Getting Into School
Today was an interesting opportunity for me to jump from the Back To School mentality even further back, to the point when we are Getting Into School. Giving four consecutive university admissions interviews, meeting four superficially similar but deep-down-unique individuals, telling my own story and spinning my own college experience four different ways (Was it Pocahontas that said you can never step in the same river twice?).
We take these imposed structures in life so very seriously. I have always lamented the fact that pieces of paper are more important than individual human beings (c.f. my Cuba situation 4 years ago) but such is the price of civilization: we have no time to “really get to know” even a thousand people truly well, forget 7 billion.
So we take shortcuts: stereotypes/heuristics, and signals such as university diplomas, in the place of real achievements.*
As stereotypes cannot much be helped if you happen to be caught by one of them in a negative sense, signalling becomes really the only way to get a quick leg up without actually achieving anything noteworthy (a sort of achievement by association is implied, of course). And like leeches drawn to warm blood, gatekeepers soon ingratiate themselves into the signalling process, sucking the life out of those passing through and producing not very much extra value added of their own.
I am not proud that today I played a part in that role, but given the fact that it is unavoidable, I endeavored to make it both painless and truthful, which is harder than it sounds.
Truth in my book meant saying things like “Yes, we all know that Penn is NOT the best school, but-” and “Really, you should know you’re choosing schools based on the most superficial and blathering nonsense possible because the stuff that is really going to matter to you, the professors you love and the people you meet, can’t be known until you get in”. Painless meant taking things none too seriously, sharing what little I knew of things within their orbit of interest, and, well, smiling a lot**.
One candidate really stood out; one was good; two were kind of average (for the warped sense of average one gets from interviewing people at this level); none (thankfully?) got to the level of the absolute liar I exposed from last year. As a general rule, the candidate that stands out in my book is the one I actually do want to follow through on and see where he/she ends up in life just because they are that interesting.
I did feel somewhat like a used car salesman – selling something of a certain value that the buyer thinks is of a higher value than it truly is. It is true that Wharton played a huge part in getting me where I am today, and I am happy where I am. But it isn’t true that I could not be where I am today without Wharton. Not by a long shot.
As I thought further to advice I would give, I happened upon a presentation by Angela Lee Duckworth of Penn. Although the presentation is plodding, the message is clear and sincere: Tenacity*** breeds greatness. Not what school you went to, although that helps.
Footnotes
*I don’t mean to diminish the value of this – shortcuts are there to be used by both frauds and high achievers alike.
**This last bit I am still working on. 
It does not come naturally yet.
***Grit is an awful name. I don’t even like it as a marketing term.
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