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.”
She turned to the fearful girl, who did not seem at all comforted. Portia sighed.
“And as far as the writing itself, again, not everyone has a natural, flowing, literary style. We understand this. But on the other hand, with seventeen years to write your essays, you’ve certainly had enough time to make sure you’ve made proper use of grammar, and that every single word is spelled correctly. Not because mistakes will tell us you’re unintelligent. I freely admit that most of us in the adult world rely heavily on our computer spell-check programs! But a spelling or grammatical mistake in your application means that you haven’t cared enough to make sure there aren’t any mistakes. And that does mean something to us.”
“You hear that?” Roden said. “Now you know why I’m always on your case about this.”
“It isn’t a timed exam, after all,” Portia said. “You know, you might make an error in the middle of an SAT essay. It’s not a disaster. Anyone can butcher the English language when the clock is ticking. But with your essays, you have time, so take the time to go over them. You might catch something, and be really glad you did.”
“Any other dumb, avoidable mistakes?” Roden said. “Pay attention, everybody.”
“Okay.” She smiled. “A few. Please don’t write us a long, rapturous essay about how much you want to attend Yale. You’d be surprised,” she said when they laughed. “It happens quite a lot. The cut-and-paste function on your computer makes it easy to declare undying love for any number of colleges simultaneously. Unfortunately, it also makes it easy to slip up. I’ve read essays telling me why the applicant feels he is perfect for Stanford, Duke, Harvard, USC, you name it. You know, we get that you’re applying to more than one college. We understand the kind of pressure you’re under. But again, just take the time to make sure you’re ready to seal that envelope. Or, in the case of the common application, or the online Princeton application, before you hit Send. Okay?”
They nodded. Some of them were scribbling notes.
“Another thing. Please don’t mount a campaign. There’s a reason we ask for two recommendations from teachers, plus an optional recommendation from someone who might shed light on another aspect of who you are. There’s very little we can learn from four of your teachers that we couldn’t have learned from two, and just multiply those extra letters by eighteen thousand and you can understand why we’re going to get a bit annoyed if you ask everyone you’ve ever known to send along a testimonial. And think carefully about whom you want writing for you, and make sure they know you well enough to speak knowledgeably about who you are. And please, don’t bombard us with extras. A recording of your instrumental work or some slides of your art, that’s great. And as you probably know, we send these submissions to our departments for evaluation, so you don’t have to worry about a tone-deaf person like me passing judgment on the quality of your Chopin. If you’ve written fiction or play the bassoon, by all means send it along. But hold off on the cookies. I won’t deny that we eat them,” she said, smiling. “But they don’t help our waistlines and they won’t help your applications.”
They looked, she thought, oddly bereft, as if they had secretly taken comfort in the notion of baking cookies for the admissions officers, and now this option had been rudely stolen from them. It was an illusion, of course. These kids were far too sophisticated to try something so crass.
“But here’s the main thing,” Portia told them seriously. “The cardinal rule is: Tell the truth. You may say to yourself, They can’t possibly check every single fact in every single application. And you know what? You’re right. We can’t. And we shouldn’t have to. Because Princeton has an honor code, and we expect honor from the very first moment of your relationship with us. If you lie about your record, will we find out? Probably. And when we do, I can promise you that bad things will happen. Does anyone remember a little situation we had about ten years ago? This is probably too far back for them,” she said, looking over at Roden.
“Johann something,” he said immediately.
“Yes. Before my time, too, actually, but we admitted a student who wrote eloquently about his life as a shepherd out on the high prairie. How when the little sheep were asleep at night he took out his copy of War and Peace and read by the light of the stars, and how he wanted to study Freud as a philosopher, and write nonfiction with John McPhee. Only there was very little nonfiction about him. One day during his sophomore year, a student from Cornell recognized him at a football game. They were from the same hometown, it turned out. In Florida, which last time I checked didn’t have much in the way of prairie.” The kids laughed, but uncertainly. They were not quite certain whom the joke was on. Not that they really cared, as long as it wasn’t them.
“He had a record for mail fraud, and an outstanding warrant, and he was thirty-something years old. So he had to drop out of Princeton and go straight to jail. Bad for him and certainly bad for us, but how could we have known? There is ample opportunity for fraud, as Johann discovered, because we have trust in this process, and the trust is mutual. You trust us to treat your application seriously, and with an open mind, and I can promise you that we will do that. You trust us to read it carefully—which, again, I assure you, we will do. We are going to give your request for admission very thoughtful, very respectful consideration. But in return, we trust you to tell us the truth. To write
your own application. To take your own SATs. Any questions?”
No questions about that, at any rate.
Then, a hand in the back, from an Asian girl, her black hair secured tightly in a scrunchie. “Yes?”
“Yes?”
“Yes,” said the girl. “I wanted to ask about how much it matters if your parents went to Princeton. It’s easier for you to get in if they did, right?”
Portia considered. There was now palpable tension, almost hostility, in the room, which undoubtedly held more than the one Princeton legacy she had already met. In fact—and it would come as no surprise to anyone here—it did make a difference that an applicant’s parent went to Princeton, even though the university bore little resemblance to the old boy network it had once almost exclusively been. Walking the tightrope between Princeton’s sense of tradition and its outreach to the best available students from any and every background was one of her most serious charges, but it required calibration.
“Look,” she finally said, studiously avoiding the gaze of her wrapped-in-an-orange-baby-blanket applicant, “our alumni are very important to us. They’re part of our university culture. They are our tradition. Yes, it matters, and if you look at the statistics, you’ll see that your chances of being admitted are higher within the legacy pool than they are in the nonlegacy pool. But don’t for one minute think that having a parent who attended Princeton means you get to walk in. Again, the statistics for legacies show that most legacy applicants don’t get in. And believe me, you don’t want to be sitting in my boss’s chair when the letters go out and that phone starts ringing. We could fill every class just with legacies, but we won’t, because that’s not our mission. In fact, we have exactly as many students who are the first in their families to attend college as we have students whose families have been attending Princeton for generations, and a whole lot of students who are neither of those things. Okay? Here’s my advice: If you’re not a Princeton legacy, don’t waste your time worrying about it. And if you are, it’s still a very, very competitive process.” She looked at the girl in the scrunchie. “You don’t look happy.”
The girl seemed to remember herself. “No, that’s okay.”
“Joanne?” said Roden. “You had a question?”
Portia looked where he was looking. In the front row, a heavy African-American girl sat cross-legged. Her Deerfield Lacrosse sweatshirt did not fully disguise something essential about her, a displacement. She lacked the sheen of money, the lean, muscular good health, good skin, good clothes. Prep for Prep, Portia thought right away, or one of the other programs that sponsored inner-city kids at some of the best high schools in the country.
“Yes?” Portia said. “Joanne?”
“Uh, well,” Joanne faltered. “I was wondering about financial aid. Is it harder to get in if you can’t pay the tuition?”
“Oh no.” She smiled. “And I’m really glad you asked that question, because it gives me a chance to brag. Like most other selective colleges, Princeton is need-blind. We don’t even look at your financial aid application until you’ve been admitted. Then we put together a package designed for you and your family that will enable you to cover your expenses. And over half of our students are on financial aid, so there’s no stigma about it. Then in 2001 we eliminated the loan as part of our financial aid package. You know those student loans you hear so much about? The ones your parents are still paying off from when they went to college? We don’t give them anymore. We give you a grant to make up the shortfall between what you can pay and what the tuition costs. We did that because we could. We could afford it, and we didn’t think it was right to graduate our students already burdened by debt. Also, we trusted that our graduates would show their appreciation for our gesture, but later, when they could afford to do it. I’m being perfectly frank here. It’s a little too soon to say whether we were right about that. Our first alumni to graduate since these changes were made are still at the start of their professional lives.”
“So nobody’s given you a building yet.” It was Hunter, the smug kid on the sofa.
“Nope.” She declined the bait. “Not yet. But we’re not hurting for buildings.”
She told them about the new student center, the new Neuroscience of Cognitive Control Laboratory, the new residential college to be named after the CEO of eBay, the $101 million arts initiative, Toni Morrison’s Atelier, which brought performing artists to campus to create original artworks with undergraduates. Their eyes began to glaze. There was abundance fatigue, overstimulation. Even the eager ones were stupefied. The note takers had stopped taking notes. Some of them looked crestfallen, as if they could never hope to experience such a playground of riches. Some of them must have been thinking how nice it might be to go to a college where they could get loaded and play Frisbee, at least most of the time. Though selfishly, Portia wanted the Frisbee players to apply. The Frisbee players were the easiest to cut and set the intellectual kids in bolder relief. They made her job easier by providing contrast where the only typical contrast was far more subtle: wonderful student versus phenomenal student, terrific kid versus amazing kid, applicant upon applicant who could obviously come in, do the work, contribute to the community, and go on out into the world to project retroactive glory on Alma Mater. Her bag was full of them. Her desk back at the office was laden with them. And in six weeks’ time, when the application deadline rolled around, the entire building would flood with them, and she, like all of her colleagues, would begin to swim with them, and struggle with them, and sink with them.
“So,” she said brightly. “Any more questions?”
Miraculously, there were no more questions. They moved to a different room in the library: apple cider in waxy cups, cookies (chocolate chip, as it happened, not Oreos) on a paper doily. She spoke to a boy from Mumbai who wanted to be an electrical engineer, the girl with the long braid who wanted to take a class from Chang-Rae Lee, her favorite author, another girl who let Portia know that her father was a famous movie director.
“And what about you?” said Portia. “Are you interested in film? What are you thinking of doing?”
The girl looked up, notably shocked. Perhaps it had always been enough, having a famous director for a father. The thought of having to do something, having to be something, care about something, herself, seemed to have stunned her. Portia spotted Joanne, the girl who had asked about financial aid, near the cider and quickly went to pour her own refill. Joanne was a Brooklyn girl, and Prep for Prep. She was actually a year older than her classmates, she told Portia, having spent her ninth grade back home preparing for the SSAT and the academic challenges of a school like Deerfield.
“That isn’t a problem,” she asked. “Is it?”
“Not at all. Actually, it says a great deal about your determination that you were willing to step back and work that hard to get where you wanted to be.”
Joanne nodded warily. More than likely, they had told her the same thing at Prep for Prep when they’d accepted her with this proviso.
“What are your thoughts about college?” Portia asked her.
“Well… ah… I’m kind of thinking about being a lawyer. But you know, I’m better at math.”
“So you’ll be a lawyer who’s good at math. Maybe you can prosecute white-collar financial cases.”
She frowned. “Or, like, accounting or something.”
“Well, I’m actually one of those people who thinks it’s better not to have too clear an idea when you go to college. Lightning strikes, you know.”
“Yeah,” Joanne said uncertainly, but her classmates were crowding her aside. The orange blanket baby wanted her to know that his lacrosse team made the regionals last year. Hunter from the couch wanted to give her a manila envelope containing, he said, his recent op-ed piece in the Deerfield student paper on the anti-intellectualism endemic at the school. Portia looked at her watch and noted gratefully that she was nearly out of time.
“Mr. Roden?” She looked around for him. H
e was standing with two ponytailed girls in front of the fireplace. She tapped her watch and he nodded, moving off instantly, probably leaving the girls in the middle of their angst-ridden declaration.
“Time to go?” he said, reaching her. “Listen, this was great.”
“Oh, I love coming here,” she said heartily. “The kids are so articulate.”
“Yes, they certainly are. They’re happy kids. It’s a happy campus.”
“Yes,” she agreed, because it seemed like the appropriate response. She made eye contact with her orange blanket applicant, and Joanne, and told the director’s daughter that she was looking forward to her application. Then they were outside in the bright midday sun.
“I remember this smell of burning leaves,” she said as he walked her to the parking lot. “I think all of New England burns leaves the same week.”
“It’s a decree!” Roden said. Like her, he was killing time. “So where are you off to now?”
“Oh, Keene. I’m crossing the border.”
“Public school?” he asked. There was an edge of hopefulness. It was bad enough that she should bestow her favors on any other school but Deerfield. He did not, in particular, wish to share her with his students’ most direct competitors: applicants from Northfield Mount Hermon, Groton, St. Paul’s.
“No. It’s a new school, actually. I think they’ve only been going a couple of years. Outside of Keene. Wait a minute.”
They were beside her rental car now. She opened up the passenger door and put her satchel on the seat. Then she leaned down and hunted out the downloaded directions. “Quest School. Do you know it?”
“Never heard of it,” he said with notable relief. “Experimental? Sounds experimental.”
“I actually don’t know anything about it. It’s a first visit for us. And we haven’t had any applications so far.”
“Ah.” He seemed even more relieved to hear this. “Well, good to know what’s out there.”
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