The Vandy Admissions Blog

frankwcislo November 21st, 2009

It’s a quiet Friday morning on The Commons. The campus is pausing for a week-long Thanksgiving Break that begins tomorrow. Many people are headed home. Others, especially students who live abroad, will stay here or travel elsewhere in the United States. Hard to believe that it’s “only” been twelve weeks since the semester began in late August. So much has changed since then—-new friends, new classes, new experiences, new discoveries.

A group of students was in the house the other night (I can’t take myself so seriously as to call it the Dean’s Residence, but please do understand that my family and I literally live in the center of The Commons). They were my Visions group (shout out to Group 80!). Every first year student belongs to a Visions group that meets weekly with a student and faculty “VUceptor” to discuss the transition everybody is experiencing as they move from high school to college. It’s a steep learning curve. For our group, that translated into talking for an hour a week about where we were at in the semester—sometimes structured discussion but more often than not general chat. We’d always start by going around the circle and playing “highs and lows” of the week. “My high of the week was seeing my girlfriend from home and my low of the week was the calculus exam.” You get the idea.

Since this was the last official session of the semester (we decided to have one more after the Break to spend our group activity fee on dinner at the world-famous Loveless Café!), we played “highs and lows” of the semester. There were lows. “The Swine”—H1N1—has been an issue here this semester, so sickness was one constant,, as was lack of sleep, as was the discovery that, in fact, not everybody possibly can get A’s. I remembered that my high of the semester was Lindsay’s low; she was crushed that the Phillies lost the World Series and hated the fact I was a Yankees fan! The group started pausing, though, when it tried to remember the “high” of the semester, and fairly soon the consensus started to emerge that there were “highs, ” but these just reduced to a common denominator. They simply liked it at Vanderbilt, they felt at home, were having a good time of it, and felt a growing self-confidence. “Yeah, I’ve talked with some of my friends from high school, and they’re just not as happy as I am.” “That’s true for me, too. I just like it here.”

Of course, for me, as a professor, to be surrounded by young people in both my classrooms and my neighborhood who are comfortable enough to be themselves means that they are tapping into their capacity for personal and intellectual growth—the chief reason we brought them to Vanderbilt in the first place. As they grow and explore, my life becomes richer. That makes me—and my colleagues—happy as well. As does having a Thanksgiving Break.

• Balance , Commons , Freshman Commons , Housing , Living on Campus , Nashville , Uncategorized
• Comments(0)

Thom September 29th, 2008

There are two things I learned yesterday that I didn’t know the day before:

1) The largest truck stop in the world is right outside of Davenport, Iowa.  I mean it’s huge.  Driving to Chicago from Des Moines (for college fairs and high school visits), you can’t miss it.  It takes like a full minute to drive past it, even going 80, I mean, going 65.

2) ESPN’s gameday program will be coming to Vanderbilt this weekend for the first time ever!

Go ‘Dores!

• Balance , College Fairs and VU Visiting Your High School , Nashville , Vandy Athletics
• Comments(0)

Thom September 26th, 2008

Not sure you if guys saw this week’s VUCast but it opens up a nice window into some of the cool things our professors are doing in classes at Vandy.  The video chronicles an English class discussion on the history and culture of coal mining held at a professor’s house with music superstar Kathy Mattea in attendance.   I find that it’s intellectual experiences like this that makes higher education so fascinating.  It’s one thing to read about something in a book . . .

Another amazing learning experience was last year’s retracing of the Freedom Rides.  This program is still being talked about around campus.  It is absolutely remarkable what those young people went through in the name of justice and equality.

• Academic Life , Balance , Nashville , Preparing for College
• Comments(0)

Thom September 11th, 2008

My two year old son likes to ask me to tell him stories right before bedtime.  I weakly protest but ultimately acquiesce in the effort to get him off to dreamland.  Quite candidly though, I suck at it.  He is a tough, but forgiving audience, mostly finding a matchbox car more entertaining after about two lines in to the tale.  Once I became so bored with my own story that I began plagiarizing the plotline of The Wizard of Oz, passing it off as my own.  Don’t judge me, okay?  You try and concoct a story that will keep a toddler’s attention.  Oh the great divine irony then that I work in a field that demands that students tell us a story about their lives in the form of the application essay, and then passes judgment on the merits of that story.  I just hope we have a slightly better attention span than a two year old. 

The application essay is perhaps the most common grist for the anxiety mill that is the application process at highly selective colleges.  I get why it’s a little daunting to applicants.  It’s a task which is nearly completely in your control, including the overall direction of the content, and most importantly, the decision of when that task is successfully completed.  At some point, your grades are on paper in the transcript, the standardized tests are taken, and there you are, staring at the rhythmic blinking cursor on the screen, almost like it’s a tapping foot.

What I don’t get is the cottage industry of “experts” who crank out guides to writing said admissions essays that “can’t miss.”  So in the effort to do research (and get out of the office for an hour) I have taken a pilgrimage to the local mega-bookstore to seek the collective wisdom of the great Oracle of College Decisions (for short, we shall call it OCD) on the admissions essay.  Here’s what I learned:

• You must package yourself in every way, “just being yourself” and “just being honest” isn’t enough.  One “expert” even lists these as “fatal errors” in the essay writing process based apparently on one student’s experience of writing an essay on her honest assessment that her effort level in her high school studies was lower than it could have been, as her academics seemed to come naturally to her.  She had to *gasp* “settle for her 4^th choice school.”
• If you are a graduate of a highly selective university you apparently can write books about how to get into those colleges.  Nevermind that this logic is akin to me saying that I can be a real estate agent because I applied for and got a mortgage.
• Under no circumstance should you write an essay that someone else could have written.  Since the number of students applying to college is nearly 2,000,000, each applying to an average of 6 colleges each, your essay must then be one out of 12,000,000 in its uniqueness.  Yeah, that’s reasonable.
• The café chairs in mega-bookstores are really uncomfortable.

The essay is a chance for you to speak directly to the individuals reading your application.  It’s not moderated through someone else (like a guidance counselor or teacher letter of recommendation or the SAT or ACT companies), it’s just you.  In the college application essay, we are trying to assess two major things (one that I will address today, and one that I will address tomorrow):

1.       an understanding of your voice, and

2.       an evaluation of how your mind pieces together thoughts and concepts

The science of writing an essay is no different than what you’re taught in your English composition classes:

• A clear, coherent message/thesis that is consistent throughout the essay
• Great proofing and grammar, and please go beyond spell-check which will not catch that you “did the loin share of the work on the lab project”  
• Use examples and imagery rather than simply stating things (show me, rather than tell me) – more on this tomorrow
• Answer the question (seems simple, but you’d be surprised)
• Use precise word descriptions

The art of writing the essay is found in the voice.  I know you’re reading this now and perhaps rolling your eyes at the very ethereal notion of “hearing your voice,” but stick with me here.  Your essay, and the topic can be ordinary, oddball, simple, or complex, so long as it is genuinely you, it tends to work.  The reality though, is that we all have multiple voices.  Put another way, we all have various wonderful facets of ourselves, be it a thinker, a leader, a friend, etc.  So which one should you accentuate in your college essay? 

To answer this, humor me with a quick exercise on a scrap piece of paper.  First, write your name using your dominant hand.  Easy enough right?  Now write your name with your non-dominant hand.  A lot harder right?  Took longer?  Looks pretty bad too, huh?  Trying to write an essay in which you are trying to package yourself for some unknown admissions officer is no different than trying to sign your name with your opposite-hand.  It’s going to take forever and the product of your labor isn’t going to look all that familiar to you.  I don’t care what the OCD tells you.

If you’re a naturally funny person, that should come out in your essay.  If you’re known by your buddies as being introspective, always thinking about tiny, sometimes odd details, consider letting that voice come through.  Try this test to see if your essay clearly aligns with your voice.  Take your essay and remove your name, or any obvious self-identifying elements within it, and put it in front of 10 people who know you best.  They should be able to identify you as the author by its contents.  The college admissions essay should amplify your most natural, and thus strongest voice, not mimic someone else’s.

Tomorrow I will tackle the second dynamic we gleam from a college application essay: how you piece your thoughts together.

• Application Process , College Application Guides , File Reading Explained , The College Essay
• Comments(0)

Thom May 29th, 2008

A Post Script

I get asked a lot about the political life at Vanderbilt. Is it a protest around every corner type place, or more apathetic, passively watching the political process pass like a garish parade? The answer to most questions like this is clearly subjective, and my attempt to objectively answer it puts me in the muddy but candid middle. Vanderbilt is a place where debate is active, no question about it. It is a place where people care deeply about issues and can find an audience to air their opinions. This mostly happens in classrooms and at Vanderbilt’s modern version of the Roman Forum known in Vandyspeak as “The Wall.” A central meeting place for students, faculty and staff alike to join organizations, sign petitions, and raise money and awareness for a variety of causes. My sense from being around many college campuses is that while Vandy students have certainly organized around a variety of causes in the past, it does not take the protest-a-minute persona that some campuses (in)famously adopt. Issues live here though, and do so in a spectrum. It’s a place where democrats, progressives, independents, libertarians and conservatives will find a place, and a voice (we have 5 different student newspapers, including a liberal and conservative publication).

• Political Life at Vanderbilt , Preparing for College
• Comments(0)