Admission (3 page)

“Is this a class period?” asked Portia when Roden came back for her.

“Yes, but we let seniors out. It’s important.”

Portia suppressed a smile and followed him into the meeting room: midcentury portraits of steely masters overlooking Williamsburg
sofas and wing chairs. She didn’t doubt that Princeton’s admissions office was of vital importance to Deerfield. In spite
of the laudable philosophy of the institution—the education of young minds or something of that nature—college placement was
the
raison d’être
of every prep school, and the annual dispersal of students to the Ivy League and other selective colleges functioned like
a stock market within their world; a prep school that found itself unable to place its students well would find itself unable
to attract students in the first place. Indeed, these economically symbiotic relationships were so long-standing that they
had attained the filmy gleam of tradition, Portia thought, allowing Roden to take her leather bag. But it was far, far more
complicated now. And though there would undoubtedly always be Princeton students who hailed from Deerfield and Andover and
Harvard-Westlake and Lawrenceville, it had also become harder and harder for those applicants to get in, a fact known to every
single student waiting for her to begin her presentation.

The kids sat on the couches and on the floor, some perched on the window seats or leaning against the walls. They seemed to
avoid the wing chairs, as if these were consecrated to adults. They smiled nervously at her or did not smile (in case it was
a bad thing to smile, in case it made them seem too eager or insecure); then, thinking better of that, thinking that it might
make more sense to seem friendly and affable, the ones who had resolutely not smiled began to grin. One bold boy in a green
Deerfield Crew sweatshirt stepped into her path and introduced himself.

“I’m almost finished with my application,” he said, squeezing her hand a little too tightly. “Just waiting on my physics teacher.
I wish you still had Early Decision. I’m totally committed.”

“This is Matt Boyce,” Roden said helpfully. “Both his parents went to Princeton.”

“Yeah, we’re total Princeton,” Matt Boyce said eagerly. “I was, like, wrapped in an orange blanket.”

“I’ll look forward to reading your application,” said Portia with practiced warmth, noting the scowls of displeasure around
the room as this exchange was observed.

Roden was deflecting other students who’d been emboldened by their classmate and held up his hand as they stood to catch her
eye. “Later,” she heard him say quietly. “Wait till later.”

Later meant the inevitable reception, she thought. More bad coffee, but this time with Oreos. And full-throttle adolescent
anxiety.

“Okay, settle down,” Roden said. “Everyone…” He trailed off, eyeing a too-cool-to-care-about-college-admissions trio on one
of the sofas. “Hunter, is there someplace else you need to be?”

“Absolutely no, Mr. Roden,” the boy said, not giving an inch.

“Then let’s please quiet down and give Ms. Nathan our attention. She’s come a long way to be here with us today, so let’s
give her a warm Deerfield welcome.”

Energetic applause. Portia stepped to the front of the room and gave her audience a swift appraisal. At least sixty of them.
It was going to be a tough year for these kids.

“Hello,” she told them. “I’m really pleased to be here, because I grew up nearby and I love coming back. Especially this time
of year. Actually, any time of year except for mud season.” This got a laugh. The tension slipped in the room, just slightly.
“I’m a great believer in visual aids,” she said, “so I’m going to show you a little film about Princeton. Takes about sixteen
minutes. Some of you might already have seen it on our Web site, so you can just amuse yourselves. Work on your college essays
or something.”

Nervous laughter in the room, but they settled in. No one worked on their college essays. They watched, instead, the parade
of bright kids through the bright courtyards and leafy glens of the campus and listened to the newly minted Princetonians
on the screen speak about their freshman seminars, their adventures of the mind and spirit. “Each of you,” intoned Clarence
in an address to the freshman class, filmed a couple of years ago in Richardson Auditorium, “is the kind of person your classmates
came here to meet.” The students were admonished to play with their fancies, to step beyond their comfort zones and take the
chance of learning something truly unsuspected about themselves. They were fantastic, articulate, adorable. And when it was
over, Portia was not really surprised to see two girls wiping away tears.

“Okay,” she said as the lights flicked on. “Lots of great schools out there. Lots of places to get a first-rate education.
So why Princeton? What’s so great about us?”

“You’ve got Toni Morrison,” said a girl with a long red braid, seated on the floor in front of the foremost couch.

“Okay. And twelve other Nobel laureates. Thirteen, if you count Woodrow Wilson.” She smiled. “But who’s counting? We’re not
the only university with an outstanding faculty.”

“What about Albert Einstein?”

“Alas,” she said, “we no longer have Einstein.”

“No,” the boy said, chagrined, “I mean… he
was
there.”

“Well, more or less. He was at the institute, not the university proper.” Due to the small matter of endemic academic anti-Semitism
at the time. But why rain on her own parade? “Here’s my point,” said Portia. “At Princeton, we’re all about the undergraduate.
Yes, we have graduate programs. Graduate students are an important part of our community. But our professors are dedicated
to the undergraduate. Now, you can go to a university with marquee-name faculty, and you can park yourself in a very large
lecture theater and have your mind blown by an hourlong talk on Milton or Buñuel or fractals, or whatever it is you’re into,
but you may never get closer to that lecturer than the first row of the lecture hall. And for many students, that’s just fine.
But the ones we’re looking for want more than that. If you’re the kind of student who wants more than that, we hope you’ll
apply.”

They laughed uncomfortably.

“Look, there is no mystery about this,” she said bluntly. “There is no secret formula or hidden agenda. I’m going to tell
you right now what we’re looking for. We’re looking for intellectual passion. What it’s for—that’s secondary. We are looking
for the student who is so jazzed about…
whatever
… that he or she can’t wait to get to Princeton and find out everything there is to know about it. And that’s, by and large,
not going to be the student who’s content to sit in the lecture theater and take her notes, and take her exams, and collect
her grade, and move on. We’re looking for the students who are looking for our faculty.”

Now there were expressions of real dismay as well. She wondered if she’d been too strong.

“Does this mean,” she said, “that every Princeton undergraduate is a genius? A prodigy? Absolutely not. But what makes Princeton
such an exciting place is that it’s an environment where people care about ideas. We have a faculty who are doing work they’re
passionate about, and every fall, about twelve hundred bright and excited new students turn up to meet them and argue with
them and learn from them. And that makes them happy.” Portia shrugged. “Intellectuals… can be strange.” She laughed. “But sometimes
that’s what I think admissions really is: the care and feeding of the Princeton faculty. We procure fresh young minds to keep
them busy, and I have to tell you, we’re very good at it.”

She told them a story—true story—related to her some years before at a History Department party. The man who’d told her this
was a post-colonialist in a limp suit, who’d had a student he was quite fond of, a sophomore from Pittsburgh. The student
had a twin brother at another Ivy league school, which she naturally refrained from naming, who was also majoring in history.
One day, the professor had been in his office at around ten in the morning when this student arrived, his identical brother
in tow.

“This is Peter,” said the student.

The Princeton student, whose name was Patrick, and Peter both took seats in the historian’s office, and they talked. They
talked about being twins and having twins (the professor had fraternal girls, so physically different that they barely looked
like siblings). They talked about Peter’s growing interest in cold war Europe and his recent class on the economic history
of the Baltic states. They considered a couple of evolving ideas for Patrick’s junior paper, compared and contrasted the schools’
football teams, and discussed the relative merits of Bent Spoon and Thomas Sweet ice creams (the brothers had already embarked
on a highly scientific study). They took a run at Pennsylvania Democratic politics and the failure of the Clinton health plan
and the various repellent aspects of Karl Rove and the Blair scandal at
The New York Times
. They talked about the professor’s daughters’ obsession with Harry Potter and the twins’ remembered literary obsessions from
their own childhood, and they spent a good long while going over the paper the professor was readying for the AHA in two weeks,
about the amateur photographs taken by British troops in the Boer War. And then finally,
finally,
the professor had looked at his watch, seen that it was nearly three o’clock, and announced that he had to go and pick up
his children at school. Whereupon the twins burst into hysterical laughter, and Patrick turned to his brother and said, “See?
I told you. I
told
you.”

They had had a bet, the Princeton brother reported, when the two had at last stopped high-fiving each other. “Peter said I
was always jerking him around when I talked about conversations I’d had with my professors. He said he never got past the
TA in any of his classes, and he’d never be able to just knock on a professor’s door and sit down and have a conversation.
I said I did it all the time, so he bet me. Five hours! I have to say, you surpassed even my expectations. But don’t worry.”
Patrick laughed. “I’ll donate my winnings to charity.”

“You ought to donate your winnings to
me,
” said the history professor, but he wasn’t really angry. In fact, there was definite pride in his face as he told this story,
and Portia had happily purloined the tale.

“I’m telling you this,” she said, “because I want you to think carefully about what you really want out of the next four years.
Ivy League institutions may be wrapped up in one big ribbon, but these are very different institutions, offering very different
experiences. Don’t just apply to these eight schools because they created an athletic conference in 1954. You might be happiest
in a huge university, or in a little college. You might want to see an entirely different part of the country when you go
to university, or even a different part of the world. And let’s not forget, some people just don’t want to work that hard
in college. They want to go, learn a little bit, play a little Frisbee, and get a halfway decent job when it’s over. Not everyone
is looking for the kind of intellectual environment Princeton is offering, and if you’re not, I urge you to save yourself
the effort involved in applying, not to mention the application fee. And I urge you to spare us the very distressing task
of having to reject your application. Please be honest with yourselves, because this is about your well-being, and your goals,
and your life.”

She stopped there. They were all somber, of course. A few of them seemed actively engaged in some sort of internal catechism:
Because Mom wants me to? Because Dad wants me to? Because it never occurred to any of us that I wouldn’t? Because I just want
to get in, and I’ll worry about all this Deep Thoughts crap in my own damn time.

“Okay,” said Portia. “I’m sure you have questions. I’m here to help. Is there something you’d like to know about the university?
Or about admissions?”

It didn’t take long. This was why she’d come, after all, not the promotional film or the save-us-all-the-trouble lecture or
the cute story about the kid who’d never talked to a professor. They wanted in. They wanted the tricks, the secrets, the strategies.
They wanted to maximize and package. They wanted to know what they should write their essays about, and if a 720 on the math
SAT was good enough, and was it better to take six APs and get some 4’s or three APs and get all 5’s?

“Are the essays important?” said a girl with fearful eyes behind thick glass. “I mean, if you have good grades and good scores?”

“At Princeton, the essays are very important. I think perhaps more so than at other colleges. You should think carefully about
them, and spend time on them.”

“But,” the girl said plaintively, “some people aren’t that good writers. I mean, some people are good at other things.”

“Oh, we understand that,” Portia said. She nodded appreciatively at Roden, who was bringing her a chair. “We know that not
everyone’s equally gifted as a writer. We’re not expecting every student to have the same fluency with language, and we know
that people are intelligent in different ways. But as far as we’re concerned, you’ve had about seventeen years to write your
application essays.” Predictably, the kids exchanged looks of horror. “Oh, you’ve been busy. Part of those seventeen years
was probably spent, I don’t know, spitting up and learning to ride a two-wheeler. You’ve been doing your homework and going
to camp, or maybe working on your Facebook profile.” There was a ripple of sheepish acknowledgment through the room. “But
the fact is, you’ve had time to think about how you want to use these brief opportunities on the application, and that’s how
you should think of them: as opportunities. What are the most important things you need to tell us about yourself?
How
do you want to tell us those things? If you decide that you want to squander an essay declaring your undying devotion to
the color blue, or your love for your childhood goldfish Fluffy, well, I’m going to wonder if you really have very much to
say. On the other hand, there are so many things we want to know about you, and with the exception of your recommendations,
this is just about the only way we’re going to find out. We want to know what makes you tick, what gets you out of bed in
the morning. If you love to play sports, we want to know why. If your favorite subject is math, we want to know why. If you
can’t stand biology, make a case for it. Tell us about it. We want to know about the people who have influenced you and the
way you feel about our leaders and our national policies. We’re interested in your thoughts on religion and even popular culture.
Basically, we’re interested in just about everything.”