There
was a great article posted on December 9th in The Atlantic that talked,
among other things, about the stress of trying to get into an elite college.
Below is an excerpt...I encourage you to read the entire article which
can be found here:
(excerpt)
Janet
Lavin Rapelye, the dean of admission at Princeton, told
the New York Times that students should
“use the criterion of interest when selecting extracurricular activities,
rather than how a list of activities might appear to a college admission
office.” A former Stanford University dean of freshmen wrote a column in
the same newspaper saying that many of the students she encountered “taught me
that a pre-programmed, enriched, spoon-fed, caged-in, ‘checklisted childhood’
may in fact lead to an impressive ‘resume’... but that such achievements can
come at the expense of self-efficacy—a true, innate sense of self that is
undermined when a person has too much of the stuff of life planned and handled
for them.”
The
article goes on to say:
Irena
Smith, a former Stanford admissions officer recalls a student who wrote an
essay about working her summers in a fast-food restaurant, and was accepted to
several Ivy League schools. “Given the population of students I see, she
probably shone like a diamond in the applicant pool at Harvard,” Smith says
flatly, emphasizing that the student’s unique way of looking at the world
and the way she wrote had more to do with her acceptance than the exact circumstances
of her summer job.
“I
think the biggest misconception people have is that there are these magical
things you can do each summer that will get your kid into the perfect college.”
...“Whatever the student does should be theirs to find and to like or not
like,” Smith says, “rather than have a well meaning adult carefully steering
them so they avoid all the dead ends and sharp corners. You don’t learn a lot
if your whole life path is charted.”
