sterlingice
08-25-2007, 01:28 PM
http://news.yahoo.com/s/ap/20070822/ap_on_re_us/back_to_school_authenticity
Colleges seek 'authenticity' in hopefuls
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By JUSTIN POPE, AP Education WriterWed Aug 22, 6:33 PM ET
If there's a sign of the times in college admissions, it may be this: Steven Roy Goodman, an independent college counselor, tells clients to make a small mistake somewhere in their application — on purpose.
"Sometimes it's a typo," he says. "I don't want my students to sound like robots. It's pretty easy to fall into that trap of trying to do everything perfectly and there's no spark left."
What Goodman is going for is "authenticity" — an increasingly hot selling point in college admissions as a new year rolls around.
In an age when applicants all seem to have volunteered, played sports and traveled abroad, colleges are wary of slick packaging. They're drawn to high grades and test scores, of course, but also to humility and to students who really got something out of their experiences, not just those trying to impress colleges with their resume.
The trend seemingly should make life easier for students — by reducing the pressure to puff up their credentials. But that's not always the case.
For some students, the challenge of presenting themselves as full, flawed people cuts against everything else they've been told about applying to college — to show off as much as possible.
At the other extreme, when a college signals what it's looking for, students inevitably try to provide it. So you get some students trying to fake authenticity, to package themselves as unpackaged.
"There's a little bit of an arms race going on," says Goodman, who is based in Washington. "If I'm being more authentic than you are, you have to be more authentic next month to keep up with the Joneses."
Colleges say what they want is honest, reflective students. As Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania puts it, "everybody's imperfect."
"Since that's true for all (students), those that portray that aspect of themselves are that much more authentic."
How do colleges find authenticity? They look for evidence of interests and passions across the application — in essays, interviews, recommendations and extracurricular activities.
"What we see are the connections," said Christopher Gruber, dean of admission and financial aid at Davidson College in North Carolina. If a student claims working in student government has been a meaningful experience, it's a more credible claim if recommenders have picked on that as well.
"That, in my mind, gives authenticity to an application, when you're reading things more than once," Gruber said.
But in the age of the hyper-achieving student, authenticity doesn't always come easy. Some schools, such as MIT, now specifically ask students to write about disappointment or failure. Many can only come up with a predictable and transparent answer: perfectionism.
Will Dix, a counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School, who also spent eight years in the Amherst College admissions office, struggles to persuade students that essays about doubt and uncertainty can be at least as interesting to admissions officers as those with a conclusion that's sweeping but implausibly confident for a 17-year-old.
"No one expects you to solve the mystery of life," Dix says. "I sometimes get in trouble with parents for advising that. They'll say, '(colleges) will think he doesn't know anything.'"
Dix counters by paraphrasing Socrates via Donald Rumsfeld: "The first thing is to know what you don't know."
Susan Weingartner, another former admissions officer and now college counseling director at Chicago's Francis W. Parker School, surveys her juniors about shortcomings and weaknesses. The next year, those now-seniors often are unsure what to write about. She digs up their junior-year responses, where they often find their topic — like one student last year who ultimately wrote a moving essay about his experience being overweight.
Weingartner has noticed more students writing about being gay. Some pull it off, coming across as honest, humble and reflective about the challenges they've faced. But others raise alarm bells by appearing to be traumatized or just looking for sympathy.
The challenge for students is a tough one to get your mind around: If you're authentic, you feel pressure to rise above the fakers. But try too hard to do that, then you just appear to be, well, inauthentic.
Dix summarizes the logical muddle the student is in: "As soon as you ask someone to be authentic it's impossible to be authentic."
Goodman, the independent counselor who advises making a small mistake to look authentic, unapologetically tries to hit the right note of authenticity: be true enough to make the full application consistent and credible, but also give colleges what they want to hear. He compares it to a politician who has learned to give a stump speech that makes every audience feel like it's new.
And he defends the tactic with a point that several admissions deans frankly acknowledge: Colleges are guilty of playing games with authenticity, too.
"They soften their image with pictures of kids under trees, smiling in front of the library, engaging with a professor in a small group discussion," Goodman says. What's the difference between a college trying to look good to students and the reverse?
David Lesesne, dean of admission at Sewanee, a small Tennessee liberal arts college, admits Goodman has a point.
"Students perhaps have become less authentic to themselves, trying to be what colleges want," Lesesne said. But colleges have done the same. Schools "are looking to draw more applicants and students are looking to gain acceptance," he said. "As those numbers grow I think that has caused both sides of the equation to lose a little focus on what should be most important: the match."
Yes, I realize this quote is from the AP but it could have come from any news agency or fluff writer. Also, I concede that maybe I shouldn't get worked up about something that amounts to a fluff piece but this just goes back to my issues with the idea of interviews, HR, and judging people based on their ability to sell themselves and how it's just a giant b.s. contest typically won by, you guessed it, people with great tendencies to sell themselves and lie rather than the best candidates for the job.
But, more to the meat of the article as it does have fairly far reaching implications as I think a lot of these people truly believe what they say even if they don't know they are spewing the crap that comes out of their mouths. And I say this full well as someone who played some of these games and got into some scary good schools but detested most of the process.
There is some easy, low hanging fruit to go after. Namely that it's suggested to intentionally make mistakes on your college application to show your authenticity. I think this is one of those statements where you just pause, feel a little of your hope in humanity die, and then move on.
There is talk early in the article about how everyone has scary good activities and academics and awards and all sorts of the crap that colleges touted as what made you "well rounded" in the 90s. And while the author is silly enough to suggest that since everyone has it, it's not as big of a deal so it's easier on students who could lay off of some of this stuff, what it really means is that the arms race is a step higher and the baseline to be considered is all of this nonsense. Whereas previously, everyone had, say, various clubs like academic decathlon, student government, drama, volunteering, and sports, something like a summer doing mission work in a third world country really stood out, I'd imagine. Now everyone has to try to up the ante so if you only were in a couple of "run of the mill" things, you don't even get to the "consider" pile.
And then we get to the crux of it all:
{But in the age of the hyper-achieving student, authenticity doesn't always come easy. Some schools, such as MIT, now specifically ask students to write about disappointment or failure. Many can only come up with a predictable and transparent answer: perfectionism.
Weingartner has noticed more students writing about being gay. Some pull it off, coming across as honest, humble and reflective about the challenges they've faced. But others raise alarm bells by appearing to be traumatized or just looking for sympathy.
The challenge for students is a tough one to get your mind around: If you're authentic, you feel pressure to rise above the fakers. But try too hard to do that, then you just appear to be, well, inauthentic.}
In the end, it's not about being honest. It about finding that which makes you appear honest but can be spun best. Again, in the 90s, it was perfectionism, anal-retentiveness, too much attention to detail- whatever, all sides of the same coin. It's the "I have no faults but I'll pretend this is one". I've seen it lots of times, even on this board from HR people- better to come up with a bad answer than no answer at all. That's a lie and everyone knows it or is badly delusional. We all know that "well, I came into work drunk" is, well, infinitely worse than "I can't come up with an answer". But there are a lot of areas of darker grey before you get into the positive category above "I don't have an answer".
I was in an interview for a job I didn't have much of a chance for but was really practicing for next couple of times this job would come up and a question of the weakness ilk came up. I really didn't have a prepared, canned answer (the biggest mistake and I should have known better) for it and anything I could have come up with would have been worse than nothing. So, after staring across the table at 3 people I knew fairly well from a professional standpoint, I told them as much- I just didn't have an answer. I continued that it's not that I don't have weaknesses, certainly, but that one that can be spun into a good interview answer wasn't readily apparent and, in the back of my mind, the answer that just kept flashing at me was to not say "well, I get into bad moods when half of my team decides they don't want to work in a given week so I have to pick up the slack" as was the case at the time. A few days after the interview, I was talking to one of the interviewers and he said he just wrote down "pretention" for that answer and moved on.
It's not about being honest or being authentic or anything like that. It's about being the best salesperson you can be, regardless of all the above. It's any wonder why we have any good engineers or academics and our society isn't competely dominated by lawyers and salespeople and thespians, never mind...
SI
Colleges seek 'authenticity' in hopefuls
<!-- END HEADLINE --> <!-- BEGIN STORY BODY -->
By JUSTIN POPE, AP Education WriterWed Aug 22, 6:33 PM ET
If there's a sign of the times in college admissions, it may be this: Steven Roy Goodman, an independent college counselor, tells clients to make a small mistake somewhere in their application — on purpose.
"Sometimes it's a typo," he says. "I don't want my students to sound like robots. It's pretty easy to fall into that trap of trying to do everything perfectly and there's no spark left."
What Goodman is going for is "authenticity" — an increasingly hot selling point in college admissions as a new year rolls around.
In an age when applicants all seem to have volunteered, played sports and traveled abroad, colleges are wary of slick packaging. They're drawn to high grades and test scores, of course, but also to humility and to students who really got something out of their experiences, not just those trying to impress colleges with their resume.
The trend seemingly should make life easier for students — by reducing the pressure to puff up their credentials. But that's not always the case.
For some students, the challenge of presenting themselves as full, flawed people cuts against everything else they've been told about applying to college — to show off as much as possible.
At the other extreme, when a college signals what it's looking for, students inevitably try to provide it. So you get some students trying to fake authenticity, to package themselves as unpackaged.
"There's a little bit of an arms race going on," says Goodman, who is based in Washington. "If I'm being more authentic than you are, you have to be more authentic next month to keep up with the Joneses."
Colleges say what they want is honest, reflective students. As Jess Lord, dean of admission and financial aid at Haverford College in Pennsylvania puts it, "everybody's imperfect."
"Since that's true for all (students), those that portray that aspect of themselves are that much more authentic."
How do colleges find authenticity? They look for evidence of interests and passions across the application — in essays, interviews, recommendations and extracurricular activities.
"What we see are the connections," said Christopher Gruber, dean of admission and financial aid at Davidson College in North Carolina. If a student claims working in student government has been a meaningful experience, it's a more credible claim if recommenders have picked on that as well.
"That, in my mind, gives authenticity to an application, when you're reading things more than once," Gruber said.
But in the age of the hyper-achieving student, authenticity doesn't always come easy. Some schools, such as MIT, now specifically ask students to write about disappointment or failure. Many can only come up with a predictable and transparent answer: perfectionism.
Will Dix, a counselor at the University of Chicago Laboratory High School, who also spent eight years in the Amherst College admissions office, struggles to persuade students that essays about doubt and uncertainty can be at least as interesting to admissions officers as those with a conclusion that's sweeping but implausibly confident for a 17-year-old.
"No one expects you to solve the mystery of life," Dix says. "I sometimes get in trouble with parents for advising that. They'll say, '(colleges) will think he doesn't know anything.'"
Dix counters by paraphrasing Socrates via Donald Rumsfeld: "The first thing is to know what you don't know."
Susan Weingartner, another former admissions officer and now college counseling director at Chicago's Francis W. Parker School, surveys her juniors about shortcomings and weaknesses. The next year, those now-seniors often are unsure what to write about. She digs up their junior-year responses, where they often find their topic — like one student last year who ultimately wrote a moving essay about his experience being overweight.
Weingartner has noticed more students writing about being gay. Some pull it off, coming across as honest, humble and reflective about the challenges they've faced. But others raise alarm bells by appearing to be traumatized or just looking for sympathy.
The challenge for students is a tough one to get your mind around: If you're authentic, you feel pressure to rise above the fakers. But try too hard to do that, then you just appear to be, well, inauthentic.
Dix summarizes the logical muddle the student is in: "As soon as you ask someone to be authentic it's impossible to be authentic."
Goodman, the independent counselor who advises making a small mistake to look authentic, unapologetically tries to hit the right note of authenticity: be true enough to make the full application consistent and credible, but also give colleges what they want to hear. He compares it to a politician who has learned to give a stump speech that makes every audience feel like it's new.
And he defends the tactic with a point that several admissions deans frankly acknowledge: Colleges are guilty of playing games with authenticity, too.
"They soften their image with pictures of kids under trees, smiling in front of the library, engaging with a professor in a small group discussion," Goodman says. What's the difference between a college trying to look good to students and the reverse?
David Lesesne, dean of admission at Sewanee, a small Tennessee liberal arts college, admits Goodman has a point.
"Students perhaps have become less authentic to themselves, trying to be what colleges want," Lesesne said. But colleges have done the same. Schools "are looking to draw more applicants and students are looking to gain acceptance," he said. "As those numbers grow I think that has caused both sides of the equation to lose a little focus on what should be most important: the match."
Yes, I realize this quote is from the AP but it could have come from any news agency or fluff writer. Also, I concede that maybe I shouldn't get worked up about something that amounts to a fluff piece but this just goes back to my issues with the idea of interviews, HR, and judging people based on their ability to sell themselves and how it's just a giant b.s. contest typically won by, you guessed it, people with great tendencies to sell themselves and lie rather than the best candidates for the job.
But, more to the meat of the article as it does have fairly far reaching implications as I think a lot of these people truly believe what they say even if they don't know they are spewing the crap that comes out of their mouths. And I say this full well as someone who played some of these games and got into some scary good schools but detested most of the process.
There is some easy, low hanging fruit to go after. Namely that it's suggested to intentionally make mistakes on your college application to show your authenticity. I think this is one of those statements where you just pause, feel a little of your hope in humanity die, and then move on.
There is talk early in the article about how everyone has scary good activities and academics and awards and all sorts of the crap that colleges touted as what made you "well rounded" in the 90s. And while the author is silly enough to suggest that since everyone has it, it's not as big of a deal so it's easier on students who could lay off of some of this stuff, what it really means is that the arms race is a step higher and the baseline to be considered is all of this nonsense. Whereas previously, everyone had, say, various clubs like academic decathlon, student government, drama, volunteering, and sports, something like a summer doing mission work in a third world country really stood out, I'd imagine. Now everyone has to try to up the ante so if you only were in a couple of "run of the mill" things, you don't even get to the "consider" pile.
And then we get to the crux of it all:
{But in the age of the hyper-achieving student, authenticity doesn't always come easy. Some schools, such as MIT, now specifically ask students to write about disappointment or failure. Many can only come up with a predictable and transparent answer: perfectionism.
Weingartner has noticed more students writing about being gay. Some pull it off, coming across as honest, humble and reflective about the challenges they've faced. But others raise alarm bells by appearing to be traumatized or just looking for sympathy.
The challenge for students is a tough one to get your mind around: If you're authentic, you feel pressure to rise above the fakers. But try too hard to do that, then you just appear to be, well, inauthentic.}
In the end, it's not about being honest. It about finding that which makes you appear honest but can be spun best. Again, in the 90s, it was perfectionism, anal-retentiveness, too much attention to detail- whatever, all sides of the same coin. It's the "I have no faults but I'll pretend this is one". I've seen it lots of times, even on this board from HR people- better to come up with a bad answer than no answer at all. That's a lie and everyone knows it or is badly delusional. We all know that "well, I came into work drunk" is, well, infinitely worse than "I can't come up with an answer". But there are a lot of areas of darker grey before you get into the positive category above "I don't have an answer".
I was in an interview for a job I didn't have much of a chance for but was really practicing for next couple of times this job would come up and a question of the weakness ilk came up. I really didn't have a prepared, canned answer (the biggest mistake and I should have known better) for it and anything I could have come up with would have been worse than nothing. So, after staring across the table at 3 people I knew fairly well from a professional standpoint, I told them as much- I just didn't have an answer. I continued that it's not that I don't have weaknesses, certainly, but that one that can be spun into a good interview answer wasn't readily apparent and, in the back of my mind, the answer that just kept flashing at me was to not say "well, I get into bad moods when half of my team decides they don't want to work in a given week so I have to pick up the slack" as was the case at the time. A few days after the interview, I was talking to one of the interviewers and he said he just wrote down "pretention" for that answer and moved on.
It's not about being honest or being authentic or anything like that. It's about being the best salesperson you can be, regardless of all the above. It's any wonder why we have any good engineers or academics and our society isn't competely dominated by lawyers and salespeople and thespians, never mind...
SI