[lit-ideas] Please, just fake authenticity for me one more time?
- From: "Julie Krueger" <juliereneb@xxxxxxxxx>
- To: lit-ideas@xxxxxxxxxxxxx
- Date: Thu, 23 Aug 2007 01:27:27 -0500
AKA "Prove your authenticity and human imperfections by faking them or,
perhaps, appearing to fake them"....
Okay, all you profs out there --
help me understand this, please.
Julie Krueger
Back to
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Colleges seek 'authenticity' in hopefuls
By JUSTIN POPE, AP Education Writer*Wed 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."
Copyright (c) 2007 The Associated Press. All rights reserved. The information
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or redistributed without the prior written authority of The Associated
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