Rethinking Ivy League Admissions

One Girl's Unorthodox Journey to the Ivy League

Nobody thought I was going to the Ivy League.

Coming from a competitive high school, I always heard horror stories about students who slept just three hours a night, ran twelve different student organizations, and downed a Red Bull before exams just to stay awake. Landing in my counselor’s office during my freshman year of high school, I tuned in for an exposition on the ideal trajectory of my high school experience: I would join several clubs to become a leader in my community, take the school’s most rigorous courses, spearhead the development of a non-profit organization, and network extensively to procure internship opportunities—all by the age of sixteen. Needless to say, I ran out of her office in tears, overwhelmed by the seemingly impossible standards of college admissions.

In protest of this draconian culture, I joined a total of zero clubs at school, half-heartedly participated in track meets every spring just to stay fit, and sat around reading Victorian novels during math class. I had always loved reading and storytelling, and at age fifteen, books brought me more joy than people or equations. Cooped up in a library on weekends, I tuned out the drone of my peers’ extracurricular prattle.

By junior year of high school, a friend had convinced me to join the school literary magazine to explore my burgeoning interest in writing. I slouched into an 11 a.m. Wednesday board meeting, propping open a booklet of that week’s submissions and listening, in silence, to what appeared to be a popularity contest for poetic work. Given my social anxiety, I stayed mute during all subsequent meetings, convinced that no one knew who I was until one morning, laughing sardonically to myself, I thought it would be amusing to apply to an executive board position for the spring. To my surprise, I had become co-editor in chief just two semesters later.

Meanwhile, my mother, brutally aware of my apathy toward social interactions, had convinced me to apply to an internship program as a young critic at the local theater. I therefore had three activities under my belt—about a third of what might usually be required for admission to a competitive university—but I’d expended my social battery in the process.

The bulk of my time went to feeding my passion for literature: educating myself on the progression of literary history and writing a novel of my own in the hopes of one day joining the creative tradition I cherished. Having digested more novels than I would encounter in my college English program, I set up a website devoted to all things literature, posted snippets of my novel, and sent my poetry to literary journals. Instead of challenging myself with math and science courses as my counselor had suggested, I pursued two independent studies in literature. My sole aim at the age of seventeen was to gain pleasure from literature’s intellectual challenge—I doled out the minutes of my free time to my various literary activities and, without a thought about where I might go to college, found refuge in words.

So when application season rolled around, I was shamelessly unprepared. My college counselor told me to focus my efforts on mid-tier liberal arts schools where I’d be able to explore my passion for literature without the competitive pressure of an Ivy League school—a nice way of saying I wasn’t cut out for that type of institution. I had just two AP STEM courses on my transcript and an SAT score that put me in the bottom quintile of all Ivy League applicants. My likelihood, the counselor explained, of gaining admission to a top school was slim. I had not put the same amount of effort into academics or extracurriculars as my peers, but I’d slept eight hours every night and woken up every day to spend my time on what I loved.

I knew that what I did have over my classmates was the ability to write a compelling narrative. If admissions officers were shrewd, I wagered, they would discern my passion for literature and would at least give my application some consideration. By then, I had identified a clear direction for my efforts: I wanted to reform the way people thought about literature and revitalize their appreciation of literary study. I had an obsession, and now I had direction. I applied to just two of the schools that my counselor recommended and spent the rest of my evenings writing essays for America’s most competitive universities.

On Ivy Day—the day that every Ivy League school releases its decisions—tension and resentment infiltrated every conversation in which I found myself. Surveying the hallways, I noticed several students pressed up against their lockers, wrapped in consolatory hugs from counselors and friends. These dejected teenagers with immaculate GPAs and perfect test scores were stuck going to less prestigious schools than they had been expecting after four years of sleepless nights and countless mental health problems. I kept quiet until the final day of school, when I announced to several close friends that I would be off to Manhattan that fall to attend Columbia University.

The secret to my unconventional success wasn’t sleepless nights or leadership or rigorous courses. I likely received an offer from Columbia because of the way my eyes sparkle when I’m lost in a discussion of iambic pentameter; because of how, at parties, I’m ensconced in a modest corner explaining the merits of Dostoyevsky; because I knew from an early age that I wanted to be a writer. I was probably the only seventeen-year-old that year who had read the complete works of Dickens and Chaucer and who had uploaded a poetry sample to a space reserved for scientific research supplements. And, most importantly, I had identified a lifestyle that put a smile on my face.

Several years later, experiencing college admissions from the other end at my college consulting firm, I coach many students who come to me with essays about stress from outlandish activities that serve no purpose but to make a mark on their resumes, and it breaks my heart to see that they are fed a narrative that makes them believe they must be unhappy for the first eighteen years of their life in order to be successful. My personal experiences with Ivy League admissions negate that misconception, and I hope that through my practice, I can teach students that nothing matters in life except to wake up every morning loving what you do. It’s an unfortunate world we’ve constructed that leads students to believe they must destroy their childhoods in order to achieve success, but maybe we can change that. I think back to the little fourteen-year-old girl in her counselor’s office, kicking her legs absentmindedly against the back of her chair, and I wish that I could quell her tears and take back her counselor’s words.

In order to change the admissions narrative, we must retire the idea that our teenagers must mimic corporate executives or American presidents to gain a fulfilling education; instead, we can encourage them to spend their lives doing what brings them the greatest fulfillment, and to take advantage of the moment when their passions lead them to inadvertent success.