Sun 25 Oct 2009
Rubberband (Wo)man
Posted by jeffz under Admissions at 7:47 am
A Williams-related anecdote is featured in this article on college admissions essays:
One essay, written several years ago, sticks out in Ms. Taylor’s mind as a good example of such insight. The student wrote about a rubber-band ball she and her father had made. They collected the rubber bands that came with their groceries and other mundane things. Eventually, the student relied on her “special brainiac rubber bands” to bring her good luck on tests. She shared the ball with her friends, and came to see it as a symbol of her relationship with them and with her father.
“Here’s how we know it was a great essay,” Ms. Taylor said. “The girl applied to Williams College. She was accepted early, and the dean of admissions wrote her a personal note and sent her a rubber band for her collection.”
One essay, written several years ago, sticks out in Ms. Taylor’s mind as a good example of such insight. The student wrote about a rubber-band ball she and her father had made. They collected the rubber bands that came with their groceries and other mundane things. Eventually, the student relied on her “special brainiac rubber bands” to bring her good luck on tests. She shared the ball with her friends, and came to see it as a symbol of her relationship with them and with her father.
“Here’s how we know it was a great essay,” Ms. Taylor said. “The girl applied to Williams College. She was accepted early, and the dean of admissions wrote her a personal note and sent her a rubber band for her collection.”
| « Rent a place in the woods | Eph 400 » |
14 Responses to “Rubberband (Wo)man”
Leave a Reply
You can follow this conversation by subscribing to the comment feed for this post
If a comment you submitted does not show up, please email us at eph at ephblog dot com. Please note that commenters are required to use a valid email address when submitting comments.
Jr. Mom says:
This is one of the best (and simplest) articles on essay writing, that I’ve seen. I would recommend it to any college applicant.
And I love the Williams anecdote. That little gesture, of sending a rubber band along with the acceptance, characterizes a specific quality about Williams that is hard to put into words, but which, IMO, very much sets it apart from other schools.
kthomas says:
++;
rory says:
my friend’s brother went to yale and wrote his essay about how important Hoagie Haven (the local amazing sandwich shop in Princeton) was to him. A couple weeks into his freshman year he met an admissions officer who heard his name and said “oh, Hoagie Haven guy! Welcome!”
good article.
frank uible says:
To this superannuated, insensitive curmudgeon, this subject is a little too touchey-feeley.
hwc says:
My wife and I had that happen at the orientation reception for parents with the President and Dean of the College. My wife introduced us to the Dean and without a beat, he said, “Oh, you just be ‘**** Girl’s’ parents” — ‘**** Girl’ being the title and punchline of her essay. He gotten the essays sent over from admissions as his summer reading to get to know the new class.
ebaek says:
I would like to add my two cents of cynicism and note that plenty of people I knew just made up stories that seemed touching and got in to great schools. They’re great essays if it’s real, but I find it frustrating that the admissions offices around this nation underestimate the applicants’ ability to fake sincerity.
Also, how much does the originality of the “windows” essay factor in to admission, anyways? Many of the class of ‘13 wrote about being on a plane/car, often taking it as a metaphor for the “journey” through their life. It was quite disappointing to see how much of the accepted students had thought that little about the question.
David says:
Approximately zero. Even if the essays were randomly reassigned by a computer error, at least 500 (and more like 530) of your classmates would still be here. At most, things like essays and recommendations are coin flips in a handful of cases.
JeffZ says:
I find that hard to believe, DK. Once you get outside categories like tips, alumni kids, URM’s, etc., there is a vast, vast middle group of applicants who are barely distinguishable from one another. At that point, they are relying (from what I understand) on admissions officers for their region to essentially go to bat for them as advocates … a little spark of originality, humor, creativity, a particularly interesting life experience, is far more likely, whether consciously or subconsciously, to stick in an admission officer’s brain after reading 5,000 application full of the same AP classes, class president honors, and 3 yr varsity cross country activity lists. On paper, it seems like (once you get beyond a threshhold of serious contenders) 50 applicants from this vast middle who get accepted are roughly the same as 50 who get rejected, so SOMETHING has to end up being a distinguishing factor, and I’d say the sum package of two essays and multiple recommendations will play a substantial role in that process. Otherwise, if the essay was basically a non-factor as you suggest, Williams wouldn’t have added a SECOND essay to the evaulation process, thereby deflating its applicant pool and potentially hurting its rankings plus requiring more admissions office resources to cull through … that just makes no sense.
kthomas says:
ebaek:
Are we on the essay again? Dylan? Do you have a copy of Corey’s, as well, and Amy and Jon and Cindy and … ?
I recently received an alumni survey from Deep Springs College. The cover letter kindly explained to me that that they hadn’t gotten enough response to the first version some months previously, but as part of the accreditation process, they needed to demonstrate the value of the education by showing that alumnni…
So, would I please respond to this much-shortened version, presented, this time, as a multi-page Excel sheet? (There was also a clause which noted with some apology, that the previous version had proved a bit long for most people.)
You have to hand it to Deep Springs; it’s certainly not an institution which has anything to do with the “unexamined life.” Three or four hours after starting this survey– about 20 or thirty minutes into it, I had decided to read the whole thing first, to orient myself — after the forth hour of examination, I became a bit glib, in order to finish. I addressed whomever had written the survey: hello, I’m sorry to have taken only 45 minutes with this particular question, but, well, if what you want is to increase your response rate!
So: we have your cynicism, and we have David’s practical advice. And we have a rather dead and obvious trope about looking out a window, being a metaphor for the journey of life.
Suppose it depends on how you look at it. No! I’m mean: you, there– suppose — you, suppose that– it depends on how you look at it.
Not exciting prose? Oh, well. I’m a little low for English these days. But– let’s shift. Shall we?
There’s been some discussion on that essay “prompt” here– and I’ll agree, it’s not an easy one. It may also not me– well, I personally would prefer something such as Deep Springs, pedagogically, where the essays, well-answered or not, pervade the future.
Your contemporaries fake sincerity? Well. There’s another side to every coin, but. Perhaps less than you think; looking back, at my class(es), there are a lot fewer people that I would accuse of that today, than when I was at Williams. (I can’t speak for you– you will have to wait twenty or so years, to know! Patience!)
But. Pedagogically, there’s another point to the prompt– to create a series of responses, to determine a future. “Hello, class! … it seems Admissions and the Deans have presented us with a rather difficult group this year, but we will trudge on … ” [see: Larry Wall, intro to Perl].
The point of education isn’t how brilliant the class is; it is what we do with the situation, what we make of it.
And that– is a penultimate question of perspective.
ebaek says:
We don’t need a class to be brilliant writers… just not full of people who faked their way through with help from expensive writing coaches, or people who spent less than 2 minutes thinking about the prompt. And I think we can stop pretending that this charming rubberband story shows that honest sincerity is what gets an essay chosen from the rest.
David says:
Don’t believe me. Believe Williams and Morty.
1) The Alumni Review admissions article (pdf) explicitly that any applicant not in a magic category and below Academic Rating 2 is rejected. Period. No bothering with essays. No worrying over recommendations. Out they go. These are the thousands of Williams applicants in the “vast, vast middle group of applicants.” They never really had a chance.
2) Morty used the coin-flip analogy in his reunion breakfast talk last spring. “The essays are the coin-flip.” is close to an exact quote.
jeffz says:
Well, by vast middle group, I don’t mean the median applicant necessarily, what I meant are those who have the academic qualifications to be a group 1 or 2 … because I imagine that less than half of THOSE applicants are accepted, and there has to be some way to distinguish among them. Many, many applicants with A/A- averages and SAT’s over 1450 are rejected or waitlisted …
I wasn’t there for Morty’s comments so I didn’t hear the context, but I imagine that MAYBE what he meant is that there are hundreds of applicants all more or less equally academically qualified for the 300 or so spots that don’t fit into any category, and that Williams could basically flip a coin for those applicants, but the essays, etc., instead serve as the coin flip … that would make sense to me. IF the information was truly useless to Williams, again, it seems ridiculous and nonsensical for them to add ANOTHER essay to provide additional useless, irrelevant data.
jeffz says:
I mean David, in that article you site, it talks about the importance of the “intellectual vitality” tag, something that a 1600 SAT is apparently not sufficient to ensure. How are they making that judgment, if they can’t based on grades and SAT’s? I would imagine at least in part by essays and teacher recommendations, combined with other unique / unusual academic achievements like science or writing awards, etc.
David says:
We are moving closer to agreement with your “hundreds of applicants.” Last year, Williams had 6,000 applicants. If your claim is that, say, 300 had their admissions decision affected by their essay/recommendations, than that is not a crazy number. (If by “hundreds” you mean 900, then that is almost impossible.)
300 of 6,000 is 5%. So, could the essay affect admissions decisions in 5% of the cases. Unlikely, but not impossible. But that also means that 19 times out of 20, your essays/recommendations have no impact on your admissions.
But not the subtle game you are playing. The original question was:
You have turned a question about just the windows essay into a discussion about all the essays and the recommendations and “science or writing awards.”
[Side note: I believe that teacher recommendations and academic prizes can affect someone's Academic Rating, but ignore that complication for now.]
So, even if you are correct that non-AR stuff (essays, recommendations, prizes) might influence the decisions for 300 applicants, then you have to whittle down that number much further to figure out the marginal impact of just the “windows” essay. If 300 were the total affected by the package of all the non-AR material, then, at most, 50, would have their decision changed by a different “windows” essay. That is less than 1% of the applicant pool, which is why my “approximately zero” is the right answer. In fact, my 530 out of 550 (meaning 20 accepted-turned-into-rejected and rejected-turned-into-accepted) matches that 50 estimate nicely.
Moreover, I still think that the 300 is an overestimate, but I should probably turn this comment into a post before I go further.
Please pay attention. The (admitted!) purpose of adding the aditional essay was to discourage 1,000 or so applicants from applying, those applicants who cared least about Williams, were the least likely to enroll if accepted and less likely to be happy if they enrolled. It had nothing (meaningful) to do with providing the Admissions Office with further data to distinguish among applicants.