College Admission Help

The Envelope, Please: Defending a College Admission Decision -- and Himself
By Nicholas Geiser
The Choice
The New York Times
Now that my decision process is effectively over, I (like some of my fellow bloggers in this series) would like to address some of the comments and themes that have come up over the course of my last few posts.
“Why are students like you unwilling to quietly own up that you’re a top-notch applicant, and you want the school you choose to reflect that? Why do you need to coyly tell the world that you’re seriously studying the merits of attending a school not ranked in the top three of the Master Colleges of America when–plain and simple–you’re not?”
I’m sorry if you’ve misunderstood what I’m trying to do here. Chapel Hill was very much in the running for me, especially after my visit there for the Morehead-Cain scholarship’s final selection weekend. What I’ve tried to communicate through my posts is that the program at U.N.C. represents a qualitatively different vision of the collegiate experience from that of the other schools I seriously considered in these last few months (Harvard and Yale).
My central dilemma involved my not knowing what kind of experience over the next four years would best suit my own temperament. It is a mistake to conclude merely from my list of schools that U.N.C. was a “safety” school — if anything, the list of schools I applied to should represent my indecision. The Morehead-Cain Scholarship has a 3.4 percent acceptance rate, meaning that anyone who applies has seriously considered it. I’m sorry for the misunderstanding.
“Maybe Nicholas has a more expansive definition of diversity than some are imagining.”Some comments have asked me whether my assessment of the “lack of diversity” at Chapel Hill was truly on the mark. The comment above, however, hit the proverbial nail on the head. I do not dispute that Chapel Hill is certainly more socio-economically diverse than Yale. In this process, however, I simply saw a diversity of ideas as more important than a diversity of origin. One of the things that became very clear to me was that the Morehead-Cain scholarship puts you in contact with a far more materially diverse group of people, whether at Chapel Hill or through your summer experiences. I concluded, though, that this kind of diversity is ultimately less important than a wide variety of thinking.
If you go out into the street and meet 20 people from material backgrounds far different than yours, great. But if you lack the capacity to understand what that diversity means, how our views of it have developed through history, and such, it’s meaningless. I think Yale offers more of the latter just because it draws the best and brightest through its gates. I didn’t think Chapel Hill could match that.
“I don’t think that we ‘haters’ actually hate Mr. Geiser; it’s just that his pretentiousness is a bit much to take.”
My last post was written in the late hours of the night, and there is an inverse relationship between fatigue and quality of writing. I humbly suggest you assess the entirety of my published work here before concluding that I am a pompous and self-indulgent writer.
“You state that you will be paying for your time at Yale. I’m interested as to how you will be doing that - your own savings, student loans?”I will be working this summer, likely either as a lifeguard and/or as an intern for the UC Berkeley’s student newspaper. I will also probably take out student loans.
“Since you state that you’ve received many things freely in your life, why do you think you wouldn’t want college to come freely to you? I don’t understand that rationale.”
Getting things for free begets a sense of entitlement. As I have tried to stress throughout these posts, I don’t want to come out of my undergraduate years with that sense. Having to work for my education would be a positive change for me.
“You obviously knew that you would be accepted at an exceptional school so why did you have to apply to 12 of them? I feel bad for the kids you put on all those wait-lists.”
Prediction is a risky business. I would never take for granted that I would be accepted at the most selective schools to which I applied or a program like the Morehead-Cain scholarship.
The number of schools I applied to, nevertheless, is something I now regret. To all the juniors reading this, I would advise to not follow my example in this case. I did so because, as of last fall, I still had no idea what I wanted and applied with excessive caution. It’s O.K. to be unsure when you apply, but a general idea is best. In retrospect, I probably would have forgone the UC system and Johns Hopkins last November.


The Envelope, Please: Defending a College Admission Decision -- and Himself