1楼炫炫爸
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发表于 2005-12-21 13:44
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麻省理工招生办主任的让人落泪的文字
Post-Early-Action Thoughts
[By Marilee Jones, Dean Of Admissions @ MIT.]
I'm sitting home reading the blogs this morning, enjoying my first day off in months. This breather comes courtesy of the finale of the early phase of the admissions process, but also because I'm finally driven to my bed, the result of a bad bronchitis that got the best of me as we worked late to finish those last-minute decisions. Spent nearly four hours in an emergency room on mailing night. Hmmmm... neglecting my health to get the work done... sounds like life at MIT alright. ;-)
Anyway, this gives me time to catch up on the cybertraffic and hear your concerns and it is breaking my heart. You see, my beautiful daughter - the love of my life - is a senior applying to college this year and I am just horrified by the pressures inherent to the admissions process everywhere. Horrified as both a mother and a dean who has dedicated her professional life to education, choosing to leave a life of research science long ago to become a gatekeeper for those who could really make a difference in this world.
Though Nora is not applying early anywhere (resisting the frenzied peer pressure to just get it over with), she is still in agony of a different type. She wonders aloud, did she do the right thing to wait? Will all the spots be gone? Will colleges think less of her because she didn't signal to them that they were her #1? I told her, in my deepest, wisest voice, that she was doing the right thing because she had not yet fallen in love with a specific college. Early programs were for people who were set on that one school, right? Don't worry, I told her, most students do not apply early anywhere and everything will turn out fine in the end "because after all, everything always works out for you".
Then I went to a session for senior parents at her school and learned that only 5 of the 94 seniors in her class were not applying early anywhere. I sat in that auditorium and began to cry, realizing the truth of what she'd been telling me all fall - that the pressure to get it over with was nearly unbearable. Here I was in my dean-of-admissions mindset, oblivious to that experience of holding such pressure while having to still do well in school. I fell in love with her all over again as I realized how brave she was to hold her own and do what was right for her. At her age, I would have totally caved.
So many epiphanies this year about this crazy process. All admissions deans should be required to have a child going through the process at least once to get grounded in the reality of your experience. I am convinced that although we think we know what you are going through (we were your age once... we applied to college and waited for that all-important envelope, we've been rejected and got over it OK and hey, we even got to be the dean), we actually have no clue what your lives are really like because your lives are so vastly different from ours when we were your age.
We hung out, watched just 3 channels of TV (!) or listened to transistor radios, showed up to take the SAT with no preparation, applied to one or two schools and got in or not. You are bombarded by glossy college propaganda ("we're #1 in the universe, the hottest thing around. The US News and World Report agrees, ranking us XX, so we must be good"), by companies trying to sell you their test prep or college counseling or financial services, by everyone out there who has turned applying to college into an opportunity to make a buck.
It's actually sickening to me now because as I stand off and observe as a mother, I see how often the message we adults send to young people is that they are not good enough as they are, that if only they were more involved, took more AP courses, cured cancer already, they would make a better applicant. I really feel that my generation has failed you by failing to act like adults, by failing to just tell the truth about what we do and why, by expecting you at your age to be what we still can't be at ours - perfect.
I read your blog entries and my heart breaks - because as Matt and Ben have told you, we took so many fewer this year (~12%) as we had 10% more applicants. We only have so many spots, so many rooms on campus, and so many of you are perfect for MIT in every way. This year especially I know that while we tell you in all honesty that an Early Action deferral is not a rejection, it will still feel like that to you. I really wish I could comfort you better. I want more than anything for my daughter to be admitted everywhere so she will not feel that sting of rejection so familiar to me at my age and level of experience (you don't get to be Dean of Admissions without some bruises along the way), but as a pragmatic dean, I know that she will probably get some rejections because of the laws of probability. After all, you are all at the crest of the huge demographic bubble, applying to many more schools than students used to, so everyone's probability of acceptance goes down. Ugh. Sometimes the truth is so ugly.
I can only imagine the anxiety you are feeling, the anxiety you describe online, as you are waiting for our decision, and I apologize that we still do things the old fashioned way - on paper, through the mail. I hear you when you say that the agony is unbearable and I believe you with all my heart. But we want to make sure that when we deliver the decisions electronically, it will be done right technologically, and this year we do not have the assurance that we can do that.
My staff also knows how I feel on this topic: while your generation has a completely different attitude towards personal privacy from mine (you guys love pouring it all out to the universe on blogs while my generation fears that Big Brother is watching), you are still teenagers and the public rejection of checking decisions on line in front of others is much more hurtful than finding out in your own time in private under your own control. A sense of control is essential. You don't have to tell everyone where you've applied, nor do you have to tell everyone where you were admitted or rejected. There are many advantages to privacy. Yeah, privacy is good.
That being said, I assure you that we MIT admissions officers will do everything we can to make this process clean, transparent and safe for you. You must see by now how committed we are to make admissions humane again, to treat every applicant like the rare jewel that you are. Ben, Matt, Bryan and Daniel in Financial Aid all love kids, and have the biggest hearts and highest integrity I know. They don't try to spin or package the truth... they just speak the truth and they are in life exactly as they write. I cannot say strongly enough, having just been through the grueling process with them of taking just 377 of 3098 superstars, how lucky I am to work with them, to work at MIT, at this remarkable place where truth matters more than perception, where light matters more than smoke and mirrors.
I know that doesn't make you feel any better, but it's why I get up every morning, to do my part to clean up the admissions process and take it back from the marketers and Big Business, to help return education to its rightful role in the scheme of things. I often tell my audiences, and usually they gasp, that "it's just college, nothing more, nothing less". We adults all know that where you go to college does not make your life in America - you make your life through your choices and intentions. This is not cliche... it is really true. The best people I have ever worked with - the smartest, the most creative, the most resourceful - did not go to Ivy League schools or the MITs of the world. Many went to schools you have never heard of.
My friend, a well-known pediatrician specializing in adolescent medicine, says that the #1 quality of successful and happy people is resilience - the ability to spring back from life's bumps and bruises. Since learning this I have thought that we colleges should really be asking applicants not just for your many successes but for your failures as well, to understand how much experience with resilience you've had. Certainly MIT students need resilience by the boatload because egos are challenged here every day. Humility comes fast. In order to be happy at MIT, all of us - students, faculty and administrators - have to like being surrounded by people who are smarter and more talented than we are. Not all smart people like that concept and there are many other good schools for them.
This leads me to my final thought on this Weekend of the Big Wait. Because I believe that the happiest people always create their own reality, I suggest that you see the college admissions process for what it really is - an initiation or rite of passage into adulthood. We don't really have initiations in this secular culture because America is a culture where Youth, not Wisdom, is celebrated. Initiation is all about growing up. An initiation is a process, not just an event. It is always hard - otherwise it is not an initiation - and it always has an element of fear or anxiety because you are being tested. It requires self-examination, courage and calls upon all skills previously learned. In an initiation you are saying to the world in a public way, "I am ready to be an adult and I will prove it now".
Think about it... through the college admissions process, you are reducing the complexity of your essence and experience to fit a fixed format on a handful of pages, exposing yourself to strangers who will judge you using arcane rules you will never understand, you will be forced to hold your anxiety for many weeks while you are expected to keep up the highest level of performance in school, and then will get the thumbs up or down response in a public way. Sounds like an initiation to me. And it may be the hardest thing you will ever do.
Odds are that many of you will be rejected somewhere this year (especially if you stretch yourself as the most talented people do) and I assure you, speaking as one who has gone before you, that life will present you with many such rejections. As you walk through them, you'll see that things always turn out for the best in the end. I do believe that when the door closes, the window opens. If you get a rejection this year, feel the hurt, yes, feel it fully to metabolize it, let it move through you and then release it. But then look for that open window. It's always there. After all, everything always works out in the end.
Now it's back to bed for me, since my fever seems to have returned. Hang in there, you guys. No matter what happens, better days are coming. I'll write again soon.
Marilee
[ 本帖最后由 炫炫爸 于 2005-12-24 12:50 编辑 ].
