Going Geek:

What Every Smart Kid (and Every Smart parent) Should Know About College Admissions

John Carpenter

Going Geek: What Every Smart Kid (and Every Smart Parent) Should Know about College Admissions by John Carpenter

Introduction If you go to the library or to a bookstore, youll find dozens of books written about how to get into college. From insiders guides, written by former admissions officers who claim to have the secrets of undergraduate admissions, to rankings and descriptions of the most selective universities and colleges, they all seemed geared to help you find the quickest, most sure-fire way to get into the college of your dreams. And thats good--except for one thing: most of those books are written for the mass public with the idea that everyone thinks the same way, wants the same thing, and should go about it in the same manner.

This book is different. The idea here is that if youre reading this book, then youve already set yourself apart from most people. Youre eager to go to college not just for all the fun--and believe me, college is fun, but youre one of those people who really likes to learn, and youre looking forward to exploring all you can without the restrictions of high school hanging over you. You actually enjoy learning things. Some folks might find you to be a little odd, but youre

okay with that. In fact, you may be smiling right now, thinking about just how smart you are and how much you love the weirdness that goes along with being smart.

Going Geek is for the intellectually gifted kid who gets it. You. Because, lets face it, youre the one whos going to lead the planet to a better place and undo all the crap that the people ahead of you have created. And later, many of those other kids who--well, who just arent that bright-will be looking to you for leadership and will be waiting to invest their money in your projects.

But first you have to get there--wherever there is, and before that, you have to get into a school. Into college. And youre in luck because despite whatever you read in all the other guidebooks or hear from admissions officers around the country about being phenomenally well-rounded or having great community service or possessing amazing leadership skills, it is the really smart kid who excites professors, and every dean of admissions knows it.

This book is written to help you, the kid who genuinely gets excited about geeky things, show off your best attributes. It is designed to help you create an application that reflects the brilliant star that you are--no matter what your grades look like, no matter what your SAT or ACT scores might be, no matter what obstacles youve had to overcome. So if this sounds interesting to you, get ready to think because I am going to challenge you a little bit as you put together an amazing application.

Chapter One: Identifying Your Inner Geek, Part One

Lets talk for a minute about the kind of geek you are. What? You didnt realize there was more than one type of you? Sure you did. Havent you taken one of those on-line geek tests before to see where you fall on the nerdy scale? Actually, those tests are pretty funny, and you might enjoy rating yourself, but I digress--and its only the first paragraph! My point is this: standing out because you enjoy thinking is a good thing, so lets figure out the kind of thinker you are and start from there.

Like just about anything, there are several ways of being really bright, and the challenge for you (and for people in college admissions) is to identify who you are as a learner and also as an academic performer. I cant emphasize this enough: your best shot at convincing admissions officers that their institution will benefit from your contributions is to let them see how you think and act in an academically challenging environment. So, our first steps have to be for you to understand exactly the kind of learner you have been up to now, with examples.

The important thing is to be able to describe yourself honestly. Knowing who you are is the best place to begin. Being able to articulate how you learn, how you process what you learn, and how you use what you learn will increase your chances of being admitted to any college. Your goal is be able to present a very clear picture of who you are as someone who gets excited by academic ideas. That all starts by understanding the kind of geek you really are.

Here are six high school seniors--mostly fictitious but comprised of very real characteristics of actual students who have already graduated and gone on to college. See if any of their habits or personalities resonate with you. Of course, being the unique person you are, you wont be exactly like any one of the students described here, but you may see some of yourself in two or three of them.

Marco As a junior, Marco was a high school national mathematics champion. He loves math at all levels and finished AP BC Calculus as a sophomore, with a 5 on the exam. To continue in math, he has taken courses at the city campus of the state university where he lives. By the time he graduates, he will have earned 5s on his AP exams in Physics, Chemistry, Biology, US History, Economics, and French Language. He loves reading but prefers studying for a purpose. He has formed study groups for each of his subjects with two or three other kids, and his idea of a funfilled evening is reviewing class notes for his Econ class, recounting the ways that his teacher, who is also brilliant, uses very weird humor as he finds tiny errors in the way the students have constructed their work.

Marco has earned the highest GPA in the class, and he has a perfect SAT in math as well as in the three subject tests he has taken. His SAT reading and writing scores were only 780 each, a shame he bears good naturedly. He is the oldest in his family of four siblings, and neither one of

his parents attended college. He knows that he will have to depend completely on scholarship and financial aid money in determining where to go to college.

Marco is large, non-athletic, and always happy. Hes the kid who tells the joke about two guys in the jungle who come across a desperate, starving man-eating tiger. One kid whips out his iphone and looks for an app where he can enter all kinds of data about the tigers approximate size and speed to calculate how fast he has to run to escape the tigers deadly jaws while the other kid starts tightening the laces on his sneakers. What are you doing? the second kids asks his friend. Im figuring out if I can outrun this man-eating tiger, he replies; what are YOU doing? The second kid smiles and says, Im just getting my shoes tied so that I can outrun you. At first glance, many people would think that Marco would be the guy punching data into his i-phone, but in reality, hes the smarter one who understands he really only needs to run faster than his buddy even though the chances of Marco outrunning anyone are pretty slim indeed, and he knows it.

Hannah Hannah loves to talk. At times, she drives the rest of us mad with her need for conversation, but she finds real pleasure in the exchange of ideas and the subtle challenge of contradicting people. Some of her teachers dont understand Hannah and think that she is trying to draw attention to herself. She has friends, but none of them fall into the popular group at her school. That doesnt

bother Hannah in the least. Most of the kids in that group arent really interested in thinking about why things exist the way that Hannah does.

Hannahs school doesnt offer a class in philosophy, which she loves, but in Latin she learned about the Epicurean Catius who wrote about finding the highest good within the physical world. (De rerum natura et de summo bono for any Latin geeks.) So, she starts the philosophy club after school, which becomes really popular among the artsy kids, meets her current boyfriend, and falls into bliss. Topics include the impermanence of beauty, measuring time, and whether or not anything can really be known. And while the club goes on very successfully for the whole semester, Hannahs real love continues to be science as she considers engineering and biology possible majors at college.

Hannah loves language obviously, and she is a beautiful writer who creates clear and readable prose effortlessly. Her mother is Nicaraguan, her father Italian; she has traveled widely and speaks both Spanish and Italian fluently. She scored higher than anyone else in her eleventh grade class on the PSAT, but because she isnt a citizen of the US, she wasnt recognized by National Merit.

Weisheng

The only child of a single Chinese parent, Weishing came to the US when he was three. He and his family gained citizenship through a lottery. Weisheng attends a public school. He is fluent in English and spoken Chinese. He has never been back to China.

He loves theatre and alternative music, but he is not so crazy about anything else related to school. He is a constant worry to his mother though the two have a close relationship. His GPA hovers around a 2.5 but his SATs are all in the very high 700s.

As a sophomore, he memorized the entire version of the Odyssey in his English textbook and recited it for his class, stunning everyone. He sang the role of Judas in the schools production of Jesus Christ Superstar, stealing the show from more popular student actors. He plays classical piano at home as well as bass guitar, flute, and synthesizer. On weekends, he is often found guest-performing with local bands in under-18 clubs. His i-pod is always on.

Almost everything in school is easy for Weisheng, but classes are boring and most of his classmates seem ridiculously immature. He doesnt care about sports or school spirit or community service. He does, however, love poetry and has read and also written more poetry than probably any of his teachers. By the time he graduates, he will have had two poems published in national literary journals though none of his schoolmates will know about it.

He wanted to take AP Englilsh as a senior because he recognized the authors on the reading list, but his low grades as a junior prevented him from being approved for the course. Without telling

anyone, he read every book on the list over the summer before his senior year, and took the easy class, Writing for Seniors, instead. People automatically categorize him as a user even though he doesnt use drugs nearly as much as most kids in his school.

Ernie A violinist since age four, Ernie is also gifted in math and language. Things are easy for him, but his time is always compromised. He practices violin at least three hours a day during the week, and on weekends he studies with a private tutor and performs with a community group of musicians at the local arts center. His school music program is underfunded, and though wellintentioned, the director cant provide Ernie with the level of challenge or teaching that he needs. He is breezing through IB Music, higher level, and he is one of a small group of students at his school who are taking a full IB Diploma program.

Ernie sometimes can be hot-tempered, but he never really means to be unkind. He has little patience for teachers who get hung up on process instead of looking to find the answers. And he seldom has time for homework due to his violin lessons--a situation that has had a slight effect on his GPA.

At the mid-semester marking period during his sophomore year, Ernies teacher gave him a C even though he had made perfect or near-perfect scores on every quiz and test; what Ernie hadnt bothered to do was homework. When he explained that he didnt need to write out the

homework because he understood the problems when he read them at home, his teacher laughed at him. So that same night, Ernie stayed up all night and wrote out every homework problem in the textbook for the next nine weeks, in order to get it all done and out of the way.

Ernie really wants to attend college at a selective national university where he can continue studying music while also majoring in history or pre-law, but he realizes his 3.5 GPA might not be high enough.

Suriya Some girls just seem do to everything right, and Suriya is one of those people. She is detail oriented and highly organized; she is involved with about ten different projects any given week, ranging from Arts Council to Special Olympics; she is a champion debater who has led her school to victory in many tournaments. She is active and well-liked.

Her parents are both doctors, and Suriya is also considering a career in medicine, but she also likes several different subjects equally well: English, history, art, dance are all as appealing to her as math and science. She spent a summer working in a graduate studies research lab, recording the percentage of lead concentration in various samples of drinking water; it gave her the opportunity to use various reactors, to work alongside professors doing real research, and to have her name as a co-author on the finished scientific paper published in a journal of geological sciences. She also was named a national science scholar as a result of this research.

Suriya loves football, too. She is a huge fan of her schools team as well as her state universitys team though she considers the state school her fallback option and secretly only plans to attend there if she doesnt get in at a top private school. She has a good head for sports statistics and often amazes people by how much she knows about any football teams passing numbers, NFL or college ranking, or odds against other teams. She is amazing at football trivia.

She reads novels as fast as she can pick them up, but there never seems to be enough time for her to read as much as she would like to. She really enjoys Jodi Picoult novels, but also loves a good biography or historical novel. In grade nine, she read all the Bronte sisters and then moved on to Jane Austen, Charles Dickens, and Wilkie Collins.

Angela. A huge fan of history, Angela fell in love with Abraham Lincoln in the fourth grade. While many kids outgrow their grade school interests, Angela only added to hers, reading everything she could about statesmanship, slavery, equal rights, and the Civil War. She convinced her family to spend their summer vacation in Pennsylvania one year to walk the battlefields of Gettysburg, in Illinois one summer to visit the Lincoln museum, and in Ontario later to pay tribute to where many people escaped slavery via the Underground Railroad.

She knows just about everything about the history of her own city in the Midwest, in a matter-offact kind of way. On a visit to any historical society or museum, she often recognizes people in obscure portraits or those for whom buildings and institutes are named. She knows who all the streets downtown were named for, too, and their significance to local history.

Her dream is to become a historical authority on all things related to Civil Rights and to write several books. In fact, she has already begun her first real attempt at a historical novel, having finished about 200 pages, based on women serving as spies in the Civil War. Angela has a small group of friends, but most people think her passion for history is a little over the top, and secretly, Angela occasionally wonders if she should take more interest in pop culture as most of her peers do.

Angela has suffered many a teasing over the years for her single-minded love of the past, and her number one goal in finding a college is that it be a place where people treat one another with respect, thus giving her the freedom to explore fully the topics she cares about. She has no interest in sororities, but she does love sewing and dress-making, and cares deeply for the small circle of girls who are her friends.

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Each of the students in the preceding pages is different from the others, but one thing they all have in common is that they are intellectually curious. They may appear very different in what

they like and in what they like to do, but a strong desire to discover things, to see connections, to learn more unites them.

You are also part of that group if you can identify an area where no matter how much you learn, it seems that you just cant get enough. Youre always interesting in learning more, in continuing to read, in finding out what else there is to know. This is what college professors love--students who share their enthusiasm for a topic. And it is exactly the kind of student whom admissions officers are eager to admit--when they can identify them.

Admissions officers are the good guys here, but they have an impossible job--especially at highly selective institutions where the ratio of admitted students is somewhere around one out of five to ten. Our goal is to make it easier for them to see your strengths.

So, lets begin with an assessment of YOU. If you were to write a short description of yourself such as one of the descriptions of Marco, Hannah, Weisheng, Ernie, Suriya, and Angela, what would it include? Try that now. And then ask a close friend to write a short description of you as well. And finally, ask your parents to do the same thing. Once you have all three, compare them, and see what common threads exist. What we are beginning to build here is the fundamental concept of the kind of learner you have been. Eventually, we will add to it, modify it, and shape it into a description that shows off your wonderful geekiness. But for now, dont think so much about how it might look at the end; just write.

Identifying Your Inner Geek, Part Two.

In the last section, you took a good look at yourself as a learner. What did you discover? What were some words or phrases that came up again and again about the things you like? What were the ideas that you, your friends, and your parents all recognized? What did they see that you hadnt?

Using the observations of people around you is important in self-examination. Its like using a mirror to see what you look like from a different point of view--or two mirrors even. Of course, the philosopher inside us will remind us that reflections are never true images but rather approximations of who we are, and that perception is always skewed and never perfect; however, this combined point of view is much more complete that none at all, so lets go with that as we work to understand ourselves better.

In the 1950s two psychologists named Joseph Luft and Harry Ingham created a model to help people develop self-awareness in interpersonal communication. They called it the Johari window because a) their names were Joe and Harry, and b) the diagram of the model looked like a window.

The basic idea is that of the four sections (or window panes) of the diagram, one represents all we know about ourselves that other people also know about us; one is what others see in us that

we do not recognize; one represents what we know about ourselves but others do not; and the last stands for what is not yet known or cannot be known about ourselves by us or by anyone else.

The window panes that admissions officers see are the first and the second, and your goal is to be sure that what they see represents you accurately. That means being aware of your public self (the person that you will present in your college application) by being intentional about it, being as aware as is philosophically possible about your blind spots so that nothing is working against you, and making others aware of your hidden self by sliding some of that (the good stuff) over into your public self. One huge error that many high school seniors commit is not realizing how

much of who they are and what they have to offer a college or university often remains unseen in that third window pane, the hidden self, and as a result, if no one but you (or your mother) sees your gifts, your talents, and the kind of learner that you are, then no one can admit you to their institution. The college application is the perfect vehicle for transporting some of what lies in your hidden self over to the public self--that is, for those who are smart enough to realize it. And clearly you are one of those smart people.

One word of caution, however: because were all human, there are probably things in our hidden selves that should remain hidden. Think of the inappropriate postings youve seen on Facebook and you know instantly what I mean.

So, lets continue with discovering who you are as a learner in order to communicate that effectively through your application. Lets talk about your grades. Are grades important to you? They are to admissions officers. And no matter how fair or unfair they are, your grades communicate a strong message about how successful you might be in college.

So, right now, own your current GPA--whatever it is. What it reflects is the way you have performed in the classroom over the last few years. Most GPAs begin with first semester in ninth grade, but some dont include grades until your sophomore year. Some schools weight grades--meaning you get extra points for classes that are considered tougher or honors classes; some schools consider all grades equally. Whatever your scenario your school uses doesnt really matter as much as where you fall in the spectrum of GPAs at your same school. Also, you

should probably count on the fact that many college admissions offices have practices that include refiguring your GPA, using their own system. For those that do, they sometimes take off the extra points (if you have a weighted system at your high school), and they usually dont figure in grades for religion courses or arts courses. But dont sweat any of that right now. What we need to figure out first is where you fall GPA-wise in the range of kids at your school.

Most schools now use an on-line resource that gives you access to all kinds of statistics so that you can compare your GPA to the GPAs of other kids from your school in the past who applied to the same colleges youre interested in. Check that out. It is really helpful in guiding you to a place where you can understand what your statistical odds are to be admitted. Dont worry if your GPA is slightly lower, and dont be too confident if its slightly higher than the average GPA of an admitted student from your school, but do use that info wisely in helping you choose where youll apply. Well talk about that more in the chapter on how to figure out where to apply. (Chapter Five.)

Your grades do not define you, nor do they define your potential at the undergraduate level, but college admissions officers do use them as one factor in trying to figure out if they should admit you. Obviously, the higher the better, but the number is only as important as the way you have risen to academic challenge all along.

And your grades also tell part of a story, but seldom the whole story. What do your grades tell about you? Do they explain some of your other commitments? Do they reflect your ability to pursue a topic in-depth? Do they show a progression from year to year?

Remember Ernie, the kid who practiced violin every day? Hes worried about his GPA not being high enough, and he actually has reason to worry at some colleges. At very highly selective institutions where five times as many qualified people apply and where numbers are a priority, Ernie might get overlooked for another student who has higher grades. However, at many of those same colleges that are competitive in admissions, Ernie might have a chance if he presents a complete picture of how he learns, how he has performed, and how he will thrive once he gets to college.

Or what about Weisheng, the kid who memorized the entire Odyssey, loves poetry, and plays beautiful music but whose GPA was a 2.5? He has a huge obstacle to overcome, and his options for college will probably be fewer, but by presenting a complete picture of who he is as a learner and highlighting exactly where he has been successful, he may still have a chance at many pretty cool schools. Interestingly, his options for college may even represent more creative approaches to an undergraduate degree--especially at really competitive places. But much of his chances will ride on how successful he is at communicating his love for ideas to college admissions officers.

The key phrase is complete picture--as in comprehensive, thorough, and consistent. GPA is a factor in that total picture. Whatever yours is, own it, present it, know the story it tells, and dont make excuses for it. Lets go back to the self-description you wrote and what your parents and friends told you, and now factor in your GPA. You are beginning to see the outline of the geek that is you. Lets flush it out a bit more with the grades. Answer these questions: why is your GPA so high (or low, or medium)? how did that happen? what does it say about your priorities? what does it say about your test-taking or homework skills? what does it say about your follow-up? what does it say about the way you communicate to your teachers about what youve learned? what does it say about your outside time commitments? what does it say about your most enjoyable subjects? what does your GPA really represent?

For some people, the GPA says, Hey, I love working hard and getting all the answers right! For others it says, It wasnt always easy, but I have worked very hard and heres proof that I have been successful. Or this: I took courses that were really hard and wasnt able to put as much effort into them as I wish I had. Or this: I didnt try nearly as hard as I could have, but

you know what? I didnt really care about grades and still dont. I enjoy learning, but Im not all that excited about doing a lot of the required work.

Whatever your GPA says about you, add that to your description for now. If what it says isnt exactly what you wish it said about you, relax. By the time we finish looking at the complete you, there will be enough of everything else thats good about you to strike a balance and present a pretty good picture of your intellectual self. In the interim, however, continue to think about what are the things that you really like to learn and where you have been successful learning them.

And for however much time you have left at high school, get the highest grades you can get. Work hard. Lean into the inner geek that craves conventional rewards.