How Frank Bruni changed the way I look at the College Admissions Process and Myself

Prospective seniors, congratulations on getting through junior year! You’ve stacked up on Honors & AP classes, dedicated your free time to your extracurricular activities and community service projects, finished taking your college entry exams, pulled countless all-nighters, got the grades that you hopefully deserve, and spent much of your time wondering when summer vacation was going to start or if you’re doing enough. You’re at least ten weeks away from starting your senior year, which is an entirely different ballgame from the eleventh grade. Not only will you still be juggling a difficult class schedule and continuing your extracurricular activities, you will have to set aside time to finish some very time-consuming college applications. “Who-got-into-where” will become the new, main topic amongst your friends during your high school lunch break. You will find that people tend to react differently when someone says the word “college”. You may feel that your value as a human being should be determined by what schools you got into. At least, that’s how I thought it was.

When I started my college applications, I kept on reminding myself how much time and effort I have dedicated to my studies. Being that I have lived overseas until I was 14 years old and being that I am bilingual, I thought I had the “well-rounded student” box checked off the list. I logged 108 hours of community service. Much of my time after school was spent not only finishing a sea of homework, but to practicing viola. Fortunately, the hundreds of hours that I reserved for viola practice paid off; I was admitted into the high school programme for the University of North Carolina School of the Arts! Not only did I have an impressive resume, the activities on my resume were activities that I enjoyed doing. With that, I thought I was ready to feed myself to the wolves, otherwise known as the numerous schools I applied to.

I have always wanted to continue studying music, but I still don’t know if I would like to seek employment in that field. Keeping that thought in mind, I decided that being a double major would be the best path for me. With Sheila and my parent’s help, I decided to apply to the University of Michigan, Oberlin, the University of Indiana, SUNY Purchase, and Appalachian State in Boone, North Carolina. After sending in my applications and getting through my nerve-wracking auditions, I anxiously awaited for my college decisions.

I found out that I was admitted into Indiana University for academics, SUNY Purchase, and Appalachian State. App had also offered to pay for pretty much my entire tuition, which is why I chose to go to App. I know there were other factors that determined my audition results, but I still felt degraded by the schools that rejected me. I felt like all those hours of studying and practice had gone to waste. I watched through Facebook as my friends back in Chapel Hill committed to UNC, Yale, Harvard, NYU, and Princeton. Not only did I feel left out and stupid, I felt frustrated. I included so many facts about myself in my application that made me stand out, or so I thought.

When my parents noticed how depressed I was by the results, they wanted to find a creative way to tell me that where I go to college and my value as an individual belong in 2 entirely different hemispheres. That’s why my dad gave me the book Where You Go is not Who You’ll Be by Frank Bruni. A few weeks later, I opened the book, thinking that by the time I got to page 3, I would be fed up by reading some student’s UVA success story. Apparently, that wasn’t the case; as soon as I finished reading page 1, I couldn’t put the book down!

After finishing WYGWYB, my way of thinking about college and myself has been completely transformed. Instead of going into detail about how this book has changed me, I am going to share the four ways Bruni corrected the way I look at the college admissions process and myself.

1. The Cold War wasn’t the only thing going on in the ‘80s: When the U.S. News & World Report started ranking American colleges annually in the 1980s, things started looking bleak for most of the schools across the country. “The rankings factor acceptance rates into their evaluation of schools-the lower the rate, the loftier the evaluation-and many schools have inevitably responded with efforts to bring their rates down by ratcheting up the number of young people who apply.”-Pg. 43. This report may tell you how selective a certain American university is, but does it tell you what special programs can be found at that certain university? For example, Monmouth University has a behavioral psychology class where the students are required to study the land and sea mammals at the Six Flags Great Adventure amusement and safari park. In other words, you get to study the behavior dolphins and seals! How cool is that? And if you saw Monmouth’s ranking in the U.S. News, how would you know from that ranking that Monmouth has such a great psych class? Let’s face it guys, rankings are just numbers.

2.) Not all treasure is silver and gold, mate: The world seems to immediately match up schools with stereotypes, with the term “party school” being one of the best known. Arizona State University is an institution that has become a victim to this term. Ranked by Playboy as the No. 3 party school in the nation, Arizona is one of the United States’s largest universities. However, if you look beyond the high acceptance rate and the excessive partying, you can find some hidden treasures on this huge campus. Devin found his. Unlike most of the individuals that were interviewed, Devin got into all of his schools. Some of those schools on Devin’s list included Yale, Brown, and ASU. In the end, (surprise) Devin committed to ASU. Devin did have some doubts about his decision, but in the end, he was happy with the education he received from ASU. One thing Devin remembers from his time at ASU is that there was no divide between the Tempe campus and ASU; “The school wasn’t just located in Tempe and in Arizona; it was entwined with them.”-Pg. 118. The non-existent bubble allowed Devin to gain some hands-on political experience in Arizona. Devin tells Bruni that “[He] testified at the legislature a couple of times, one time about a bill aimed at limiting academic freedom.... [Devin’s] friends who went to prestigious places weren’t involved that way.’”-Pg. 119. In the fall of 2010, Devin went off to Harvard law school and is now clerking for a judge in Washington D.C..

3.) Even the Fortune 500 knows that where you go is not who you’ll be: According to Bruni, the Fortune 500 is “...[Fortune Magazine’s list of] the [500] American corporations with the highest gross revenues. The list is revisited yearly.”-Pg. 15. Bruni gives us a list of 2014’s top ten, which are “Wal-mart, Exxon Mobil, Chevron, Berkshire Hathaway, Apple, Phillips 66, General Motors, Ford Motor, General Electric & Valero Energy.”-Pg. 16. Bruni then continues to give us a list of the schools where the chief executives got their undergraduate degrees, which are “...the University of Arkansas; the University of Texas; the University of California, Davis; the University of Nebraska; Auburn; Texas A&M; the General Motors Institute (now called Kettering University); the University of Kansas; Dartmouth College and the University of Missouri-St. Louis. Just one Ivy league school shows up.”-Pg. 16. There are many reasons why this is the case. University of Delaware alma mater Steve Schmidt, who was assigned to be the senior strategist of John McCain’s 2008 presidential campaign, answers this question quite smoothly. Schmidt tells Bruni that you can’t make it to the top of the business world with only intelligence. “‘I think it carries a fair degree of common sense and a blending of emotional intelligence and IQ intelligence, which isn’t necessarily a virtue of the people coming out of the most elite universities if you were to make generalizations and stereotypes.'”-Pg. 27. The CEO’s whose companies made it to the top 10 of the F-500 may have not gone to the top tier schools, but they knew how to stand out from their competitors, cooperate with others, come up with new innovations, and continue to motivate themselves, which is what truly counts!

4.) Life’s what you make it! Bruni tells the story of Jillian, a very bright student. However, the only blemish in Jillian’s college application was her ACT score, which kept her from being admitted into Brown. Jullian did apply for the University of Vermont and the University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill. Jillian felt lucky about able to commit to UNC, but she still suffered from “the sting of not being wanted by those other places...”-pg. 153. Instead of moping around, Jillian decided to use her rejection from Brown as motivation. Jillian looked for the most interesting and demanding courses that were offered at UNC. Fortunately, Jillian found her jackpot: an interactive English seminar class limited to 15 students and a lecture class on contemporary documentary filmmaking at Duke University. “‘...I was extremely satisfied there, but it took everything I had to make it happen. I couldn’t be passive. I had to be proactive.’” -Pg. 154. Jillian now works for CollegeHumor Media in New York.

If Jillian was admitted into Brown and committed to the school, she probably would have never found how much potential she truly has. Jillian would have settled into Brown and instead of stepping out of her comfort zone, she would have only made herself comfortable, probably thinking that she has done enough and that she was safe and sound. Sure, she would have made it somewhere post-Brown, but she probably would have never found her true calling. So the lesson learned from Jillian and this book is in the end, it’s not the school that will make you stand out, it’s you.

When Jenna started going through the college admissions process, she set her sights on Claremont McKenna. Although the school has a 9.8% acceptance rate, Jenna thought she had a fair shot of getting in. She was applying from Phillips Exeter Academy, otherwise known as one of the most competitive preparatory schools in America and was also the captain of the academy’s cross country team. Fortunately, when McKenna turned Jenna down (probably due to her low SAT math score), Jenna set to apply for other schools with excellent reputations, such as Georgetown and Pomona. When Jenna’s new top choices also let her down with the “we inform to regret...”, Jenna felt like her IVY-bound classmates “...had made the cut and she hadn’t.” Jenna’s final decision was Scripps college, which although has a great reputation, Jenna felt that Scripps “‘...wasn’t enough for me...I wanted a name. I wanted some prestige.’”-Pg. 5. This bright girl had no idea what surprises were awaiting her in Southern California when she arrived to Scripps’s beautiful campus. Not only was she welcomed by a beautiful campus, she fit in perfectly. “...she realized not only that the most crushing chapter of her life was in the past but that it hadn’t crushed her....Actually, it had helped her separate the approval that others did or didn’t give her from what she believed-no, knew-about herself.”-Pg. 5. One of Jenna’s most memorable college memories came from a day trip to Tijuana, Mexico. Jenna was assigned to help paint and finish other charity projects in an impoverished neighbourhood. Jenna told Bruni that, “‘I held a baby who could barely breathe, and the mother didn’t have the money to take the baby to the doctor, and you could literally see the United States on the other side of the border.’”-Pg. 5. In that moment (and others to come), Jenna found that helping others was her true calling. Jenna has opened a public elementary school in Phoenix, Arizona in August 2014, where the main purpose of the school is to provide an adequate education to children of low-income families. “‘I never would have had the strength, drive or fearlessness to take such a risk if I hadn’t been rejected so intensely before...there’s a beauty to that kind of rejection, because it allows you to find the strength within.’”-Pg. 6

I promise you that as you are going through the college applications process, you will run into some bumps on the road. In fact, you will probably have to change your direction at least once or twice. At least I did. I only mentioned a handful out of the many points that were made by Bruni. All of his points helped me tremendously. On the front cover, the book is described as “an antidote to the college admissions mania” and that’s exactly what it is. Because of to Bruni’s advice, not only do I look at the college admissions in a new light, I have survived through what was a very discouraging time in my life. Thanks for everything, Frank Bruni.