Crushing Krisis

Comic Books, Drag Race, & Life in New Zealand

admissions

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NYU is who they reject, and i was rejected by them. Somewhere in that exchange of $50 and a heavy manila piece of paper with my essay about intolerance and growing up attached we agreed to define each other. NYU already knows exactly what it is because i am just one tiny speck of rejection on the wide face of their thirty thousand plus applications every year. But, i have yet to define them. To this point i have just been “peter, who did some theatre and took some advanced placement tests and didn’t get into NYU.” And, so, now i feel like i have to be something… something that represents what NYU passed up when they passed on me.

Of course, Mr. NYU didn’t really mean “You are who you reject” with any sort of positive intent other than increase in reputation. He never gave the indication that students could use their rejection to define themselves better or that they should realize that they were only being turned away because a fine institution is as much about who they admit as they are about who they don’t. There isn’t any reason to wonder about such things, and that’s why his school can afford to be nearly the most expensive place to get a degree in the entire country. He said his catchphrase and then launched into how the school targets their mailings at specific grade levels and about how they guarantee four-year housing to all students from outside of the five boroughs because none of them could ever afford to live anywhere near the school on their own.

And i was stuck on instant replay in my head, taking the meeting’s minutes down like an automaton while i wondered. He didn’t mean it as a key to self help, but i’ll be damned if i don’t use it that way. Because, i do not want to visit drexel in 10 years and hear someone say in some faceless heartless presentation that i’m the kind of student that they gobbled up 15 years ago but that now i would barely even meet the criteria to slip in the back way through our local community college. The thought of it makes me sick.

NYU and i are stuck together for life. And, if you want to get more compulsive about this than i’m being, every job and listener and reader and girl who turned me down is now saddled with me more than if they had just gave in and paid me some effort. But, the burden is on my shoulders. I’ve got to become somebody.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5119796/

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So i found myself sitting across a long table from Mr. David Someone who was at NYU when it was just a little hole in The Village’s wall, and he was telling our counselors how to do things. At first it seemed rather dashing and exciting and fun, but then when the counselors started to ask questions about if NYU does personal interviews and personal tours and handwritten envelopes from counselors suddenly all of the happy smiling applicants turned into sheep either being lead to the slaughter or the shears. And and and, and finally we got around to how financial aid works, and he said that SAT scores and family income have a perfect positive slope on his graph and so selective schools don’t have to worry too much about throwing excessive amounts of aid around. Because, if a student without too much money and merely above average grades manages to get in they will find a way to make up the difference if the school really matters to them.

And then, and then …. his favourite phrase came out. “Remember, you aren’t judged by who you accept, you’re judged by who you reject.” And, yes, i know we were talking about the college admissions process and about how NYU only has to accept 25% of each application pool to fill all of their seats, but it was like he was staring right at me from across the table saying that they are who they are because i got a big fat NO in the mail from them April 4th, 1999.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5119645/

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Today the former director of admissions at New York University was here at Drexel to talk to our admissions staff about our potential for growth in the coming year, and somehow i got myself into the meeting with him because i said i thought it would be “educational” (for all of the obvious reason, and since NYU was one of my top choice schools). So, i volunteered to take minutes and wound up choking down metaphorical bile through the entire chat.

You have to understand that when i say that NYU was one of my top choice schools that i really had no top choice. I was totally unprepared for college. I had no idea what i wanted to be save for that i didn’t really want to take any more calculus, and i thought that i was being savvy and intelligent when i said i had my school search narrowed down to cities that reminded me of Philadelphia. I knew nothing, and had no battle plan, and didn’t know how i was going to pay for college, and i could be accused of being silly and naive but i had honestly been convinced by Masterman that i just had to pick a school and apply and my SAT score and our reputation would step up and do the trick.

Of course, having worked in Admissions for a half a year now, i see how this was both true and false. If i had been told to target smaller sized colleges that were on the upper half of the second tier of acceptance rates, i would’ve done amazingly well. Those schools gobble up SAT scores like mine and are left wanting more. They love AP-inflated GPAs. They love over-involvement in extra-curricular activities. However, no one told me that, and so it was just my mother and i all alone against the admissions process.

My first four choices were Brown, NYU, Penn, BU. No one saw fit to tell me that even our top ten students wouldn’t necessarily be able to make a clean sweep on acceptance letters from those institutions, and one way or another none of those stories ended happily. APs don’t mean too much when over 70% of your entering class has them. Good SAT’s pale in comparison to a perfect 800. A single parent working as a nurse with no savings doesn’t buy you too far into a class of intelligencia and society that you never even met before let alone associated with.

And, so, i didn’t go Ivy, or even “little ivy.” Somehow, almost by coincidence, i came to Drexel. And i love it and the people are perfect and i still regret the fact that i’m here because i didn’t do all of my homework like i should have (on so many different levels).

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5119628/

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The sky is endlessly growling and hissing and it is crumbling down on us slowly but surely as i speak. The great court of our main building has a skylight in the middle of the ceiling made up of 81 tiny windows on the heavens arranged by nines, and when the sky is this angry the building is cast in the make-pretend candle light held up by tiny cherubs flirting with the shadows that surround them. When i hear thunder i bolt out of our back office door to imagine the court as i might have seen it lit a century ago.


And our website doesn’t have a single picture of it; however, this is the visageless keeper of it all.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5021048/

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Blogger is dumb. I ought to start keeping a blogger is dumb tally somewhere of the number of estimated words that it’s eaten. This time i just pressed ‘esc’ with a stray finger and it cleared the blog box. Whatever, we all know it’s got dumb flaws. Better than using live journal, i suppose.


Anyhow, the relevant part of my post was about heat. Heat is such a relative concept… right now there is a heat index of 108 firmly in place for my walk home. So, i’m sure i’ll be hot. But, really, heat isn’t something i especially notice unless it’s pointed out to me. This morning i gave my typical walking backwards tour for an entire hour to a huge group and when i got back i was informed that i was feeling 110 degrees of heat for the entire tour, when in my head i think i figured it was 86 or 92 or some other acceptable test-score number. Really, the difference between my perception and the reality was the same as the difference between 70 and 90, and i’m sure i could tell the difference between those two.

https://www.crushingkrisis.com/2001/08/5002948/