Admission

by Jean Hanff Korelitz

  The secret of her own mediocrity was quite likely similarly held by men and women all over the industry. To wade through these best and brightest seventeen-year-olds was to be, at once, deeply reassured by the goodness and potential of the American near-adult population and deeply humbled by one’s own relative shortcomings. These students were absolutely going to make scientific discoveries, solve human problems, produce important works of art and scholarship, and generally—as so many of them pointed out—give back to their communities and make the world a better place. She, on the other hand, was fit only to make life-altering decisions on their behalf. And how could that make sense?

  A room like this, she thought, finally gathering up her several files and the three empty canvas bags, had secrets everywhere. Every file drawer—and there were hundreds of them—was crammed with files that were crammed with secrets that were ardently protected by office protocol. (Clarence, in fact, was such a stickler for the privacy of the process that he asked admissions officers not to discuss applicants in the upstairs corridors.) But much mischief could be accomplished here, if one were so inclined, and when you thought about it—as Portia did now—wasn’t it sort of surprising that mischief didn’t get done all the time? This office, after all, employed a number of undergraduates at the height of the season, who sat for hours at a time in this room, slitting open the incoming envelopes and filing, filing, filing each filament of information into the thousands and thousands of separate folders. Part-time application readers from the town and university community were similarly hired during the most intense months to carefully read applications and write a first reader report. People wandered in and out, delivering food or picking up the shredded documents for recycling. Sometimes, when the receptionist was on break or in the bathroom, prospective students and their families had even stumbled inside, stopping in shock when they realized where they were and what they were seeing. Automated though it was, the system seemed rife with the potential for human influence—accidental or outright sabotage—yet you never heard of it happening. Did it happen? she wondered, closing the office door behind her and hearing the lock click. Was there some secret tradition of midnight fixing, unexplored by the ax-grinding journalists who seemed so fixated on the notion of admission for sale to big donors? Had there ever been an administrative assistant intent on sneaking in his or her cousin’s child with a few covert taps of the keyboard? Or a Princeton undergraduate secretly fixing things for a friend from home? How about an idealistic admissions officer who couldn’t bear to let some favorite applicant go? It was odd, Portia thought, that these questions had never occurred to her, that she had for years placed a mindless trust in the system and its practitioners, from Clarence on down to the student interns and outside readers, when any of them, probably, could find some way to tamper with the works. If they wanted. And who among them had never wanted?

  She felt, when she unlocked her own office door on the second floor, an unmistakable and terribly welcome sense of tranquillity. Here, all was unaltered from the morning of her departure for Vermont, when she had stopped in briefly before meeting Rachel for their walk: her Word-a-Day calendar set to December 24 (when its word was, inauspiciously, “Inauspicious”), a scrawled note on her desk to chase down an application from a Groton student she’d read about in a Boston Globe piece on young environmentalists, and three bundled stacks of applications, fifty in each, which Corinne had dropped off. These folders, for which Portia was to act as second reader, hailed from her old district and were doubtless weighted with future doctors, scientists, mathematicians, and engineers from the heavily Pacific Rim immigrant applicant pool, an overendowment of abundantly overqualified kids. She sort of missed them, it occurred to her. She missed the Bay Area kids who hauled their cellos into San Francisco on the weekends, redesigned the computer systems for their schools, and interned with research scientists at Berkeley, and the Silicon Valley kids, shuttling from the tennis team to their community service duties at the tutoring center, and the Hawaiian kids with their fantastic names and intensive luau dance training. They were all in there, of course, and who else? Plus, she was anxious to see what this least favorite colleague, forced from her Mid-Atlantic comfort zone, had made of her new charges.

  She stood for a long moment, merely looking.

  Outside was starless night and very cold. Inside, it was also dark, and she was entirely alone, except for the kids in their thick and suppliant folders. She felt a kind of duty to them, but not only a duty. She truly preferred to be with them, these fleshless people, their best selves neatly in black-and-white on the two-dimensional paper and primly contained within each orange file. And she felt necessary to them, and she felt accountable to them, and were those really such terrible things to feel? She took off her coat and reached for the topmost folder.

  My favorite saying is “no guts, no glory.” I can’t recall who said it first, but whenever I am in trouble or facing a big challenge, I think about this saying. What it means to me is that anything worth doing is worth doing well, not only in sports but in life. There have been times when our team is in the dumps because things are not going well, but I always draw inspiration from this saying. It has helped me to be a stronger individual everyday.

  CHAPTER FOURTEEN

  AREN’T THERE THINGS TO TALK ABOUT?

  The kid who had written about zombies, it turned out, was the real thing. His impenetrable essay, which she had dispatched to David through the university mail, came winging back the first week in January with a cover note that read: “Definitely. Absolutely. Yes, please.”

  Portia found the file on the overhead shelf she used as a parking lot for applications awaiting something or other. She slipped this memo in the back and made a note in the “Department Rating” area of the reader’s card, a seldom used but highly influential section on the front. Then, before she let it go, and armed with David’s endorsement, she made another attempt to glean some sense from the essay:

  Certain things are conscious. We may not know what it’s like to be a dog, or a bat: but we know (or at least we think we know) that animals have feelings and experiences. We also know that a creature’s conscious life is somehow determined by what’s going on in its brain. So here’s a question: What exactly is the relation between conscious experience and the brain activity that underlies it? Many philosophers—materialists—have thought that conscious experience just is brain activity, in the same sense in which heat just is the motion of molecules. The Zombie thought experiment puts pressure on this sort of view. We seem to be able to imagine or conceive a creature that is just like you in every physical respect, down to the last detail, but which is altogether unconscious. A Zombie will move and talk as if it were awake and genuinely aware of its surroundings; but its inner light is OFF. It has no subjective experience. Now the fact that we can imagine such creatures gives us some reason to believe that they are logically possible. But if it’s logically possible for a creature to have a brain just like yours and no conscious experience, then consciousness is not literally identical to brain activity. Instead we should say that brain activity normally causes consciousness, in the sense in which heating up the filament in a lightbulb normally causes it to glow. On this view, the physical aspects of an organism are distinct from its subjective, mental aspects: at best there are various causal laws connecting the two domains.

  She read this twice but could not follow the logic past the point about the inner light being OFF. (Did this, in fact, indicate that her own inner light was OFF?) Nonetheless, she wrote her summary and checked “High Priority—Admit” at the bottom of the card, then put the file in the pile of folders to go to Corinne for second reading.

  Her colleagues were all in the early stages of their shared annual affliction. The traveling was done for the year, and what remained was this confluence of the cold and winter, and the all-in-our-hands sense of bleak responsibility: to the trustees and faculty, of course, and to the guidance counselors (who were, for be
tter or worse, their partners in the work of getting the right students into the freshman class), and, yes, to the alumni, because Princeton honored its graduates and wished to retain their high opinion. But mainly to the applicants themselves, who collectively seemed to hover everywhere in Portia’s imagination, like spectral Jude the Obscures, waiting for the verdict on their futures and—Portia very much feared—their sense of self-worth. Sometimes she imagined them, waiflike across Cannon Green and behind West College and along Nassau Street, winding their white, supplicating hands through the great iron gates. (This was not, needless to say, an image she shared with her colleagues.) No one was complaining aloud, but then again, no one had to; the weight of the burden was intense and everywhere, and the entire crew (fighting the same cold) shuffled through the corridors with the same set of dour thoughts.

  Portia, too, was well into her winter sinus misery, a malady that typically began after New Year’s, did battle with a tag team of antibiotics over the winter months, and finally surrendered to modern medicine just in time for the pollen surge in April. It had begun right on schedule the week she returned from Vermont, flickering behind her cheekbones as the year turned, sneaking tendrils of pain along the facial nerves, coiling around her ears and scalp. At her appointment with the internist she got a prescription for Ceftin, the best of a bad lot, and asked for Ambien, which she’d been given but was not yet brave enough to use. Instead, she lay in bed timing the pounding in her head against the dull clicking of the bedside clock, feeling the pain across her entire face, as if the bones of her skull were contracting steadily, the flesh struggling against containment. This was not an effective sleep aid. The house would not seem to warm up, and she wondered if there was something she was supposed to have done to the boiler after her return; but the boiler was Mark’s domain, and she did not want to ask him about it. She did not want to ask him about anything. She did not want her reverie that he did not exist, and that therefore nothing had happened between them, to be broken. Besides, she was hardly at home, so it hardly mattered that she was cold.

  Once again, this year, the applications had jumped—up eight hundred this time—more evidence of the still swelling population bubble of teenagers and, too, perhaps, that their efforts to reach beyond the traditional applicant pool, to students who might not have thought to apply ten or even five years earlier, were proving successful. It all seemed utterly overwhelming just now, with every surface in her office piled with files and boxes more waiting downstairs in the office, but no one was panicking because they always felt this way at this particular moment in the cycle. There had never, in Portia’s recollection, been any real worry that they wouldn’t finish in time, though the task did have a way of expanding to fill every worker’s every available hour.

  This was the point in the admissions cycle when Portia became reacquainted with many of the students she’d spent the previous spring encouraging to apply to Princeton. Selling the university, of course, was not difficult, but overselling it to potential applicants sat near the top of every critic’s list of complaints (the gist of this being that top-tier colleges went out of their way to get vast numbers to apply, only to admit an ever smaller percentage and earn, as a result, a higher U.S. News & World Report ranking). But while Portia did sometimes wish there were a way to selectively discourage the students she met while visiting high schools, she would never—and could never—do it. Not only was it the office’s philosophy that every student should feel welcome to submit an application, and that equal and thorough consideration awaited everyone who did so, the fact was that you just couldn’t tell, when you looked into their serious, tremulous faces at the information sessions, who was the kid who’d cheated his way through Calculus BC and who was the kid whose English teacher was going to call him “the most exciting student I’ve had in my thirty-year career.” What if she discouraged some student who couldn’t break 1200 on his SATs from applying, when he would turn out to be idiosyncratically cerebral, a true original kid whose unqualifiable abilities would lift the discourse in every class he enrolled in? How could you know that the thoroughly dull high school junior struggling to make conversation over cider and cookies would emerge as the writing program’s most gifted novelist in a decade? Still, when their faces came back to her now, swimming up from the accounts of debating triumphs and stage fright at the piano recital, she sometimes wished she’d been able to say to them: Don’t. Don’t try for this. Don’t want this or, worse, make some terrible connection between who you are as a human being and whether or not you get in.

  The pool, once again, was absurdly strong, the applicants more driven, more packaged, more worried, even than the year before. They were decent kids who had never considered that their life experience was at all unusual, since they were like everyone else they knew, so when they set foot outside the United States, on a church home-building trip to Mexico or a visit to relatives in Bombay, they were stunned by the poverty, dumbstruck to discover how wealthy and privileged they were. They wanted to fix things, cure diseases, make it better. They wanted to turn into the amazing people their teachers swore they were and their parents had always planned for them to be. They wanted not to fall short at this finish line of their entire lives (so far) and be that kid who’d thought he was so great, who’d aimed so far above himself. Portia felt for them, of course. She wished, as she checked, again and again, the box reading “Only if room” (a euphemism for no, as there was never room), that she could reach through the folder to the kid beyond and say, Anyone would be ecstatic to have their child turn out as great as you, and, Please, go and do all the things you say you intend to do.

  Few of them were eliminated easily. The campaigners, who fashioned elaborate dossiers with glossy eight-by-tens of their grinning faces and sent in reams of thick stock pages enumerating each spelling test and charity walk as far back as middle school, could not be dismissed out of hand, because you couldn’t hold someone’s personality against them, and besides, some idiot might have told them to do it. The student who provided an eighteenth-century family tree with the name of a distant ancestor circled in red could not be eliminated instantly, though his cover letter said he wanted to go to Princeton because his antecedent had “helped set up the place.” The girl who had entered her e-mail address as HotSxxygrrrl69@yahoo.com could not be declined on the spot, because even Princeton applicants were allowed to be idiotic teenagers. The ones with low SAT scores couldn’t be dispatched quickly, because some of them were superb and thoughtful writers, with recs that begged her to see past the numbers to this singular awakening mind. So when she came to an applicant who, given the benefit of every doubt, fell decisively short, she was relieved: Here was one she did not have to bring to committee, sell to her colleagues, sell to Clarence. The math geeks who hadn’t done any math outside of school—“Only if room.” The literary types who were poor writers—“Only if room.” The faux philosophers, high on Nietzsche and Ayn Rand, who only hoped to find professors worthy of having them as a student. She had no need to trouble David with their essays:

  As Sartre wrote in his play No Exit, hell is other people. This play illustrates the theory of existentialism, which is the philosophy that since God is dead, we are all ultimately responsible for everything that happens to us. This philosophy is valid in my opinion. When I first read Sartre’s play, I realized that other people are cowards who hide behind religion and rules and laws. They think that their lives are not really up to them, and this makes them lazy and complacent. Since then, I have been reading the great works of philosophy on my own, starting with the Apology of Socrates which shows that it is important to stand up for what you believe in even if everyone else thinks you’re wrong. After one year of intense study, I began to think of my own philosophy. I call it metaexistentialism, and it builds on the profound insights of Socrates and Sartre. My first book, Dionysus Novus: A Treatise on Agony and Ecstasy, is almost complete and I hope to publish it soon. It argues that we are most real when we exp
erience intense emotions, and that those who are not capable of intense emotion live lives that are mediocre and sad. In college I hope to develop these ideas, and possibly teach courses in philosophy and literature to impart my philosophy to others. I have found that other people often find it hard to understand my theories. But they are not professional philosophers, and so that is to be expected. I look forward to studying with important professors who will definitely understand what I am saying.

  “Only if room.”

  The Fannie Lou Hamer essay had not turned up in the database, but Portia, reading through it again, could not let go of her suspicions. Misspelling both the title and author of your favorite book, as this Rhode Island girl had done, was pretty close to unforgivable on a college application, but it was the disparity between this carelessness and the superbly fluid, well-constructed—and correctly spelled—essay that bothered her. There was little else noteworthy in the application. The girl was a strong student who’d taken summer classes at Brown and played squash. She did like the fact that the girl had written about Hamer, not a more obvious civil rights figure—that counted for something—but in the end she could not disentangle herself from that Pride and Priviledge. “Only if room.” And there would not be room.