Asian parents don't believe that.

You write well, and your letter indicates that you can reason in a fairly sophisticated manner. It's fine to be a serious kid, and it sounds like you are. But you are far too young to be worrying about the opinions of anyone besides your friends, your close relatives, your current teachers, and yourself.

Just do your schoolwork, take part in whichever activities interest you _without_ concern with how they might look on an admissions form, and take time to do nothing, especially in the summer. Do things like swim, or hanging out trying to look tough with your friends. Climb trees: you're still young enough for that. Get a dumb job collecting shopping carts at the grocery store. Read books that don't have a lot to do with achievement and don't claim to be teaching you something. If you are female, you should be dancing and learning silly techniques of hairdressing with your friends.

When the time comes to fill out college admissions forms, you'll just fill them out and send 'em in. Ivy League schools will usually arrange for one of their local alumni to interview you, and one thing the school does not want to see is some kid who has memorized the entire works of Isaac Newton for the occasion and is likely to explode within the next ten minutes: this is not who they need in their freshman class.

Some success in life depends on school and contacts, but much more of it is dependent on character, some particular talent you might have, and a fair proportion of luck, and you must learn to be philosophical about all three.

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I was saner than my father was when it came to going off to college. He was terrified of the whole procedure, having been well-trained himself by being snatched off the street at age sixteen by the University of Chicago for their weird 1930's 'great books' program. He left my sister pretty much alone to choose Ohio State. But he made me apply to Harvard, which I didn't care about, Yale, which I cared less about, and McGill University, which I'd never heard of. There was the US Naval Academy, too, and some weird British outfit where you wound up being an officer in the Royal Navy when you were done; just the thing every kid from Cleveland Heights longs for.

I went to Ohio State.

M Kinsler