Brad July 6th, 2009
Good morning blog readers, friends, and people who were mysteriously sent here using Bing:
This blog began several years ago as an experiment. It was not rolled out with fanfare, nor was it vetted through a massive team of consultants in suits. In fact, it was quite the opposite. I built a simple site on the now defunct Blogspot, recruited a few students to help and away we went. Our goal was to demystify the admissions processs and put you in our shoes. Of course, we quickly learned what it means to be in your shoes as well. I don’t know for sure if this blog has been successful or if it has helped meet those goals, but one thing I do know: It’s been a great time.
Sadly, this will be my last post as an official VandyBlogger since I am leaving Vandy to pursue graduate coursework in Educational Policy and Administration. Sadder still, is that the previous sentence may be the dorkiest thing I’ve ever written.
I may drop by from time to time to post a comment or to razz Thom for one of his dramatically flourished opening salvos. I hope you all continue to enjoy the dispathes from this office and that you keep the tough questions like, ”Can I combine my SAT and ACT score into a super-super score?” or “How do I make pesto?” coming.
Mostly, I hope your take our advice to heart. College admissions is not a sport or a game or a contest. If it was, admissions counselors would get paid more and would have a Hall of Fame/Truck Stop/Gift Shop somewhere in Indiana. Admissions is a subjective process, run by flesh-and-blood human beings who care a great deal about getting it right. Still our decisions come down to distinctions that can be immeasureably small or just plain unmeasureable.
If you decide to make your education a lifelong journey, then everything will fall into place.
It’s been fun. Go Dores!
Thom February 18th, 2009
A wonderful article appears this week in the Chronicle of Higher Education’s Chronicle Review by W. A. Pannapacker of Hope College. In it, Pannapacker portrays the well known genius of Leonardo da Vinci set against the lesser known backdrop of growing biographical evidence that he was a chronic procrastinator. Amid the volumes of lauded works that constitute a considerable portion of the Western world’s artistic, scientific, and industrial traditions lay a bevy of promised yet uncompleted projects, false starts, and abandoned ideas. If his biography was a high school transcript, it would be peppered with “I’s” and “W’s.” I wonder if da Vinci himself were charged with constructing the intellectual pedestal upon which he stands, if the monument itself would be nothing but a half-carved stone slab.
This is probably the best news I’ve received in some time. For me, genius seems perpetually delayed and happens mostly when I’m not looking. It appears when I’m not trying to make my son laugh, only trying to make pancakes on a Saturday morning when the egg breaks wide open on the side of the bowl and counter, sending him into a ten-minute hysterical fit of chuckling.
Still, it makes me think about the admissions decisions we make (what else?) and how we interpret this “conflict between unlimited aspiration and the acknowledgment of human limitation,” as Pannapacker puts it. We see this sometimes in our office in an applicant who seems to have all the intellectual horsepower, but can’t get the wheels in motion in class, at least not consistently. This is where the rubber meets the road (apologies for the stretched metaphor) for an admissions committee, when we must project intangible promise from tangible accomplishments of an applicant’s past. Though we try, can an admissions process ever recognize pure genius, as Pannapacker describes it? Are we expecting it to emerge “fully formed,” asking unconventional brilliance to be depicted conventionally - in a single-spaced, 12-point Times New Roman font resume no less?
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