Breaking Out of the “Little Boxes” in College Admission

Before we had staff living all over the country, and before we employed part-time readers to assist in file review, we had a fun tradition during reading season. Several times a week, we’d gather in my office and someone would share a funny YouTube video. This is how I was first exposed to John Mulaney, Mike Birbiglia, and this gem. It was a great way to start a long day or night of reading in committee.  

Recently, I’ve incorporated this concept at home. Each night while we’re cleaning the kitchen after dinner someone gets to pick a clip to share. Some Good NewsTrey Kennedy, and Hamilton have all made some good runs, but lately we’ve been on a Walk Off The Earth kick.  

Last night’s clean-up was inordinately long and YouTube rolled us from Hey Ya to Little Boxes.  

Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes made of ticky tacky
Little boxes on the hillside
Little boxes all the same 

There’s a pink one and a green one
And a blue one and a yellow one
And they’re all made out of ticky tacky
And they all look just the same 

And the people in the houses
All went to the university
Where they were put in boxes
And they came out all the same 

Written by Malvina Reynolds and popularized by Pete Seeger the campy rhythm, simple lyrics, and refrain of “all the same” really sticks with you. Brilliantly, maddeningly, intentionally—with ticky tacky– it sticks with you. It rattles around in your mind, until you almost want to shout, “A box-dominated life is no life at all!”  

2020!!

2020 has squeezed us. It has limited our radius from home and forced most of our interactions onto small screens. Whether it be school or work or time with friends and family, we’ve been boxed up and reduced to a pixel count on Zoom.        

This myopic, restricted, obscured life is not natural. Fundamentally, we long to be fully seen—to be deeply known. While we may appreciate not having to wear shoes or tuck in our shirts for calls that only show us from the torso up, this season has made us acutely aware that real life, true life, full life is meant to be multi-dimensional and 360 degrees.   

As you go through your college admission experience, I hope you won’t forget these pandemic lessons. I hope you will resist being placed in a limited, restricted, narrow, and myopic “little box.” 

Look Beyond What You See– Rafiki had this right in The Lion King when he instructed Simba to look within himself for truth, strength, vision, and authentic hopes and dreams. Regardless of where you live, you’re exposed to a limited number of colleges and universities. The same bumper stickers, same hoodies, and same schools getting TV coverage.  Look beyond what you see

Your family, siblings, neighbors may be loving and supportive people, but they’re usually not the best at helping you broaden your set of college considerations. Don’t get boxed in!

When that brochure or email from a college you have not heard comes, don’t immediately trash it. Hit pause and look closer into the ripples like Simba did. Be courageous enough to imagine life outside the camera angle that many around you might unintentionally (or very intentionally) impose.  

Process vs. Experience– Journalists and most admission folks will describe this all as the admission process. I want to push back on that word. Go to Google Images for process. You’ll find lots of cogs in the wheel, and mechanical, sterile, linear pictures. Like the Zoom life we’re experiencing, they can be isolating—you’ll notice almost none of them include other people. 

If you approach this as a process, then you begin to believe there is a specific and right way to go about it. Your mindset becomes binary. Process will tighten you up and restrict you to a narrow path Cogsyou must take in order to avoid peril…. And then test administrations get canceled, you make a B+ instead of an A, you don’t get to go on that mission trip or aren’t able to volunteer at the hospital as you’d planned…. You missed an ingredient, and the recipe is a bust. The process is ruined. The box is crushed.   

Experiences on the other hand are more open, more fluid, and more relational.  Google experience and you find people on high places looking out at their options. They have vision, perspective, and freedom. Experience images are boats in the water. Experience images incorporate other people, a variety of places, and wide lenses. Experiences facilitate relationships, inspire dreams, and account for a breadth of decisions, routes, and ultimate results or destinations. 

2020 has squeezed us down. Your job is to stand up, move around, breathe, break out, lift up, and push back. Assert agency, seek perspective, and flip your camera around.    

How > Where– The longer I do this work the more I think most people miss out on the real opportunity the admission experience provides for students and their families. As a high school student, and particularly as an applicant, my hope is you will be more concerned about how you end up on a college campus- prepared, confident, ready to engage- and less focused on precisely where, i.e. which gate or archway you walk through or statue you pose in front of.   Waterfall

Students often ask, “What do I need to do to get in?” They expect to hear a formula: take 7 AP classes, make a 1370 or higher, be sure to play on the tennis team, and lock down a position in the French Club. The truth is college admission deans and committees just want you to be a great high school student. If you work hard academically and invest in the people around you- the people in your house, your school, and your community– you’ll be a great candidate for most colleges. 

Take some time to write down your answer to this question: What does success look like a year from now? 

If you are a senior (or the parent of a senior), my sincere hope is your answer does not start with (or include) the name of a specific college. Instead, I hope your goal is to be academically prepared, socially engaged, comfortable with the financial investment, and closer with your family because of open, honest, proactive conversations that led to a unified college decision.   

Draw fewer lines. Spend more time listening to your family about hopes and dreams and goals, and less time strategizing or attempting to control a specific outcome. The college admission experience provides a unique and precious opportunity to deepen, broaden, and expand. Refuse the tunnel visioned, myopic, boxed- up mentality of where, and commit fully to how you and your family will start college. 

Thankfully, this pandemic won’t last forever. However, I’m hopeful some of the lessons we are learning now will sustain. I would never have wished your high school experience to have been impacted this way. But I also believe you have a significant opportunity right now to garner a healthy distaste for draconian lines, to develop a “box busting” mentality, and to refuse a narrow approach to life.  Instead, my hope is the rest of your high school career, your entire college admission (and actual college) experience, and your life well beyond will be open, broad, multi-dimensional, and characterized by deep, meaningful, and authentic relationships.    

Big shout out to my friend Jeff Kurtzman at the McCallie School in Chattanooga who plays “Little Boxes” each year for his junior class as way to get them thinking about why they want to go to college, the expectations their family has for them, and to begin a conversation about their unique hopes and dreams. 

Navigating the Waitlist

Listen to “Episode 10: Navigating the Waitlist – Alex Thackston” on Spreaker.

This week we welcome Senior Admission Counselor, Alex Thackston, to the blog. Welcome, Alex!

We live in unknown times. The uncertainty surrounding COVID-19 and the effects it will have on us, our families, our society, and the world, leaves us feeling uneasy and unsure about our future. I’m not sure about you, but I wish I had a definitive answer on how this will all turn out. But this is not the first time I have dealt with this feeling of uncertainty, knowing I had no control over a situation.

When I was pregnant with my son, my fellow mom-friends advised me to start looking for daycare programs early in the game. I thought it was a little overboard to research and tour daycares before even telling anyone I was expecting. Once I learned about the competitiveness of getting into these schools, I started my preparations. After combing through 40 different early childhood institutions in the Atlanta Metro area, I narrowed my search down to six schools that met what my husband and I were looking for in a school.

We factored in location (to home and our jobs), types of curriculum (I know… curriculum for a baby?), certifications of the centers and teachers, affordability, and good reviews. Starting to sound familiar? Out of those six schools, there were two that came to the top of our list. Our top option was really out of our price range, but offered every aspect we wanted! The second option was also a wonderful choice, but a little farther than we wanted to travel. We applied to both, paid our application fees, and we were placed on… the waitlist. Yep, you read that right: a waitlist for daycare!

Hurry Up and Wait

During this holding period, we continued to hold onto hope that we would be accepted into our top choice. We figured we could find a way to save and budget for the high costs, dreamed about the educational opportunities it presented, and loved the idea that we could walk from our home to pick up our little guy.

However, fate had another plan. As we waited (and waited…), the due date of sweet boy quickly approached. We found ourselves without the news we wanted or expected. Jack was born in early August, six months after we had placed ourselves on these schools’ waitlists. We ended up receiving a spot off of the waitlist for our second choice. But we were frustrated and upset about the prospect that our first choice was not going to work out when we needed it.

picture of happy baby
Jack loving his new daycare.

We spent a couple of months bonding with our little man at home, but once January hit, it was time to send him on his way. While Jack could have cared less about where he was going, we put on a brave face and sent him to our second choice: an amazing school that still offered everything we were looking for, despite not being the perfect location. And while it wasn’t our number one choice at the time, in the long run we’ve been very pleased with the teachers, curriculum and experiences that our little guy was, and has, been having there.

“You Can’t Always Get What You Want…”

So why bring up the “you can’t always get what you want” message at a time like now? Because I know many students across the country will be receiving admission decisions in the coming weeks, and it may not be the news they hoped for.

In my experience, the hardest part is not being denied or told “no,” but being told “maybe” and placed on a waitlist. While this type of decision gives hope, it also brings about uncertainty. So, what can you do? My lesson learned is to continue making plans and look at your other options. There are bound to be other colleges on your list that have already admitted you to their first-year class. If you haven’t been admitted elsewhere, there’s good news—many institutions are still accepting applications for their first-year class!

While these schools may not be your top choice, consider how they suit you and your needs. Make a list of all of the positive attributes you discovered in your top choice school, and look at the other schools to see how they too may possess these factors. You may find that some of these institutions aren’t all that different.

Make the Most of What You Have

I highly recommend that once you get to your new school, make the best of your experience there. You may come to find that the institution you chose was the perfect fit for you after all—a place where you can grow holistically and develop academically.

As a parent, I am always looking for opportunities to create the best experiences for my child. For me that meant stressing over the perfect daycare for a 5-month-old. When our first choice didn’t work out, I looked to my husband for comfort. I mean, how was this other daycare supposed to compete with one that has a curriculum created by PhD’s, an app that let you peek into your kiddo’s typical day, and brand-new facilities for our little one to grow into?

He reassured me that our second option had a curriculum created by former Atlanta teachers who had a combined total of 30+ years of teaching experience, an app where our teachers would post videos, pictures, and updates of our son based on his personal development, and state-of-the-art facilities that were recently renovated when they expanded their building due to the high demand of their program.

It turns out my second choice had everything we wanted and more! Ultimately, we made the best decision for our son and for our family, and along the way learned the lesson the Rolling Stones said best: “You can’t always get what you want, but if you try sometimes, well, you just might find, you get what you need”.

Senior Admission CounselorAlex Thackston has worked in college admission for nine years. Prior to joining Georgia Tech in 2014, she worked for the Office of Admission at Florida State University. She currently serves as a Senior Admission Counselor working with first-year and pathway students, and also serves as the athletic admission liaison.