Myth #5 (Several Variations)
I’m going to visit that college in person. Since I’ll be attending the information session on campus there’s no need for me to go to the meeting when the representative visits my high school.
I just visited that college so I don’t need to go to their open house at the Holiday Inn next month.
I didn’t know the college rep was visiting my high school today so I forgot to sign up. My college counselor said not to worry it wasn’t a big deal.
I had a lot of homework the night of the local open house so I thought it was better to skip it. I don’t think it’s a big deal.
These are all really one myth and should be filed under the general heading of and misconception that, no single action is going to make or break my chance of being accepted. That’s a standard line from both admissions offices and college counseling offices. It’s true . . . sort of. No admissions officer wants to think that they made a decision based on some small incident either positive or negative. Their goal and preference is to make decisions based on a cumulative history or pattern of behavior.
Now, here’s where it gets a bit tricky. Isn’t any history of behavior simply the accumulation of many little pieces? Of course it is. If you were trying to carry an armful of soda cans, loading up the first couple would be easy. You could probably carry quite a few but eventually, adding one too many cans would cause you to be overloaded and you’d drop all of them.
The point is that no individual can makes a particular difference unless it’s that last critical one. Now if you work at a grocery store and carrying soda cans is a routine part of your job, you’ll eventually learn which can is the one that will make the difference . . . but you won’t know if you just try it once. I have no doubt that if you could go through high school and apply to college, say, five or six times, you’d get pretty good at it. But you don’t. You have one shot at it . . . so you want to be as careful as you can possibly be.
You don’t know if the meeting at your high school will be when you make a personal connection with the admissions officer who will be reading your application. You don’t know if the college rep will remember you from the open house at the Holiday Inn and make special note of your interest. There’s no way of knowing exactly which event, which piece of serendipity will make a difference. So . . . play it safe and make full use of every opportunity.
There’s a second part to this answer. Not only should you be careful with the active opportunities you have to impress a college but be mindful of the secondary or “once removed” opportunities as well. Consider this example from my own experience. A couple of years ago I worked with an extremely bright and talented student who was undeniably a little bit, well, let’s just call it
“irreverent”, from time to time. In the midst of college applications, he turned in a math assignment written on the back of a soda bottle label. The work was fine but the teacher felt disrespected and was quietly outraged. I’m sure it was the primary topic of conversation in the teacher’s lounge that afternoon. There’s no bad ending to this story, he was accepted at two outstanding colleges. There is an interesting wrinkle however; he was also “wait listed” at four other top colleges. That’s a lot of wait lists for one student to collect. In retrospect, it’s clear that his application was just exactly on the cusp of being accepted at several top colleges. Did the bottle label homework make the difference? Did it influence the language of a recommendation just enough? We’ll never know, but with an application that close to the line . . . clearly, very small influences either way would have and could have made the difference.
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