Chez Chesler

A New York Magazine article, The Swarm of the College Super-Applicants, discusses college applicants who appear to be overqualified for college admission, and has their chances handicapped by IvyWise's founder Katherine Cohen. David Bernstein discusses the article here on the Volokh Conspiracy. In the discussion that followed, one subthread discussed the things that are considered besides grades, SATs and race like extracurriculars include research, athletics and charity work. Commenter Mark Field suggested that a candidate who achieved perfect SATs by spending every spare minute studying was less impressive than a candidate who had perfect SATs and had spent 30 hours a week playing soccer or at a volunteer job. I agree, and not only (Mark's point) because the second candidate achieved the same score with less effort. I've come to realize that the athletes, the "dumb jocks" were learning discipline and time management and interpersonal skills that have served them, and will serve them, well throughout life, lessons that we "nerds" didn't understand. Countering Mark's point, what about the candidate with perfect SAT scores who spent the 30 hours or more watching television, or engaging in any other (for the sake of argument legal) leisure activity that doesn't particularly build discipline or strength or character? I'd say it depends. Does the candidate who was able to "phone it in" throughout high school have what it takes to rise to the greater challenge in college? Will he? Will the college help him, or will it drown him with the firehose of knowledge?

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Here were my statistics for the 1978-1979 school year, my senior year: Courses:

• bc Calculus
• Computers self-designed elective, numerical analysis. I think I spent most of my time on a program written in BASIC and running on our time-shared HP2000E to calculate polar equations [cardiods and such], convert them to rectangular coordinates, and use the 110 baud TeleTypes to display them. Besides the polar-to-rectangular conversions, which were right out of the book, my biggest cleverness was to pre-scan each line, and only advance the typehead as far as the rightmost printing character before issuing a carriage return. At 110 baud, that mattered. At graduation I won a prize for Numerical Analysis for this work. My brother later used that driver for his Rubik's Cube solver.
• Senior Math Team (during lunch)
• Organic Chemistry (abridged college level, it later became a gut course, but it was serious, and taught by somebody with industry experience)
• Astronomy and Astrophysics
• Expository Writing (college credit -- my only wise move, I transferred into this class for the spring semester, realizing I needed a taskmaster like Mr. Sodikow for the discipline)
• Social Studies: US-Soviet relations, WWII to present elective (I wanted Constitutional Law, and that would have made all the difference, but it didn't fit in my schedule. The teacher, William Stark, later became acting principal, and the Board of Ed screwed itself by letting him get away instead of giving him the position permanently. We did a mock tri-party SALT talks [China got to play too], and I represented the Russian military expert. I wanted to launch a pre-emptive nuclear strike, but my teammates rejected this. I wish I'd had Mr. Stark to explain things ten years later.)
• Russian (second year; I'd already completed 3 years of French)
• Gym

Class Standing:

• My 97 out of 100 GPA unofficial placed me 7th out of a class of 750.

SATs:

• Verbal 760 (second time, only 730 first time)
• Math 770 (both times)

Extra-curriculars:

• Key Club (co-founder, secretary-treasurer -- and I met my first girlfriend there)
• Chess Club
• War Games Club (then transitioning from Avalon Hill simulations to fantasy role-playing)
• Yearbook -- that was my homeroom, and I think I was a photographer, but I don't recall ever having anything published or doing much work for them
• Honor Society
• Math Journal -- I remember selling copies in classrooms
• Computer Society -- a kid gave a lecture about how with parts like the ICs in a TI-58 he thought you could design a computer that would fit in a briefcase
• I was a volunteer at Einstein Hospital before my junior year, as part of my pre-med bit, and a member of the local volunteer ambulance corps. I didn't do anything the summer before my senior year except try to sell Fuller Brushes (after paying for samples I ended up at a net loss for the summer) and sometimes visit Shorehaven which I'd finally joined the summer before my senior year.

Athletics:

• Nothing official
• I'd practiced with the Swim Team one off-season, but I wasn't quite good enough, and getting to DeWitt Clinton at 7am and then walking to school wasn't fun
• We played a lot of Ultimate after Chess Club
• My sophomore year I'd taken the wrestling elective in gym. I didn't grow until before senior year so I underweighed the next-lightest kid by 7 pounds and never won a bout. Juniors had health ed instead of gym. I used to like the trampoline until they took it away for fear of a broken neck and a lawsuit.
• I'd finally become disgusted with the public transit system, so I rode my bicycle the 5 miles to and from school almost every day that year

I didn't do any preparation for college admissions. I didn't visit a single school the summer before, but I did read "A Small Circle of Friends". I think the college advisor had given presentations during my junior year, but mostly I tuned her out. When she handed out the CUNY applications in the fall I asked when she'd be handing out the other applications, and she was aghast that I hadn't spent the summer collecting them. (I remember driving out to Queens late in December to borrow an application, maybe to MIT, from a classmate who'd decided not to apply.) My father gave me a lot of help with the application essays. I had a vague notion that I wanted to be away from home, but not so far away that I couldn't come home from time to time, which favored Boston.

Princeton had given me an early "unlikely" before they upgraded to "likely" and then admitted me, but that had soured me on them, which is too bad, because I might have done well at a smaller school. I think Yale was my Early Admission school, and they were very hard on Bronx Science that year -- it was my only rejection. MIT was an easy acceptance, but I was still pre-med, and that would have made a difference. We were allowed only six applications -- teachers were forbidden to write recommendations for students who had filed more. I think Columbia and U Penn were my safeties, but I got the fat envelope from Harvard and that was it.

The New York Magazine article makes me wonder if I would have gotten in, or even if I'd bother trying today. In 1979 Asians were beginning to take over from Jews as the dominant demographic at Bronx Science, but we didn't factor that into our guesses. We knew Blacks and women had an advantage.

But it also has me thinking about whether Harvard should have admitted me, if I should have accepted, and what should have been different.

I didn't know until years after college that I probably have a mild Attention Deficit or depression or Asperger's Syndrome. I was highly lacking in discipline and maturity, but mostly I needed to spend a year partying to get it out of my system. I needed to learn about alcohol, and smokable substances, and girls.

I was horribly misled. I listened to my father about pre-med (and when I finally dropped that after an advisor asked me, sophomore year, "do you want to go to medical school?" and I realized I didn't, the easiest major to complete with my math and physics credits was Applied Math/Computer Science) and didn't listen to him about not taking sophomore level courses. I listened to my high school teachers about putting a fact in every sentence, so when I took the writing test I didn't know that I would never finish the passage in time, and didn't provide analysis in my essay, so I was sent to the speed reading course (the one that is sometimes cited in the press as "Harvard is accepting freshmen so dumb they need to take remedial reading") but I already read some 800 words per minute, so that didn't help, and I started to ignore my Harvard teachers same as in high school. I took Harvard's placement exams and believed them when they said I should take sophomore math and sophomore chemistry, not realizing the speed and intensity of the instruction. I didn't have basic college inorganic chemistry. I only got a good grade in organic chemistry because William von Eggers Doering (who at 89 years old is still associated with the University!) played a dirty trick and told the class aromatic substitutions wouldn't be on the final exam, but they were, and I still remembered them from high school.

After a while I became an "invisible student". I went to sections, but few lectures. I learned to operate a machine shop, a radio station, a film projector, and a shuttle bus; hung out on the house committee, and got drafted into the Undergraduate Council. I played a lot of video games and slept in a lot.

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My conclusion is that this particular student, who did exceedingly well without trying, should have been admitted, but needed much better mentoring. With proper guidance I could have made a lot more from the opportunity.

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Update: Over on the Myspace copy of this blog, ePrep asked for a link. Done. Without endorsing them, they seem to be saying a lot of things with which I agree about "Test Prep and College Planning".