EPISODE 244: JUST BECAUSE A MOVIE ENDS IN INCINERATION DOESN'T MEAN IT WOULDN'T BE AWESOME

POP CULTURE SPIRIT WOW

The year after I got ordained a priest I worked in a parish in Milwaukee, Wisconsin. It was kind of a handful of a year for me, and I was very lucky to have a really good friend from college, Ken Anselment, working nearby.

In a funny way the two of us found ourselves in similar places. Since graduation my friend Ken had spent a decade working in admissions at our alma mater. And he was good at it – he had a warmth for the students and their families and a really great sense of humor. The publications he put out for the department won awards; people commented on the splashy visuals and the wacky, upbeat sense of humor. You picked up a pamphlet from Marquette and whether you ended up going there or not, you definitely had a sense that it was a fun place, a place where good things were happening.

But ten years at one place is a long time, and he was starting to get offers.

Meanwhile while I had just gotten ordained, my path as a Jesuit was a bit less clear. I came to my theology studies knowing I was going to do an MFA in film production and then hopefully go back to the Pine Ridge Indian Reservation and make movies. But I ended up loving the study of theology so much, and in particular Old Testament, I got to a point where I wondered maybe I should get a PhD and teach instead. During my year of parish work I was also writing a master’s thesis on Old Testament and Liturgy (ask me about the concept of memory in the Psalms and at the Eucharist!) as a sort of test drive on a PhD.

So one day the two of us found ourselves at a little Starbucks on Wisconsin Avenue, just a block from the enormous twelve-story beer-can-shaped freshman dormitory where we had both lived and worked as resident advisors. I remember sipping peppermint hot chocolate (like a boss), talking about our struggles and wondering, as Mary Oliver writes, “What is it you plan to do with your one wild and precious life?”

And in the midst of our conversation, this crazy idea came out, a sort of criteria by which to judge the courses of our lives: You’re on the right track, we decided, when you’ve put yourself in a position to fail spectacularly.

The idea was, life is about risk. If you risk a lot, it may not pan out, but you’re probably into the important stuff of your life. You’re on the right road.

Crazily, things happened pretty fast for both of us after that. I moved to New York about six months later to start work at America Magazine. It wasn’t screenwriting – a risk still too big for me to consider --- but it was writing and in a city and with a group of people I didn’t know at all. I can still remember sitting at Mass with my community there those first few days of work, and realizing that whether or not the writing worked out, it was the first time in a year I felt a sense of being welcome and at home.

Meanwhile Ken took the big leap, leaving Marquette with his wife and their kids to become director of the admissions team at Lawrence University in Appleton, Wisconsin. Today he’s the Dean of Admissions and Financial Aid.

++

Admissions is such a strange business. On the one hand, you get this opportunity to meet amazing young people at a key moment in their lives. You hear their dreams, you see their potential -- they become people you care about and want to help whether they end up at your school or not. In that way it's a lot like being a vocation director of a religious order.

But then admissions is also about getting kids with the right mix of test scores and backgrounds and other things that will enable them to succeed and help the university look good. And you need to raise a certain amount of revenue to keep the doors open and the gas on. (Gets cold in Appleton, let me tell you.)

Imagine that -- your job is to make people feel welcome, to help them see what a great opportunity you have to offer, and to ensure that those who seem like a good fit get that chance; and at the same time lurking beneath the surface is the knowledge that if you screw up or trends change suddenly and kids make other choices -- this year what's in are schools near rivers! -- your faculty and staff might not be able to get their cost of living increases, or may have to teach bigger sections, or may get fired.

You want to talk about real drama? It's not who's stealing whose boyfriend/girlfriend/person at Gamma Kappa Alpha Sigma Chi. It's what's going on in college admissions.

(Also, as much as I don't understand college essays, to me they're basically graduation speeches that everyone has to write even though they're almost all going to be terrible, as an English major it does make me happy to realize that what seems to make for the best college essays is right there in the name of the department.)

++

I didn't know anything when I was applying to colleges myself. I did really well in school - standardized tests are my version of competitive sports (COME AT ME), but when it came to things like visiting schools and fighting for a good deal, I was awful. Basically, if a school expressed too much interest in me, I immediately wrote them off, because whatever, leave me alone, needy much?

(I can remember going to a college fair with my folks and having some small private school from the Midwest tell me how great a deal they could offer me with my grades and me immediately thinking, Forget them. So so stupid.)

Marquette, on the other hand, offered some aid, but not the kind of package that now I realize we should have fought for. Like a lot of Catholic schools, they put their big gifts into "presidential scholar" sort of programs that involved essays and interviews and years spent helping poor kids start businesses. "Scholarships based on merit? We accepted you, didn't we?" is sort of the rule of the day with a lot of these things. (As though working your ass off in every subject in school is not a really substantial accomplishment in and of itself, he says without a trace of leftover resentment.)

I did my interview with two staff members up at Marquette one Saturday morning. My dad drove me up from Chicago; I was wearing my little blue blazer. We were both nervous. Neither one of us had ever done anything like that. We didn't have any idea what to expect.

And all I remember was that they kept asking me to name a personal hero. "I don't really have one," I said politely the first time, mostly because I actually didn't have one, I definitely had people I was grateful for, people who had helped me in so many ways, but heroes? Not really. In fact the whole question kind of seemed like an invitation to be fake and b.s.

NB: When people in an interview ask you to give them some sweet sweet honey flavored b.s., if you want what they are offering you have to find a way to deliver.

My interviewers were not satisfied with my non-answer. "Think about it a little bit," one of them prompted.

So I did. But I just didn't put the world together in those kinds of ways. So I apologized; "I just don't really think like that," I told them.

They waited a beat, processing this, while my mouth reached for that peak dry point where every word would be accompanied by smacking.

One of the interviewers smiled at me benevolently. "Let me give you a couple examples. One person talked about Martin Luther King, and about the sacrifices he made. Another spoke about Mother Teresa, and..."

I don't know what they said after that, because internally I was suddenly so flustered and also furious and then more flustered about being furious that I was no longer processing sound. Martin Luther King, people? Mother Teresa? Really--those are meaningful things to say? I mean, why not just say Jesus? Beat that.

If Present Me could get ten minutes with Then Me, I would tell him, Champ, you're probably not going to get this thing, so what the heck, let them know what you really think of the question and answers like that. Maybe they'll like your hutzpah.

But Present Me has not yet finished his hopefully-some day-groundbreaking work on time travel, so Then Me was just stuck there all alone, feeling like a sad ballerina who cannot master the new step. "I guess my high school theater teacher, Mr. Marquette," I said/asked them. "That's my hero?"

I did admire Mr. Marquette quite a bit, though really the teacher that changed my life in high school was the other theater teacher, Yvonne Trad. Ms. Trad cast me in a play when I'd never done one and wasn't in the theater clique, a total unknown. More than that she cast me in the lead. And her confidence in me never wavered. Really so much of who I am today comes from that older willowy lady, her look like something out of a fabulous New Yorker cartoon, taking a chance on the shy kid desperate for some kind of bigger life.

No, I'm pretty sure I thought of Mr. Marquette because his name was the same as that of the university. (It really was that bad; I could hear the "locked down" sirens going off in my brain.) Maybe some part of me also theorized that the word "Marquette" had fewer plosives or fricatives in its pronunciation and therefore would be less likely to generate my fun for parties but not for interviews mouth smacks.

Of course, giving a name did not satisfy the interviewees. No, they leaned in as though I'd said something interesting. "Mmm. Good. What about him?"

"What about him?" Were they kidding? Didn't I just say -- repeatedly -- that I did not have heroes? Did they not see I had just given them what they so clearly were saying they wanted? Now I was also supposed to come up with a satisfying why? Were they freaking serious?

They were. And I didn't. And oh, hey, look at that, I did not get that scholarship.

What I did, get, though, was a pretty big chip on my shoulder about the 24 kids who did win the scholarship. Some became really good friends; they were super impressive people. But, because I am a broken and silly Scotch Irish person who is as such genetically unable to forget crimes against his person, I made it my goal to do better academically than all of them.

And oh hey, look at that, that goal I did accomplish.

We all need our little victories to help us get through.

++

So knowing that we're in that crazy time of year when tens of thousands of other 18-year-olds are haunting mailboxes and enduring stupid questions while their parents research how many mortgages you can actually have on your house, I thought it might be fun to hear from my friend Ken about what the admissions process is like for his team and whether or not college essays are actually important or just something the universe came up with to traumatize children and admissions counselors. (Actually he came up with an alternate version of the college essay that somehow manages to make it fun. It's kind of astonishing.)

I feel like at this time of year students are applying -- Is that right? Or is that time already done? Where are things at?
You are correct, sir! The fall is when students are applying, and they’ll be doing so for the most part over the next couple of months. But—like Christmas music and political ads—the application season seems to be moving earlier and earlier. My team has just come off two months of road work—visiting with prospective students and families all over the world (we’re an internationally-focused place)—and now shifts its focus almost exclusively to reading applications.

Reading season always feels to me like the segment of a flight where the plane has just reached cruising altitude after the long ascent of fall travel season. We expect a smooth flight but will keep our belts buckled in case we experience any rough air. Carrying that metaphor to its logical conclusion, the spring is preparation for landing: the time where students and families are making their final decisions and we, as college admission folks, are trying to land our plane with all the passengers we want and need—and not to overshoot or undershoot the runway.

I don’t know what this says about me, but throughout that paragraph my brain box kept suggesting the logical conclusion of the plane metaphor is the plane crashing.

Speaking of “rough air,” if you’ve had the pleasure (or curse) of flying several different airlines, you might have become attuned to the differences in language they use around things that may cause unpleasant reactions in their more anxious passengers. Delta seems to have nailed this. I don’t recall the last time I ever heard them use the word “turbulence.” It’s always “rough air,” which, when you think about it, kind of has a nice, weirdly comforting sound to it. All soft sounds. Unlike “turbulence,” which is almost like onomatopoeia; it’s a bumpy-sounding word that makes me close my laptop and grip the armrest.

In my mind as soon as we got to “rough air” all I saw in this entire paragraph is “plane crash.”

Have I mentioned I am a bit of an anxious flyer?

It seems like everyone says the college application is all about nailing the essay. But haven't you already read every possible version of everything? What could possibly make an essay today stand out?
At Lawrence University, we have a tricky little essay prompt we ask on the Common Application in addition to the standard essays students submit with the application. I’m not kidding when I describe it as “little.” The prompt goes like this: “Why Lawrence? It’s a short question looking for a short answer. 47 well-chosen words, give or take a few, will do.”

Earlier this month, a student from Austin submitted her answer to the prompt in binary code, so that was a first. (And she nailed it.)

(For those playing along at home, it was 01010011 01101000 01100001 01101100 01101100 00100000 01110111 01100101 00100000 01110000 01101100 01100001 01111001 00100000 01100001 00100000 01100111 01100001 01101101 01100101 00101100 00100000 01001100 01100001 01110111 01110010 01100101 01101110 01100011 01100101 00100000 01010101 01101110 01101001 01110110 01100101 01110010 01110011 01101001 01110100 01111001 00111111. )

(Okay no it wasn't because no 18 year old in this universe would even get a War Games reference. But a guy can dream.)

You may be wondering, “Why 47 words?” Besides the fact that the world could use a few more pointy numbers (too many 0s and 5s out there), the number is a hat-tip to the year of Lawrence’s founding, 1847. We have a little fun with that number when we release admission decisions online, which happens at 6:47 p.m. Lawrence Standard Time (or Central Time for the rest of the world).

If you’re into 24-hour timekeeping, the pun should come quickly.

The job of reading college essays seems like it could be the punishment in some divine hell//purgatory story -- What if Dante had been a college admissions counselor? Discuss.

And yet reflecting on years of talking to you about admissions the thing that most strikes me is how much you seem to love it and how much you root for everyone that applies. What is it that you are seeing that gives you that perspective?
I don’t get to read essays all that much anymore. But the admissions staff loves to send me the good ones, which is a treat. I often write notes to students after reading those essays, but before they receive admission decisions from us, thanking them for bringing us such joy as readers or, more often, commending them on their courage for facing whatever struggle or hardship they have faced or are continuing to face.

It can be daunting having to read hundreds and hundreds of essays and applications—but that’s if you’re thinking about it only from your own perspective. If you bring empathy to this job—and you’d better bring some empathy to this job or you will lose your mind, not to mention your soul—you will remember that each of these applications was submitted by a person with hopes and dreams, and that it is your duty (and gift) to see how those all mesh with your institution, and to do so with care, respect, kindness, and, whenever appropriate, good humor.

I have to say, just being able to step back and realize life is not American Ninja Warrior, the people we meet are not obstacles but subjects on their own important journeys is a reminder I need a lot.

(Or I need to learn to run faster.)

Another thing I've always been fascinated by talking to you is the different phases to the year for you guys, like application time, acceptances, waiting for the yeses.
Let me see if I can illuminate the life cycle of admissions work through a lens you and I (and, I suspect, many of your readers) will appreciate.

In the admissions world, we start each year in the summer desert, looking off into the twin setting suns of the previous year while longing for the adventures of the coming admission cycle with what you might call “a new hope."

...Go on...

After a spring-summer season where we are planting the seeds of interest in Lawrence among students all over the world, our first applications roll over the dunes right around harvest time, presenting us with a whole bunch of interesting choices.

Let’s call them droids. Can we call them droids?

What we need to create each class will vary by the year, and what we need to replace due to the previous year’s graduation. One year we might need more protocol droids.

YES.

In other years we might need more that speak Bocce. Same thing goes for bassoonists, left-handed pitchers, tenors and point guards.

During the next part of the year—application reading season—we actually meet the interesting characters who fill form the backbone of our remaining work together. Some are wise beyond their years. Others are scruffy-looking nerf-herders. Some are shiny, well-put-together and can speak many languages. Others turn out not be the droids we are looking for.

One of the things I love about this metaphor is that you’ve basically turned admissions officers into Uncle Owen and Aunt Beru, the Perry Whites and Pa Kents of the Star Wars saga.

Yes, their story doesn't end really well. But what about their lives??
You want a standalone movie, Disney? Get me a Owen/Beru biopic.

In the spring, after we have made all of our offers of admission, the decision is in students’ hands as they mull over offers from our college and others. We will work with them very closely to help them find their way to Lawrence—answering their questions, getting them to campus for visits, facilitating meetings with professors, walking them through their financial aid awards. It is a very hands-on process.

We try to control for everything we can as we try to hit our enrollment target—the right (nearly perfect) blend of number, quality, and student revenue—which often seems no bigger than a womp rat.

And when it all goes right...

Hmm. This metaphor has some possible conflicts within it.

But at the end, there comes a point where we must turn off our computers, let go, and trust that everything we have done up to that point will do the trick.

I won’t say that we use the Force.

(But I won’t say that we don’t, either.)

This answer has made me very happy.

14 DAYS.

What are some pro-tips you'd tell to any student applying to college? This could be classic mistakes you see, things you wish more people knew, or just things an applicant and family can do to make things go best? (Basically we want to know where the bunny goes when it's not in the hat. Spill all your magic secrets.)
The biggest secret is not really a secret at all, but—like it seems to have become for so many important things—reality hides behind a cloud of misperception or misinformation.

With all the ink and pixels dedicated to college admission every year, especially the stories about college acceptance rates in the low single-digits*, it’s easy for students and families to be overcome with the idea that it’s nearly impossible to get into college. While it’s true that some colleges have acceptance rates lower than a January low in northeast Wisconsin, the average acceptance rate to four-year colleges in the United States is north of 60%. In fact more than 85% of the country’s four-year colleges and universities admit more than half their applicants.

* That NYT article by Frank Bruni was, in fact, an April fool article. But like the best April fool pranks, it takes its cues from a real premise.

So the pro tip I’ll offer in the admissions process is this: the college admissions process will end well for the vast majority of students out there.

Befitting this particular blog, Luke Skywalker’s advice—at least the way it’s edited for The Last Jedi teaser trailers—works well here:

“Breathe. Just. Breathe.”

(ahem. 14 days.)

Are their figures or stories or ideas from Catholicism that speak to you in your work?
As a guy who spent nearly half of his life either studying in or working on behalf of Jesuit education, I am more than a bit partial to an Ignatian read on the world. (Interesting side note: Autcorrect really wants to change “Ignatius” to “Ignition”, which, given the original Jesuit’s exhortation to “Go, set the world on fire,” seems on the nose… in an Ignatian kind of way.

[Side note on the side note: Ignatius would be a great name for an anarchic pyromaniac in a Chuck Palahniuk novel.]

ABSOLUTELY TRUE.

Like it can be for many jobs, work in college admission and financial aid—especially when you’re in a leadership role—has a way of becoming all-consuming if you let it. The pressures of “making a class”—which is making sure it sticks the three-point landing of size, quality and revenue for the institution—can be enormous to the point where the rest of the world and all of its wonders and graces can fly by and you don’t pause to notice them or reflect on them.

It may be the slow rising and tumbling of a cumulus cloud your plane has sailed past on an afternoon flight. And again I’m worried about plane crashes.

Sorry. Go on.

It may be the dread of a difficult conversation with a colleague, only to have that conversation lead to a new shared understanding. It may be the family who has decided to choose another more name-brand college, but sends you a note saying that your team treated them better and with more dignity than any other college. It may be a small recognition in the algorithm behind autocorrect.

They can all pass without notice in the rush and crush of this kind of work, or any kind of work or habit or avocation.

Or they can be opportunities to, as Ignatius challenges us, find God in all things.

I know I have missed many of these “things," but the ones I have noticed have, on more than one occasion, taken my breath away.

Last Question: What are you consuming from the worlds of pop culture right now? What are you loving/loathing/wishing for more? What is giving you hope?
At your encouragement, I’m working my way through The Dark Tower series. I’m only on book three, so I have a really really long way to go.

You do. But it’s really worth it.

As I’m reading this one, I’m also working through Jim Martin’s Jesus: A Pilgrimage. (And I’m not doing that to be a teacher’s pet.)

Mm-hmm.

My wife and I just started watching Broadchurch. We had been forewarned that it is emotionally challenging to watch, but after The Leftovers, we’re in great condition. We’re three episodes into Broadchurch and—man, oh, man—it is beautifully done. I’m hooked. Like a good book, it has me thinking about it when I’m not watching it, wondering what’s going on with these characters I’m already bonding with.

This is such a great series to watch, especially in the winter months. Maximum impact.

(Related note: when I want to make my life feel more cinematic/dramatic, I play the soundtrack from The Leftovers. Otherwise, when I want some fun in my life, I just ask Siri to play me some music, and she never fails to disappoint/surprise.

Stephen Colbert eases my troubled mind.

Can we start talking about the tremors I’m getting with the countdown to The Last Jedi?

Ummm...:

(And yes, the internet has multiple Star Wars countdowns.)

Ken Anselment, ladies and gentlemen. One of the good ones. If you know someone close to applying to college, they should definitely check out Lawrence. Good people there.

++ LINKS ++

You’re not going to know what this is; I still don’t. But wait a couple minutes (or skip to 2:08) and you’ll know why I’m linking to it.

Then watch this and this to see how the internet can still be wonderful.

It seems like I kept running into stories about the history of language this week. Like this piece about the origins of reading to yourself, which explains that silent reading was like the texting of its day, a practice considered rude when done in the presence of others. (Texting is definitely worse.) At the same time, some believe that silent reading created a space within people where they were more able to think for themselves.

Also, some theorize that it was actually the introduction of a space between words (because for some reason that I feel like should be a crime the monks who transcribed everything used to not do that) that might have been the first step that led towards reading to yourself in the first place.

An article that makes the grammatical space between words into the origins of our private thoughts and imagination. How can you not love that?

There’s also this piece about the development of the sentence, which I have not read yet but I’m super excited to get into.

And McSweeneys had this glorious article reimagining Dante’s circles of Hell in terms of linguistic transgressions.

A favorite:

Second Circle: The Serial Comma
One half of this circle is populated by souls who are cursed to make arguments that nobody cares about except their own mothers, howling gorgons and the infernal mistresses of hell. The other half are cursed to make arguments that nobody cares about except their own mothers, howling gorgons, and the infernal mistresses of hell. The difference between these two situations seems to matter a lot to both halves. Neither side will listen to you when you suggest that they could avoid this level entirely.

Not for nothing, the Oxford comma is rubbish, and if I have to spend eternity shouting at people about it I am prepared to do so.

It was another mess of a week. Seems like any public figure that a) you've ever admired and b) has an XY chromosome is apparently a monster.

But you know, you're still here. And the Oscar-bait movies are coming. And that early brisk chill of winter is kind of nice. So I don't know, maybe we should just eat fried food and have a beer and give it another week.

Also, there's this: