“
She loved all the wolves behind her house, but she loved one of them most of all.
And this one loved her back. He loved her back so hard that even the things that weren't special about her became special: the way she tapped her pencil on her teeth, the off-key songs she sang in the shower, how when she kissed him he knew it meant for ever.
Hers was a memory made up of snapshots: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying goodbye behind a cracked windshield.
A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam's smile.
It was a life I didn't want to leave behind.
It was a life I didn't want to forget.
I wasn't done with it yet. There was so much more to say.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #2))
“
Her parents wanted her to find her own way in life. That’s what they’d said countless times in the past. Of course, they’d been referring to school subjects and college applications and job prospects. Presumably, at no stage did they factor living skeletons and magic underworlds into their considerations. If they had, their advice would probably have been very different.
”
”
Derek Landy (Skulduggery Pleasant (Skulduggery Pleasant, #1))
“
Alphabet: a symbolic system used in algebra, with applications that have yet to be discovered by dyslexics and two thirds of college graduates.
”
”
Bauvard (Some Inspiration for the Overenthusiastic)
“
Great. Lookout. I'm a lookout. Another thing to put on my college applications. What do I do if I see someone?"
Val looked back. "I'm not sure, actually.
”
”
Holly Black (Valiant (Modern Faerie Tales, #2))
“
Hers was a memory made up of snapshorts: being dragged through the snow by a pack of wolves, first kiss tasting of oranges, saying goodbye behind a cracked windshield.
A life made up of promises of what could be: the possibilities contained in a stack of college applications, the thrill of sleeping under a strange roof, the future that lay in Sam's smile.
It was a life I didn't want to leave behind.
It was a life I didn't want to forget
I wasn't done with it yet. There was so much more to say.
”
”
Maggie Stiefvater (Linger (The Wolves of Mercy Falls, #2))
“
What grinds me the most is we're sending kids out into the world who don't know how to balance a checkbook, don't know how to apply for a loan, don't even know how to properly fill out a job application, but because they know the quadratic formula we consider them prepared for the world`
With that said, I'll admit even I can see how looking at the equation x -3 = 19 and knowing x =22 can be useful. I'll even say knowing x =7 and y= 8 in a problem like 9x - 6y= 15 can be helpful. But seriously, do we all need to know how to simplify (x-3)(x-3i)??
And the joke is, no one can continue their education unless they do. A student living in California cannot get into a four-year college unless they pass Algebra 2 in high school. A future psychologist can't become a psychologist, a future lawyer can't become a lawyer, and I can't become a journalist unless each of us has a basic understanding of engineering.
Of course, engineers and scientists use this shit all the time, and I applaud them! But they don't take years of theater arts appreciation courses, because a scientist or an engineer doesn't need to know that 'The Phantom of the Opoera' was the longest-running Broadway musical of all time.
Get my point?
”
”
Chris Colfer (Struck By Lightning: The Carson Phillips Journal (The Land of Stories))
“
You’re not your grades. You’re not your test scores or your college application or even your portfolio.
”
”
Kacen Callender (Felix Ever After)
“
But why? Why do you care about our class’s history?"
"I just do. Besides, I need something to put on my art-school applications besides ’Locks self in room and draws all day.’ Even art schools won’t take a psychopath.
”
”
Natalie Standiford (How to Say Goodbye in Robot)
“
Am I going to be able to provide a real home for her, man? An education? A real life? What's her college application going to look like: 'Raised on Spooky Island by wizard with GED, please help'?
”
”
Jim Butcher (Cold Days (The Dresden Files, #14))
“
Ezra Mason: Yeah. So all hell breaks loose, and Kady is yelling at me and I’m yelling back. All this stuff that’d been building up for the last year and boiling just under the skin. Like, I loved her. I love her. But she had this way of just…It was so stupid. The world is ending all around us and we’re screaming about college applications and commitment and ****. I mean, can you believe that? Interviewer: You’re seventeen, right? Ezra Mason: Almost eighteen. Interviewer: Then yes, I believe it. Ezra Mason: Cold, chum. Real cold.
”
”
Amie Kaufman (Illuminae (The Illuminae Files, #1))
“
In my mind, I saw a string stretching from Henry’s heart at Quiet Waters to my heart. It was taut and it vibrated with Henry’s worries and fears and I felt them all.
Deeply. I felt them all.
”
”
Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
“
She’d always thought she was sensible about romance: she hadn’t ever wanted any sort of wild destructive passion that would interfere with college applications. She had thought love would change the story she told about herself too much, that love would make her story less smart or less meaningful.
”
”
Sarah Rees Brennan (Unmade (The Lynburn Legacy, #3))
“
I’d stumbled upon the inner sanctuary of a woman who loved the world. Loved the faces of people she saw. Loved the way a hand looked when it was relaxed. Loved the way a woman looked when she touched her own face. The way a man looked when he opened himself to her. Loved the way wind changed a tree or a field or a child’s hair. The beauty of a neck meeting a shoulder. The softness of a smile that wasn’t forced.
”
”
Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
“
For a second, I stared at the map of her veins just under the surface of her thin skin. It was like her body was trying to become diaphanous. Instead of getting harder and stronger and full of life as we age, we disappear slowly. Our skin thins and evaporates. Our nails barely coat our fingertips. Our hair falls out. We are never more see-through.
”
”
Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
“
Taylor sighed. Going head-to-head with Sharpay on a school assignment was really beneath her. But the more Taylor considered it, the more she liked the idea of seeing her own poem in the paper. After all, the words "published poet" would look awfully good on those Ivy League college applications.
"You know what?" Taylor said.
"What?" Sharpay snapped.
Hands on hips, Taylor stepped forward till the girls were nose-to-nose. "Bring it on.
”
”
Alice Alfonsi (Poetry in Motion (High School Musical: Stories from East High, #3))
“
Maybe because I don’t want the guy I date to sound like a walking college application.
”
”
Jennifer Yen (A Taste for Love)
“
It’s called Zipf’s law, and it applies to résumés and college application rates and best-selling records and everything in between. Winners win big because the marketplace loves a winner.
”
”
Seth Godin (The Dip: A Little Book That Teaches You When to Quit (and When to Stick))
“
Yes, your blondness. What?
"Did you mail off all your applications?"
"I did as ordered, Your Majesty."
"Are you going to tell me where you applied?"
"University of None Ya. University of Mind Your Own. University of Not-tellin’. Big Secret College. And St. Stay-out-of-it Technical College.
”
”
Tiffany Reisz (The Saint (The Original Sinners, #5))
“
Colleges and universities, meanwhile, have no such qualms about torturing their applicants. Think about how much work a high-school student must do to even be considered for a spot at a decent college. The difference in college and job applications is especially striking when you consider that a job applicant will be getting paid upon acceptance while a college applicant will be paying for the privilege to attend.
”
”
Steven D. Levitt (Think Like a Freak)
“
He doesn’t want to step out of the present, this present. Because once he does, there will be college applications and college acceptances (just one will do) and the last of everything (last class, last party, last night, last day, last goodbye), and then the world will change forever and he will go to college and eventually become an adult. That is not what he wants. He does not want those complications, that change. Not now.
”
”
David Levithan (Are We There Yet?)
“
What I know about you, Henry,” he said. “Is that you, as big as you are, know how to walk gently on this earth.
”
”
Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
“
Make your education valuable. Apply what you learnt. Refuse to take the back seat and watch things happen. Join the change and be part of the change.
”
”
Israelmore Ayivor (Leaders' Frontpage: Leadership Insights from 21 Martin Luther King Jr. Thoughts)
“
To be honest, I hadn’t been emotionally prepared for the emptiness that seemed to accompany my senior year, the many reminders of my mom’s absence. Senior pictures, homecoming, college applications, prom, graduation; as everyone I knew got excited about those high school benchmarks, I got stress headaches because nothing felt the way I’d planned for it to feel. Everything felt… lonely.
”
”
Lynn Painter (Better Than the Movies)
“
The courtroom oath--"to tell the truth, the whole truth, and nothing but the truth"--is applicable only to witnesses. Defense attorneys, prosecutors, and judges don't take this oath--they couldn't! Indeed, it is fair to say the American justice system is built on the foundation of not telling the whole truth. It is the job of the defense attorney--especially when representing the guilty--to prevent, by all lawful means, the "whole truth" from coming out.
”
”
Jon Krakauer (Missoula: Rape and the Justice System in a College Town)
“
As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical application. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was the perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
“
As the sociologist Mitchell L. Stevens has put it, “affluent families fashion an entire way of life organized around the production of measurable virtue in children.” Measurable, here, means capable of showing up on a college application. We are not teaching to the test; we’re living to it.
”
”
William Deresiewicz (Excellent Sheep: The Miseducation of the American Elite and the Way to a Meaningful Life)
“
People were talking about SATs and college applications and summer internships. Everything seemed to be speeding up, and everything seemed to be gathering momentum, ready to go shooting off into the future on carefully plotted trajectories, while Gracie was still struggling to get her bearings.
”
”
Stephanie Perkins (Summer Days and Summer Nights: Twelve Love Stories)
“
It was like that Talking Head song. „And you may ask yourself, 'How did I get here?' … And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful house. And you may tell yourself, 'This is not my beautiful wife' ”. As he responded to the essay questions, Mitchell kept bending his answers toward their practical applications. He wanted to know why he was here, and how to live. It was perfect way to end your college career. Education had finally led Mitchell out into life.
”
”
Jeffrey Eugenides (The Marriage Plot)
“
To get acceptable quality at the lowest cost, it is vitally important to reject defective material at a stage where its accumulated value is at the lowest possible level. Thus, as noted, we are better off catching a bad raw egg than a cooked one, and screening out our college applicant before he visits Intel. In short, reject before investing further value.
”
”
Andrew S. Grove (High Output Management)
“
Writing is traveling through uncharted territory - your mind. You are the first traveler, and your essays are the world's first maps.
”
”
Harry Bauld (On Writing the College Application Essay: The Key to Acceptance and the College of your Choice)
“
Whereas in 1995, 10 percent of high school students applied to seven or more colleges, by 2016, some 35 percent did, thanks partly to the ease of online applications. But
”
”
Jeffrey J. Selingo (Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions)
“
There is no place for the word twerking anywhere on your college application. Ever.
”
”
Khristina Chess (The Future Unborn)
“
Just as quickly as it came, the wave of excitement turned bittersweet. It was all happening so fast. My baby was growing up. First teeth, then braces, then I'll turn around and she'll be filling out college applications. I can almost see he driving away in a car packed to the brim with boxes, off to start her life...away from me. Only to come home on the odd weekend.
”
”
Bunmi Laditan (Confessions of a Domestic Failure)
“
Her problem is with pretty,” Tennyson said. "She thinks I’ll need all these dresses in college. Like I would ever in a billion years pledge a sorority. I’ll pack a few of these to be ironic, though. I can wear them to, like, truck stops at night with mascara running down my cheeks and stuff.
”
”
Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
“
race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
In desperation, I’d tried to find a part-time after-school job, just to earn some walking-around money. I applied for dozens of tech support and programming jobs (mostly grunt construction work, coding parts of OASIS malls and office buildings), but it was completely hopeless. Millions of college-educated adults couldn’t get one of those jobs. The Great Recession was now entering its third decade, and unemployment was still at a record high. Even the fast-food joints in my neighborhood had a two-year waiting list for job applicants. So I remained stuck at school. I felt like a kid standing in the world’s greatest video arcade without any quarters, unable to do anything but walk around and watch the other kids play.
”
”
Ernest Cline (Ready Player One (Ready Player One, #1))
“
Broad-Based Education:
Reed College at that time offered perhaps the best calligraphy instruction in the country.… I decided to take a calligraphy class to learn how to do this.… It
was beautiful, historical, artistically subtle in a way that science can’t capture, and I found it fascinating. None of this had even a hope of any practical
application in my life. But ten years later, when we were designing the first Macintosh computer, it all came back to me.
—Commencement address, Stanford University,
June 12, 2005
”
”
George Beahm (I, Steve: Steve Jobs In His Own Words (In Their Own Words))
“
Even if I win, what will my future hold? Can I put "saved world" on a college application? If I fulfil my destiny next week, where do I go from there? A Where Are They Now pity piece in some Greek god trash rag?
”
”
Tellulah Darling (My Life From Hell (The Blooming Goddess Trilogy #3))
“
If you can deny your talents, if you can conceal them from others or, even better, persuade yourself that they weren’t even given to you, you’re off the hook.
And being off the hook is a key element of the industrialized school’s promise. It lets parents off the hook, certainly, since the institution takes over the teaching. It lets teachers off the hook, since the curriculum is preordained and the results are tested. And it lets students off the hook, because the road is clearly marked and the map is handed to everyone.
If you stay on the path, do your college applications through the guidance office and your job hunting at the placement office, the future is not your fault.
That’s the refrain we hear often from frustrated job seekers, frustrated workers with stuck careers, and frustrated students in too much debt. 'I did what they told me to do and now I’m stuck and it’s not my fault.'
What they’ve exchanged for that deniability is their dreams, their chance for greatness. To go off the path is to claim responsibility for what happens next.
”
”
Seth Godin
“
I’m not sure about all the particulars that led to this moment. Do I believe life is a series of dots to be connected…or that no one can outrun destiny…or that all roads lead to truth and coincidence is a lie to distract us? The reason I was in this place no longer mattered. The harsh reality stared me in the face and demanded an immediate decision. Walk away and blame it on my age. Or stay and try to help a woman who had slowly become my friend over the last few weeks.
”
”
Laura Anderson Kurk (Perfect Glass)
“
I wanted to give Babygirl a nice name. The kind of name that doesn’t tell you too much before you meet her, the way mine does. Because nobody ever met a white girl named Emoni, and as soon as they see my name on a résumé or college application they think they know exactly what kind of girl they getting. They know way more about me than they need to know, and shit—I mean, shoot—information ain’t free, so my daughter’s name isn’t going to tell anybody any information they didn’t earn.
”
”
Elizabeth Acevedo (With the Fire on High)
“
A member of one group told me that if i was really concerned about the liberation of Black people, i should quit school and get a job n a factory, that if i wanted to get rid of the system i would have to work at the factory and organize the workers. When i asked him why he wasn't working in a factory and organizing the workers, he told me that he was staying in school in order to organize the students. I told him i was working to organize the students too and that i felt perfectly certain that the workers could organize themselves without any college student doing it for them.
Some of these groups would come up with abstract intellectual theories, totally devoid of practical application, and swear they had the answers to the problems of the world. They attacked the Vietnamese for participating in the Paris peace talks, claiming that by negotiating the Viet Cong were selling out to the U.S. I think they got insulted when i asked them how a group of flabby white boys who couldn't fight their way out of a paper bag had the nerve to think they could tell the Viet Cong how to run their show.
”
”
Assata Shakur (Assata: An Autobiography)
“
The best essays are honest slice-of-life stories, both entertaining and serious, that tell admissions officers something they don’t learn from another part of the application.
”
”
Jeffrey J. Selingo (Who Gets In and Why: A Year Inside College Admissions)
“
The fact that we have to decide what to do for the rest of our lives at seventeen is crazy. How are we supposed to know?
”
”
J. Aleong (A Most Important Year)
“
Dad. I knew that was it. No more holding my hand. No more sitting in my lap. No more throwing your arms around my waist when I walked through the front door or standing on my shoes while we danced around the kitchen. I would be the bank now. The ride to your friend’s house. The critic of your biology homework. The signature on the check mailed away with your college application.
”
”
Karin Slaughter (Pretty Girls)
“
However, race seemed less and less a defining characteristic when one was six years out of college, and those people who still nursed it as the core of their identity came across as somehow childish and faintly pathetic, as if clinging to a youthful fascination with Amnesty International or the tuba: an outdated and embarrassing preoccupation with something that reached its potent apotheosis in college applications.
”
”
Hanya Yanagihara (A Little Life)
“
The emphasis—and money—placed on demonstrating “merit” on applications, rather than on nurturing a student’s potential during the college years, results in institutions that lack meaningful race and class diversity.
”
”
Lani Guinier (The Tyranny of the Meritocracy: Democratizing Higher Education in America)
“
She’d always thought she was sensible about romance: she hadn’t ever wanted any sort of wild destructive passion that would interfere with college applications. She had thought love would change the story she told about herself too much, that love would make her story less smart or less meaningful. She’d had Jared in her head all the time, though. She’d had love already. Only those who already had love could afford to dismiss it.
”
”
Sarah Rees Brennan (Unmade (The Lynburn Legacy, #3))
“
My mother wasn’t much into politics, but I’m sure she would have assumed that fifty years later, the minimum wage would be a lot higher. If it could feed a family of three and pay a mortgage in 1965, surely by now a minimum wage would let a family afford, say, a home and a car—and maybe even a little money for college applications for a skinny daughter. Right? Wrong. Way wrong. Adjusted for inflation, the minimum wage today is lower than it was in 1965—about 24 percent lower.
”
”
Elizabeth Warren (This Fight Is Our Fight: The Battle to Save America's Middle Class)
“
Anglo-Saxon Protestant, otherwise known as WASP, and American Black is always on the bottom, and what’s in the middle depends on time and place. (Or as that marvelous rhyme goes: if you’re white, you’re all right; if you’re brown, stick around; if you’re black, get back!) Americans assume that everyone will get their tribalism. But it takes a while to figure it all out. So in undergrad, we had a visiting speaker and a classmate whispers to another, “Oh my God, he looks so Jewish,” with a shudder, an actual shudder. Like Jewish was a bad thing. I didn’t get it. As far as I could see, the man was white, not much different from the classmate herself. Jewish to me was something vague, something biblical. But I learned quickly. You see, in America’s ladder of races, Jewish is white but also some rungs below white. A bit confusing, because I knew this straw-haired, freckled girl who said she was Jewish. How can Americans tell who is Jewish? How did the classmate know the guy was Jewish? I read somewhere how American colleges used to ask applicants for their mother’s surnames, to make sure they weren’t Jewish because they wouldn’t admit Jewish people. So maybe that’s how to tell? From people’s names? The longer you are here, the more you start to get it.
”
”
Chimamanda Ngozi Adichie (Americanah)
“
The word “holistic” is meant to distinguish their method from the purely numerical process at less-selective state universities or community colleges, where a committee will automatically admit any applicant with scores or grades above an explicit threshold. It’s a cagey word, “holistic,” borrowed from New Age yogis, Gestalt therapists, makers of herbal toothpaste, and other mystifiers whose prestige depends on your not being able to figure out exactly what they’re doing. A more practical and accurate term for holistic admissions is “completely subjective.” Kat
”
”
Andrew Ferguson (Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College)
“
High school marching band was its own little microcosm of the world. More a study in sociology than in woodwinds and brass: There were the band geeks, pimply and a tad too greasy, making out with one another every chance they got. There were the no-nonsense go-getters, eager to fill a line on their college applications, marching without rhythm or passion. There was the percussion section, hipsters-to-be whose arms would be full of tattoos in a few years’ time. And there were the tuba players, chunky and asexual, as if they were slowly morphing into their instrument of choice.
”
”
Leah Konen (The Romantics)
“
Facebook didn’t even exist yet, Twitter was still a sound, the cloud was still in the sky, 4G was a parking space, “applications” were what you sent to college, LinkedIn was barely known and most people thought it was a prison, Big Data was a good name for a rap star, and Skype, for most people, was a typographical error.
”
”
Thomas L. Friedman (Thank You for Being Late: An Optimist's Guide to Thriving in the Age of Accelerations)
“
He had plans, but his hopes for higher education, like all his others, were built on “mights.” He might go hang out somewhere, with someone. He might get a job and earn some money. He might go to college, a really old school with gray stone buildings and an enormous library. He was thinking of applying next year. Maybe the year after. He wasn’t thinking about application deadlines. That sort of detail wasn’t a part of his plan. Not at the moment. And why tell his mother about this anyway? It would rekindle her expectations, and she’d only start riding him again. Better to let it be. When his dad came home, they’d sort it out together. His mother retreated into her world, Silas into his. What a family, his mother would say, but until now, Silas had never realized that they weren’t really much of one. The names of the days retreated from them both, and soon after the school term ended, Silas was no longer sure what day of the week it was. Every morning when he woke up, he missed his father more keenly than the night before, but the details and differences of each day blurred and eventually vanished. For Silas, the passage of time became a longing ache in his heart that grew daily worse.
”
”
Ari Berk (Death Watch (The Undertaken, #1))
“
Embellishment is often used to create grandiose accounts of a person’s accomplishments. For instance, a job applicant may include that they were at the top of their class in college when, in reality, they were in the middle of the pack. Another type of embellishment is “name dropping.” This is commonly used by manipulators to appear that they are connected despite having very loose connections, at best, with the people they are mentioned.
”
”
William Cooper (Dark Psychology and Manipulation: Discover 40 Covert Emotional Manipulation Techniques, Mind Control, Brainwashing. Learn How to Analyze People, NLP Secret ... Effect, Subliminal Influence Book 1))
“
Susan’s and Jennifer’s job searches are likely made harder by the color of their skin. In the early 2000s, researchers in Chicago and Boston mailed out fake résumés to hundreds of employers, varying only the names of the applicants, but choosing names that would be seen as identifiably black or white. Strikingly, “Emily” and “Brendan” were 50 percent more likely to get called for an interview than “Lakisha” and “Jamal.” A few years later, a researcher at the University of Wisconsin conducted a similar study in Milwaukee, but with a unique twist. She recruited two black and two white actors (college students, posing as high school graduates) who were as similar as possible in every way. She sent these “job applicants” out in pairs, with virtually identical fake résumés, to apply for entry-level jobs. Her twist was to instruct one of the white and one of the black applicants to tell employers that they had a felony conviction and had just been released from prison the month before. Even the researcher was surprised by what she found: the white applicant with a felony conviction was more likely to get a positive response from a prospective employer than the black applicant with no criminal record. When the study was replicated in New York City a few years later, she and her colleagues saw similar results for Latino applicants relative to whites.
”
”
Kathryn J. Edin ($2.00 a Day: Living on Almost Nothing in America)
“
Your mom probably wouldn't be too happy if you're dating someone who quit school."
I laugh. "Nope, don't think so. But I do think she likes you."
"Why do you say that?" he says, cocking his head at me.
"When I called her, she told me to tell you good morning. And then she told me you were 'a keeper.'" She also said he was hot, which is a ten and a half on the creep-o-meter.
"She won't think that when I start failing out of all my classes. I've missed too much school to give a convincing performance in that aspect."
"Maybe you and I could do an exchange," I say, cringing at how many different ways that could sound.
"You mean besides swapping spit?"
I'm hyperaware of the tickle in my stomach, but I say, "Gross! Did Rachel teach you that?"
He nods, still grinning. "I laughed for days."
"Anyway, since you're helping me try to change, I could help you with your schoolwork. You know, tutor you. We're in all the same classes together, and I could really use the volunteer hours for my college application."
His smile disappears as if I had slapped him. "Galen, is something wrong?"
He unclenches his jaw. "No."
"It was just a suggestion. I don't have to tutor you. I mean, we'll already be spending all day together in school and then practicing at night. You'll probably get sick of me." I toss in a soft laugh to keep it chit-chatty, but my innards feel as though they're cartwheeling.
"Not likely."
Our eyes lock. Searching his expression, my breath catches as the setting sun makes his hair shine almost purple. But it's the way each dying ray draws out silver flecks in his eyes that makes me look away-and accidentally glance at his mouth.
He leans in. I raise my chin, meeting his gaze. The sunset probably deepens the heat on my cheeks to a strawberry red, but he might not notice since he can't seem to decide if he wants to look at my eyes or my mouth. I can smell the salt on his skin, feel the warmth of his breath. He's so close, the wind wafts the same strand of my hair onto both our cheeks.
So when he eases away, it's me who feels slapped. He uproots the hand he buried in the sand beside me. "It's getting dark. I should take you home," he says. "We can do this again-I mean, we can practice again-tomorrow after school.
”
”
Anna Banks (Of Poseidon (The Syrena Legacy, #1))
“
How has my industry raised prices at this rate without improving the product? At a few elite institutions, including NYU, we’ve leveraged scarcity. More than a business strategy, it’s become a fetish—believing you are a luxury brand instead of a public servant. Ivy Leagues have acceptance rates of 4–10%. A university president bragging about rejecting 90% of applicants is tantamount to a homeless shelter taking pride in turning away 90% of the needy that arrive each night. And this is not about standards or brand dilution. In an essay explaining his decision to stop conducting application interviews for his alma mater, Princeton, journalist Bryan Walsh observed, “The secret of elite college admissions is that far more students deserve to attend these colleges than are admitted, and there is virtually no discernible difference between those who make it and the many more who just miss out.” In support, he offered this statement from Princeton’s own dean of admissions: “We could have admitted five or six classes to Princeton from the [applicant] pool.”4 So, with a $26 billion endowment, the question becomes, Why wouldn’t you?
”
”
Scott Galloway (Post Corona: From Crisis to Opportunity)
“
It was little things at first. Abby missed a phone call because she had an away game. Then one time Gretchen didn’t write back and never made up for the missing letter. They got busy with SATs and college applications, and even though they both applied to Georgetown, Gretchen didn’t get in, and Abby wound up going to George Washington anyways. At college they went to their computer labs and sent each other emails, sitting in front of black and green CRT screens and pecking them out one letter at a time. And they still wrote, but calling became a once-a-week thing. Gretchen was Abby’s maid of honor at her tiny courthouse wedding, but sometimes a month would go by and they wouldn’t speak. Then two months. Then three. They went through periods when they both made an effort to write more, but after a while that usually faded. It wasn’t anything serious, it was just life. The dance recitals, making the rent, first real jobs, pickups, dropoffs, the fights that seemed so important, the laundry, the promotions, the vacations taken, shoes bought, movies watched, lunches packed. It was a haze of the everyday that blurred the big things and made them feel distant and small.
”
”
Grady Hendrix (My Best Friend's Exorcism)
“
The Indian government spent millions of rupees annually developing housing and job opportunities in villages heavily inhabited by untouchables. Moreover, the prime minister said, if two applicants compete for entrance into a college or university, one of the applicants being an untouchable and the other of high caste, the school is required to accept the untouchable.
Professor Lawrence Reddick, who was with me during the interview, asked: “But isn’t that discrimination?”
“Well, it may be,” the prime minister answered. “But this is our way of atoning for the centuries of injustices we have inflicted upon these people.
”
”
Martin Luther King Jr. (The Autobiography of Martin Luther King, Jr.)
“
Does affirmative action place minority students in colleges where they're likely to fail while depriving other applicants of the chance to attend the most challenging schools where they are capable of succeeding? Does rent control drive up the cost of housing, depriving property owners of the same opportunity to profit as any other investor while driving down the quality and quantity of the housing stock? Do minimum wage laws reduce the number of entry-level jobs, making it harder to escape from poverty? Because compassion, by its nature, subordinates doing good to feeling good, these are questions the warm-hearted rarely pursue.
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”
William Voegeli (Never Enough: America's Limitless Welfare State)
“
and pulled to a stop. He turned to Candy and kissed her—their first kiss. From then on, Ben and Candy were inseparable. They did their homework together. They encouraged each other. They were in love. * * * During his final year of college, Ben applied to medical schools. Unlike many of his classmates who were worried about which medical school would accept them, Ben was confident that he would go to the University of Michigan School of Medicine. He believed so firmly that God wanted him to be a doctor that he never doubted he would be accepted. One day another student who was agonizing about his own medical school applications turned to Ben and asked, “Carson, aren’t you worried?
”
”
Gregg Lewis (Gifted Hands, Kids Edition: The Ben Carson Story (ZonderKidz Biography))
“
This might baffle you, but despite not being a physician, I do have some pride. Although most certainly not enough to withstand the kind of beating you're capable of dealing it. The kind of beating you've repeatedly dealt it from the first time we've met. You're right, I value honesty, so I'll tell you that I make it a practice not to find women who insult me at every opportunity attractive."
Color flooded her cheeks and traveled down her neck. Finally, she stepped away from him, too, and found the back of a chair to clutch. She looked entirely devastated. Had no one ever denied her anything? He hated the hurt in her eyes. But it was done now.
"How is telling you I'm attracted to you an insult?"
He pressed the back of his hand into his forehead. It made him feel like a drama queen in some sort of musical farce. Which this had to be. "Telling me how unworthy I am of your attraction, that's the insulting part. And, no, that's not all it is. Even if you hadn't told me at every opportunity how inferior to you I am... all I do is cook... every assumption you've made about me is insulting. Culinary school is definitely college. And Le Cordon Bleu is one of the most competitive institutions in the world. The fact that that's so wholly incomprehensible to you... that's the insulting part. And it wasn't thrown in my overly privileged lap either. I had to work my bottom off to make it in."
Ammaji had sold her dowry jewels to pay for his application, something her family would have thrown her out on the street for had they found out.
Trisha squared her shoulders, the devastation draining fast from her face, leaving behind the self-possession he was so much more used to. And the speed with which she gathered herself shook something inside him. "I might not do what you see as important work, but I work hard at being a decent human being, and I would need anyone I'm with to be that first and foremost. Even if I didn't find snobbery in general incredibly unattractive, I would never go anywhere near a person as self-absorbed and arrogant as you, Dr. Raje. I would have to be insane to subject myself to your view of me and the world."
"Wow." She was panting, or maybe it was him. He couldn't be sure.
"You wanted honesty. I'm sorry if I hurt you."
She cleared her throat. "I'm surprised you think someone as... as... self-absorbed and arrogant as me is even capable of being hurt.
”
”
Sonali Dev (Pride, Prejudice, and Other Flavors (The Rajes, #1))
“
A somewhat longer deferment was available, and totally legal, for college students. Bobby had dropped out of high school, but the New School for Social Research, a progressive college in New York City, was willing to accept his extraordinary chess accomplishments in lieu of traditional schoolwork. Alfred Landa, then assistant to the president, said that Fischer would not only be allowed to matriculate into the college, but be given a full scholarship. Bobby thought long and hard about the offer. One afternoon he started to walk to the New School to put in his application—and then stopped. His experience with schools had been distasteful, and perhaps that caused forebodings. Without giving an explanation, he refused to enter the school building, and he refused to apply for a student deferment.
”
”
Frank Brady (Endgame: Bobby Fischer's Remarkable Rise and Fall - from America's Brightest Prodigy to the Edge of Madness)
“
I was reading a New Yorker online piece the other week by Roxanna Robinson, who always gives her first-year writing students at Hunter College Madame Bovary. And each year their reactions are predictably depressing. It’s a “cold” book, Flaubert doesn’t “like” his characters enough, Emma Bovary is “selfish”, she’s a “materialist” and, best of all, she’s a “bad mother”. One boy thinks that Rodolphe’s cowardly letter dismissing Emma is really cool (ie, applicable to his own life) until he is beaten up by the female students and backs down. In other words, these characters and their creator aren’t nice enough, they wouldn’t be my friends, they’re not enough like me and mine… It’s a world in which reading has been corrupted by the cliches of film and television – cliches of character as well as plot.
”
”
Julian Barnes
“
by blitzing students with information and making the application process as simple as dropping a résumé into a box, by following up relentlessly and promising to inform applicants about job offers in the fall of their senior year—months before firms in most other industries—Wall Street banks had made themselves the obvious destinations for students at top-tier colleges who are confused about their careers, don’t want to lock themselves in to a narrow preprofessional track by going to law or medical school, and are looking to put off the big decisions for two years while they figure things out. Banks, in other words, have become extremely skilled at appealing to the anxieties of overachieving young people and inserting themselves as the solution to those worries. And the irony is that although we think of Wall Street as a risk-loving business, the recruiting process often appeals most to the terrified and insecure.
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”
Kevin Roose (Young Money: Inside the Hidden World of Wall Street's Post-Crash Recruits)
“
So, absent the chance to make every job applicant work as hard as a college applicant, is there some quick, clever, cheap way of weeding out bad employees before they are hired? Zappos has come up with one such trick. You will recall from the last chapter that Zappos, the online shoe store, has a variety of unorthodox ideas about how a business can be run. You may also recall that its customer-service reps are central to the firm’s success. So even though the job might pay only $11 an hour, Zappos wants to know that each new employee is fully committed to the company’s ethos. That’s where “The Offer” comes in. When new employees are in the onboarding period—they’ve already been screened, offered a job, and completed a few weeks of training—Zappos offers them a chance to quit. Even better, quitters will be paid for their training time and also get a bonus representing their first month’s salary—roughly $2,000—just for quitting! All they have to do is go through an exit interview and surrender their eligibility to be rehired at Zappos. Doesn’t that sound nuts? What kind of company would offer a new employee $2,000 to not work? A clever company. “It’s really putting the employee in the position of ‘Do you care more about money or do you care more about this culture and the company?’ ” says Tony Hsieh, the company’s CEO. “And if they care more about the easy money, then we probably aren’t the right fit for them.” Hsieh figured that any worker who would take the easy $2,000 was the kind of worker who would end up costing Zappos a lot more in the long run. By one industry estimate, it costs an average of roughly $4,000 to replace a single employee, and one recent survey of 2,500 companies found that a single bad hire can cost more than $25,000 in lost productivity, lower morale, and the like. So Zappos decided to pay a measly $2,000 up front and let the bad hires weed themselves out before they took root. As of this writing, fewer than 1 percent of new hires at Zappos accept “The Offer.
”
”
Steven D. Levitt (Think Like a Freak)
“
Still, when Harvard said I wasn’t eligible for financial aid, and another university offered me a full scholarship, I thought I should go there. My mother became furious and said I was always sabotaging myself. She was proud of being able to borrow money at a loss from her own retirement fund, and give it to Harvard. I felt proud of her, too. But I did not feel proud of myself. It made the college application process feel, in retrospect, somehow hurtful and insulting: all the essays and interviews and supplements and letters seemed to be about you, about your specialness—but actually it was all about shaking your parents down for money. — Harvard seemed really proud of its own attitude toward financial aid. You were always hearing about how “merit-based aid,” which was fine for other schools, didn’t work here, where everyone was so full of merit. When your parents paid full tuition, part of what they were paying for was the benefit you derived from being exposed to people who were more diverse than you. “My parents are paying for him to be here, so I can learn from him,” my friend Leora said once, about a homeschooled guy from Arkansas in her history section who started talking about how the Jews killed Jesus. Leora had been my best friend when we were little, and then we went to different middle schools and high schools, but now we were at college together. She already thought every single person on earth was anti-Semitic, so she definitely hadn’t learned anything from that guy. To me, the part of financial aid that made the least sense was that all the international students got full scholarships, regardless of how much money their parents had. The son of the prince of Nepal was in our class, and didn’t pay tuition. Ivan had once caused me pain by saying something deprecating about “people whose parents paid a hundred thousand dollars for them to be here.” Did he not know that my parents were paying a hundred thousand dollars for me to be there? The thought that really made me crazy was that my parents had paid for Ivan to be there. It was another experience they had paid for me to have.
”
”
Elif Batuman (Either/Or)
“
When these children grew older and applied to college and later for their first jobs, they faced the same standards of gregariousness. University admissions officers looked not for the most exceptional candidates, but for the most extroverted. Harvard’s provost Paul Buck declared in the late 1940s that Harvard should reject the “sensitive, neurotic” type and the “intellectually over-stimulated” in favor of boys of the “healthy extrovert kind.” In 1950, Yale’s president, Alfred Whitney Griswold, declared that the ideal Yalie was not a “beetle-browed, highly specialized intellectual, but a well-rounded man.” Another dean told Whyte that “in screening applications from secondary schools he felt it was only common sense to take into account not only what the college wanted, but what, four years later, corporations’ recruiters would want. ‘They like a pretty gregarious, active type,’ he said. ‘So we find that the best man is the one who’s had an 80 or 85 average in school and plenty of extracurricular activity. We see little use for the “brilliant” introvert.’
”
”
Susan Cain (Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can't Stop Talking)
“
[There is] no direct relationship between IQ and economic opportunity. In the supposed interests of fairness and “social justice”, the natural relationship has been all but obliterated.
Consider the first necessity of employment, filling out a job application. A generic job application does not ask for information on IQ. If such information is volunteered, this is likely to be interpreted as boastful exaggeration, narcissism, excessive entitlement, exceptionalism [...] and/or a lack of team spirit. None of these interpretations is likely to get you hired.
Instead, the application contains questions about job experience and educational background, neither of which necessarily has anything to do with IQ. Universities are in business for profit; they are run like companies, seek as many paying clients as they can get, and therefore routinely accept people with lukewarm IQ’s, especially if they fill a slot in some quota system (in which case they will often be allowed to stay despite substandard performance). Regarding the quotas themselves, these may in fact turn the tables, advantaging members of groups with lower mean IQ’s than other groups [...] sometimes, people with lower IQ’s are expressly advantaged in more ways than one.
These days, most decent jobs require a college education. Academia has worked relentlessly to bring this about, as it gains money and power by monopolizing the employment market across the spectrum. Because there is a glut of college-educated applicants for high-paying jobs, there is usually no need for an employer to deviate from general policy and hire an applicant with no degree. What about the civil service? While the civil service was once mostly open to people without college educations, this is no longer the case, and quotas make a very big difference in who gets hired. Back when I was in the New York job market, “minorities” (actually, worldwide majorities) were being spotted 30 (thirty) points on the civil service exam; for example, a Black person with a score as low as 70 was hired ahead of a White person with a score of 100. Obviously, any prior positive correlation between IQ and civil service employment has been reversed.
Add to this the fact that many people, including employers, resent or feel threatened by intelligent people [...] and the IQ-parameterized employment function is no longer what it was once cracked up to be. If you doubt it, just look at the people running things these days. They may run a little above average, but you’d better not be expecting to find any Aristotles or Newtons among them. Intelligence has been replaced in the job market with an increasingly poor substitute, possession of a college degree, and given that education has steadily given way to indoctrination and socialization as academic priorities, it would be naive to suppose that this is not dragging down the overall efficiency of society.
In short, there are presently many highly intelligent people working very “dumb” jobs, and conversely, many less intelligent people working jobs that would once have been filled by their intellectual superiors. Those sad stories about physics PhD’s flipping burgers at McDonald's are no longer so exceptional.
Sorry, folks, but this is not your grandfather’s meritocracy any more.
”
”
Christopher Michael Langan
“
the list was a smoke screen: ten applications would be made on the pretense of this being a meritocratic process. But the first-choice school would have opened a file on the child once his PSATs were posted. The result was already assured. For Anne, much of the work lay in managing these lists. How to carve, from the great shared dream of college destiny, a range to fairly suit each child? And how then to help bring round the parents, in their bafflement and their shame? More accurately, how to awaken these families from a fantasy that held colleges up bright and shining and implacably steady in character, to reveal each as just what it was—a living, breathing institution—struggling to serve young minds weaned on ambition and fear and heading into a job market that matched conscription to greed and made interns of all the rest? Take Middlebury: one thought immediately of all the blond kids with a green streak, the vegans, the skiers. Take the Ivies: the Euro kids wanted Brown. Jews, Yale or Penn. WASPs wanted Princeton. Cold athletes Dartmouth. Hot athletes, Stanford. Cornell was big and seemed possible but Ithaca was a high price to pay. Columbia for the city kids. Everyone wanted Harvard, if only to say they got in. Then the cult schools. Tufts, Georgetown, Duke. Big
”
”
Lacy Crawford (Early Decision: A Novel)
“
Hoover fed the story to sympathetic reporters—so-called friends of the bureau. One article about the case, which was syndicated by William Randolph Hearst’s company, blared, NEVER TOLD BEFORE! —How the Government with the Most Gigantic Fingerprint System on Earth Fights Crime with Unheard-of Science Refinements; Revealing How Clever Sleuths Ended a Reign of Murder and Terror in the Lonely Hills of the Osage Indian Country, and Then Rounded Up the Nation’s Most Desperate Gang In 1932, the bureau began working with the radio program The Lucky Strike Hour to dramatize its cases. One of the first episodes was based on the murders of the Osage. At Hoover’s request, Agent Burger had even written up fictional scenes, which were shared with the program’s producers. In one of these scenes, Ramsey shows Ernest Burkhart the gun he plans to use to kill Roan, saying, “Look at her, ain’t she a dandy?” The broadcasted radio program concluded, “So another story ends and the moral is identical with that set forth in all the others of this series….[ The criminal] was no match for the Federal Agent of Washington in a battle of wits.” Though Hoover privately commended White and his men for capturing Hale and his gang and gave the agents a slight pay increase—“ a small way at least to recognize their efficiency and application to duty”—he never mentioned them by name as he promoted the case. They did not quite fit the profile of college-educated recruits that became part of Hoover’s mythology. Plus, Hoover never wanted his men to overshadow him.
”
”
David Grann (Killers of the Flower Moon: The Osage Murders and the Birth of the FBI)
“
Universities are fueled in large measure by what's called overhead of the grant...so if you get a million dollar grant, half or more will go to your university, right? So that's what builds the buildings and fuels the place. So the university has an incentive to get as many people to file grant applications as they can, and they have an incentive to hire people whose grant applications will be large rather than small.
So this, for example, is one of the reasons that science has taken up arms against theory –that is to say, proper scientific theoreticians like me – and it has instead hired people who run big expensive experiments: Because big expensive experiments have big grants, and those big grants bring in money.
But if you were a university and what you wanted was to have people writing big expensive grants who were capable of getting them, then what you would want to do is...you would want to free those people from teaching, and you would want to get people who weren't so expensive to do the work of the university...and the way you do that is: you bring them on as graduate students; and you pay them an appalling wage; you claim that they are not actually workers, that they are students; and they do most of the teaching, and they do a lot of the work of the university, for incredibly low amounts of money; they live under poor conditions; and increasingly they have to come from abroad where they are in some sense getting a deal that still makes sense.
But this means that we overproduce PhDs. We give people degrees instead of money to do the work of the university, in order that people who are capable of getting the grants spend almost full time doing that job. And it's a racket.
The person who knows the most about this is actually Eric, my brother. So...what he unearthed was actually that there was an explicit conspiracy to game the visa system in order to keep this system running...that effectively a fake shortage of science students was created to allow the universities to basically flood the market, to drive the wages down.
”
”
Bret Weinstein
“
Although thrilled that the era of the personal computer had arrived, he was afraid that he was going to miss the party. Slapping down seventy-five cents, he grabbed the issue and trotted through the slushy snow to the Harvard dorm room of Bill Gates, his high school buddy and fellow computer fanatic from Seattle, who had convinced him to drop out of college and move to Cambridge. “Hey, this thing is happening without us,” Allen declared. Gates began to rock back and forth, as he often did during moments of intensity. When he finished the article, he realized that Allen was right. For the next eight weeks, the two of them embarked on a frenzy of code writing that would change the nature of the computer business.1 Unlike the computer pioneers before him, Gates, who was born in 1955, had not grown up caring much about the hardware. He had never gotten his thrills by building Heathkit radios or soldering circuit boards. A high school physics teacher, annoyed by the arrogance Gates sometimes displayed while jockeying at the school’s timesharing terminal, had once assigned him the project of assembling a Radio Shack electronics kit. When Gates finally turned it in, the teacher recalled, “solder was dripping all over the back” and it didn’t work.2 For Gates, the magic of computers was not in their hardware circuits but in their software code. “We’re not hardware gurus, Paul,” he repeatedly pronounced whenever Allen proposed building a machine. “What we know is software.” Even his slightly older friend Allen, who had built shortwave radios, knew that the future belonged to the coders. “Hardware,” he admitted, “was not our area of expertise.”3 What Gates and Allen set out to do on that December day in 1974 when they first saw the Popular Electronics cover was to create the software for personal computers. More than that, they wanted to shift the balance in the emerging industry so that the hardware would become an interchangeable commodity, while those who created the operating system and application software would capture most of the profits.
”
”
Walter Isaacson (The Innovators: How a Group of Hackers, Geniuses, and Geeks Created the Digital Revolution)
“
Sharon passed around a handout: "Triangle of Self-Actualization" by Abraham Maslow. The levels of human motivation. It resembled the nutrition triangle put out by the FDA, with five horizontal levels of multiple colors. I vaguely remembered it from my one college psychology course in the 1970's.
"Very applicable with refugees," Sharon said. "Maslow theorized that one could not move to a higher level until the prior level was satisfied. The first level, the triangle base, is physiological needs. Like food and water. Until a person has enough to eat and drink, that's all one would be concerned with."
I'd never experienced not being able to satisfy my thirst or hunger, but it sounded logical that that would be my only concern in such a situation. For the Lost Boys, just getting enough food and water had been a daily struggle. I wondered what kind of impact being stuck at the bottom level for the last fourteen years would have on a person, especially a child and teen.
"The second level is safety and security. Home. A sanctuary. A safe place."
Like not being shot at or having lions attack you. They hadn't had much of level two, either. Even Kakuma hadn't been safe. A refugee camp couldn't feel like home.
"The third level is social. A sense of belonging."
Since they'd been together, they must have felt like they belonged, but perhaps not on a larger scale, having been displaced from home and living in someone else's country.
"Once a person has food, shelter, family and friends, they can advance to the fourth level, which is ego. Self-esteem."
I'd never thought of those things occurring sequentially, but rather simultaneously, as they did in my life. If I understood correctly, working on their self-esteem had not been a large concern to them, if one at all. That was bound to affect them eventually. In what way remained to be seen. They'd been so preoccupied with survival that issues of self-worth might overwhelm them at first. A sure risk for insecurity and depression.
The information was fascinating and insightful, although worrisome in terms of Benson, Lino, and Alepho. It also made me wonder about us middle-and upper-class Americans. We seldom worried about food, except for eating too much, and that was not what Maslow had been referring to. Most of us had homes and safety and friends and family. That could mean we were entirely focused on that fourth level: ego. Our efforts to make ourselves seem strong, smart, rich, and beautiful, or young were our own kind of survival skill. Perhaps advancing directly to the fourth level, when the mind was originally engineered for the challenges of basic survival, was why Prozac and Zoloft, both antidepressants, were two of the biggest-selling drugs in America.
"The pinnacle of the triangle," Sharon said, "is the fifth level. Self-actualization. A strong and deeply felt belief that as a person one has value in the world. Contentment with who one is rather than what one has. Secure in ones beliefs. Not needing ego boosts from external factors. Having that sense of well-being that does not depend on the approval of others is commonly called happiness."
Happiness, hard to define, yet obvious when present. Most of us struggled our entire lives to achieve it, perhaps what had brought some of us to a mentoring class that night.
”
”
Judy A. Bernstein (Disturbed in Their Nests: A Journey from Sudan's Dinkaland to San Diego's City Heights)
“
improbable yes, impossible no!
”
”
Bryant Marin
“
When little-league baseball players are thought to be incompetent, they are only allowed to play where the ball is rarely hit (for little leaguers, in right field), and thus they have few opportunities to overcome their unfortunate reputation. The continued absence of any positive contributions can then easily be mistaken for an absence of talent rather than an absence of opportunity. This type of expectancy effect is obviously a special case of the hidden data problem described above. A perceiver’s expectation can cause him or her to behave in such a way that certain behaviors by the target person cannot be observed, making what is observed a biased and misleading indicator of what that person is like. The employers, college admissions officers, and grant review panelists discussed earlier are all potential victims of seemingly-fulfilled prophecies: Their own actions guarantee that they will rarely receive a challenge to their negative assessments of job applicants, potential students, and research proposals.
”
”
Thomas Gilovich (How We Know What Isn't So: The Fallibility of Human Reason in Everyday Life)
“
Action Steps 1. Audit your current skill set. You have more areas of competence than you think. Throughout your life, you have amassed knowledge and specialized skills in a wide range of disciplines. That knowledge and those skills can prove useful to you in future endeavors. For example, I have a degree in Finance and Investments. Upon graduating from college, I accepted an accounting position with one of the top automakers. I then became a stockbroker. Then, I moved into a career in IT. For the past 20 years, I’ve been a writer in numerous capacities. Along the way, I learned about server management, Wordpress development and search engine optimization. All of these ventures imbued me with skills I use every day - in my business and personal life. Your experience has likewise instilled within you a raft of specialized skills. Many of them will help you to tackle unfamiliar tasks and projects, even if they seem unrelated to your current and previous jobs. 2. Focus on your desired outcomes rather than the things that might go wrong along the way. One of our survival instincts is to plan for things that might go wrong. In some circumstances, that’s a valuable quality that protects us from harm. It prevents us from strolling down dark alleys in unpopulated locales. It discourages us from petting strange dogs. In other circumstances, however, it can hold us back. The instinct prevents us from pursuing opportunities that can lead to improved aptitude as well as personal and professional growth. By focusing on your desire outcomes, you’ll find it easier to ignore your inborn fear of the unknown. You’ll be able to dismiss the voice in your head constantly whispering “What if XYZ happens?” 3. Look for opportunities to learn new skills. The self-confidence you’ll gain will make you less fearful of tackling unfamiliar tasks. Achieving a high level of competency in any discipline requires repeated exposure and application. There’s no other way to attain proficiency. The problem is a lack of courage. It’s normal to feel hesitant, or even intimidated, when we’re given a new responsibility.
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Damon Zahariades (The 30-Day Productivity Boost (Vol. 1): 30 Bad Habits That Are Sabotaging Your Time Management (And How To Fix Them!))
“
Listen to this dumbass question,” she groaned that afternoon in Pearl’s kitchen, fishing the printed-out application from her bag. “‘Rewrite a famous story from a different perspective. For example, retell The Wizard of Oz from the point of view of the Wicked Witch.’ This is a college app, not creative writing. I’m taking AP English. At least ask me to write a real essay.
”
”
Celeste Ng (Little Fires Everywhere)
“
Even if we came to a nationally shared recognition that government policy has created an unconstitutional, de jure, system of residential segregation, it does not follow that litigation can remedy this situation. Although most African Americans have suffered under this de jure system, they cannot identify, with the specificity a court case requires, the particular point at which they were victimized. For example, many African American World War II veterans did not apply for government-guaranteed mortgages for suburban purchases because they knew that the Veterans Administration would reject them on account of their race, so applications were pointless. Those veterans then did not gain wealth from home equity appreciation as did white veterans, and their descendants could then not inherit that wealth as did white veterans' descendants. With less inherited wealth, African Americans today are generally less able than their white peers to afford to attend good colleges. If one of those African American descendants now learned that the reason his or her grandparents were forced to rent apartments in overcrowded urban areas was that the federal government unconstitutionally and unlawfully prohibited banks from lending to African Americans, the grandchild would not have the standing to file a lawsuit; nor would he or she be able to name a particular party from whom damages could be recovered. There is generally no judicial remedy for a policy that the Supreme Court wrongheadedly approved. But this does not mean that there is no constitutionally required remedy for such violations. It is up to the people, through our elected representatives, to enforce our Constitution by implementing the remedy.
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Richard Rothstein (The Color of Law: A Forgotten History of How Our Government Segregated America)
“
As knowledge is acquired it must be organized and put into use, for a definite purpose, through practical plans. Knowledge has no value except that which can be gained from its application toward some worthy end. This is one reason why college degrees are not valued more highly. They represent nothing but miscellaneous knowledge.
”
”
Napoleon Hill (Think And Grow Rich)
“
It would no sooner have occurred to her that a place with so baroque a name as the Langley Memorial Aeronautical Laboratory would solicit an application from Negro women than that the white women at the college across the street would beckon her through the front doors of their manicured enclave.
”
”
Margot Lee Shetterly (Hidden Figures: The American Dream and the Untold Story of the Black Women Mathematicians Who Helped Win the Space Race)
“
An en masse increase in ability within a competitive system doesn’t advantage all individuals. Instead, more competition weakens each individual’s bargaining position within the larger structure. The White House’s own 2014 report on increasing college opportunity for low-income students noted, “Colleges have grown more competitive, restricting access. While the number of applicants to four-year colleges and universities has doubled since the early 1970s, available slots have changed little.” 15
”
”
Malcolm Harris (Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials)
“
There are some important myths to dispel: The average college student does not live on campus—only around 15 percent of undergraduates do. Most do not attend selective institutions that accept fewer than half of their applicants. 4 Only 19 percent of full-time undergraduates in four-year public degree programs graduate on time, and it’s 5 percent for two-year programs. 5 Students from poor families who go to college will probably remain working-class—38 percent of people from low-income families will remain in the bottom two deciles regardless of their educational accomplishment. But the biggest myth is probably the one about students and wage labor. In her book Paying the Price, Sara Goldrick-Rab (herself a scholar of education policy) writes about how she assumed that a drowsy student of hers had been partying too hard and failing to take her studies seriously. When Goldrick-Rab confronted the student, the professor learned a valuable lesson: The student had been working nights at the local grocery store because the graveyard shift paid a little better. She had been attending class after an 11-p.m.-to-6-a.m. shift, taking her education very seriously. This is a good example of the difference between college student stereotypes and the reality, and the experience prompted Goldrick-Rab to take a look at how hard students are working outside the classroom:
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Malcolm Harris (Kids These Days: Human Capital and the Making of Millennials)
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I think it was beginning to dawn on us that the kids could be damned one way or the other, depending on the school, on the composition of the committee reviewing the application, even on the disposition of an individual member of the committee. A
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Andrew Ferguson (Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College)
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Apparently that speech struck a chord in Delilah, because ever since, she has been in this office spilling her guts out. This is fine because that was my purpose of becoming a high school counselor. I didn’t merely want to guide children into good grades and help them fill out college applications. I wanted to be that shoulder, that advice, that parent that I was missing when I was in their very shoes when I walked these halls. However,
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Jessica N. Watkins (Love, Sex, Lies)
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mostly unsuccessful attempts to teach grade-school children English using transformational grammar were made during the 1960s and early 1970s. Today it is taught mostly in colleges and graduate schools. Outside linguistics, transformational grammar is used mostly in computer-language-processing applications. It has an alien look and feel to traditionalists, but it can convey interesting insights into how the language works
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Bryan A. Garner (The Chicago Guide to Grammar, Usage, and Punctuation (Chicago Guides to Writing, Editing, and Publishing))
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As the economic writer Ben Casselman pointed out in 2016, most college applicants “never have to write a college entrance essay, pad a résumé or sweet-talk a potential letter-writer,” because more than three-quarters of American undergraduates attend colleges that accept at least half their applicants. Only 4 percent attend schools that accept 25 percent or less, and fewer than 1 percent attend elite schools that accept fewer than 10 percent of their applicants.3 Students at these less competitive institutions then struggle to finish, with only half completing a bachelor’s degree within six years. Many
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Thomas M. Nichols (The Death of Expertise: The Campaign Against Established Knowledge and Why it Matters)
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Swami Devi Dyal College Of Nursing
Swami Devi Dyal College of Nursing was established in year 2006. The college is approved & recognized by Haryana Nursing Registration Council (HNRC), Indian Nursing Council (INC), New Delhi and is affiliated to Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak.
SWATCH BHARAT
B.Sc Nursing Students of Swami Devi Dyal college of nursing organized awareness programme on SWATCH BHARAT along with Nursing Staff of General Hospital Sector -6 Panchkula Haryana. They delivered health education to patients and their relatives about the importance of cleanliness and proper disposal of refuse .Posters were displayed.
Courses Offered
Bachelor of Science Nursing (Co-education)
Program Mode Regular
Duration 4 Years
No. of Seats 60
Eligibility 1) The applicant must have passed 10+2 exam of board of school education Haryana or any examination recognized as equivalent there to with Science (Physics, Chemistry, & Biology) and English (PCBE) with minimum 45% in aggregate marks (40% marks for the reserved category SC/ST).
2) Minimum Age limit: 17 years before 31st December of the admission session 2012.
3) Candidate must be medically fit and medical fitness certificate shall have to be produced at the time of admission.
Fee Structure 60000/-
Admission Procedure The admission to B. Sc Nursing Program will be made on the basis of the CET test conducted by Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak.
The management Quota seats (25% of the sanctioned intake including 15% seats for children/ward of NRI’s) for Nursing will be filled as per
1. CET-2012 merit ranking Conducted by Pt. B.D. Sharma University of Health Sciences, Rohtak.
2. Merit based on percentage of marks in 10+2 in Physics, Chemistry, Biology & English.
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swamidevidyal
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From 1979 to 1988, it concluded, Harvard admitted only 13.2 percent of Asian Americans, compared with 17.4 percent of whites. Applicants from California and those intending to study biology—two disproportionately Asian American groups—had lower admission rates as well. Accounting for most of the admissions gap between white and Asian applicants, federal investigators concluded, was “preference given to legacies and recruited athletes—groups that are predominantly white.
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Daniel Golden (The Price of Admission (Updated Edition): How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite Colleges--and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates)
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Fuck why he broke up with her! He broke up with her because her ass don’t need to be having no boyfriend! You’re eighteen years old girl, fuck you need a boyfriend for? Your boyfriend should be school, studying, and college applications. Where this nigga from? Where he live? Take me to him right now. I swear I just want to talk.” I said
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Diamond D. Johnson (She Got Love for a Miami Boss)
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Why on earth don't they go to men's colleges and urge the students not to allow their manly natures to be crushed out by too much mental application?
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Jean Webster (Daddy Long Legs)
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With this in mind, I’d started a leadership and mentoring program at the White House, inviting twenty sophomore and junior girls from high schools around Greater D.C. to join us for monthly get-togethers that included informal chats, field trips, and sessions on things like financial literacy and choosing a career. We kept the program largely behind closed doors, rather than thrusting these girls into the media fray. We paired each teen with a female mentor who would foster a personal relationship with her, sharing her resources and her life story. Valerie was a mentor. Cris Comerford, the White House’s first female executive chef, was a mentor. Jill Biden was, too, as were a number of senior women from both the East and the West Wing staffs. The students were nominated by their principals or guidance counselors and would stay with us until they graduated. We had girls from military families, girls from immigrant families, a teen mom, a girl who’d lived in a homeless shelter. They were smart, curious young women, all of them. No different from me. No different from my daughters. I watched over time as the girls formed friendships, finding a rapport with one another and with the adults around them. I spent hours talking with them in a big circle, munching popcorn and trading our thoughts about college applications, body image, and boys. No topic was off-limits. We ended up laughing a lot. More than anything, I hoped this was what they’d carry forward into the future—the ease, the sense of community, the encouragement to speak and be heard. My wish for them was the same one I had for Sasha and Malia—that in learning to feel comfortable at the White House, they’d go on to feel comfortable and confident in any room, sitting at any table, raising their voices inside any group.
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Michelle Obama (Becoming)
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But Portia’s application would have landed in the great moving tide of similar applications: great kids, smart kids, hardworking kids who would certainly do great at whatever college they ended up going to, which almost certainly wasn’t going to be Princeton.
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Jean Hanff Korelitz (Admission)
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especially with college applications coming up. I still had no idea what I even wanted to do. The only thing I really liked was reading.
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Alex Light (The Upside of Falling)
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It is the work of the preacher to connect the dots. Our participation in the dominant system is so “normal” that we do not notice. As a result our life is caught up in endless TV ads, mostly concerning new cars and more drugs that will kill us. It is assumed among us that more consumer goods will make us happy. It is assumed that more aggressive militarism will make us safe. It is assumed that more soccer practices will make us more ready for college applications. It is assumed that more spectator sports will give us companionship. It is assumed that anger toward Muslims is appropriate and can be unrestrained. All of these assumptions are sponsored by the empire and are regarded as “normal.” It is assumed that it is okay to treat “the other” as a commodity or as an object without merit who qualifies for no respect, compassion, or justice.
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Walter Brueggemann (Tenacious Solidarity: Biblical Provocations on Race, Religion, Climate, and the Economy)
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Why on earth don’t they go to men’s colleges and urge the students not to allow their manly natures to be crushed out by too much mental application?
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Jean Webster (Daddy Long Legs)
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jpinstituteofeducation
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The best approach is to write a narrative, “slice of life” essay where you focus on a smaller incident, event or moment, and then expand the essay to share what you learned from it.
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Janine Robinson (Essay Hell's 2017-18 Prompts Primer: Strategies for the Common App, UC, Transfer and Other College Application Essays)
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Yes, your blondness. What?
Did you mail off all your applications?
I did as ordered, Your Majesty.
Are you going to tell me where you applied?
University of None Ya. University of Mind Your Own. University of Not-tellin’. Big Secret College. And St. Stay-out-of-it Technical College.
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Tiffany Reisz (The Saint (The Original Sinners, #5))