Lilly Gets Deferred II: More Lessons for Girls From the College Application Process
In my most recent blog I began exploring the important lessons girls can learn from the college application process. In this blog I will reveal two more ways applying to college helps girls undermine and overcome the Curse of the Good Girl.
1. Criticism is Constructive
Because girls are under a constant and intense pressure to be good at everything they do, criticism can feel like the end of the world. Many girls have trouble distinguishing their external actions from their internal worth. Subsequently, if someone points out to a girl that her passes were weak during the big game, she may interpret that criticism of her performance as a swipe at her worth as a basketball player. Here’s the basic formula (and they said I wasn’t good at math!):
Criticism of behavior+ pressure to be perfect= Criticism of person
So it’s no wonder that girls have trouble accepting criticism.
Students are no strangers to constructive criticism; we see it all the time in comments on papers, report cards and in parent-teacher conferences. But it’s easy to hide a test with a disappointing grade in the back of a notebook, and it’s easy to brush off a teacher’s comment as evidence of their hatred of you.
Girls like me are hurt by constructive criticism because it means we are not doing our job of being a Good Girl very well, so we push criticism out of sight. And we pretend it is out of mind, but all the while we are beating ourselves up for failing and promising to do better next time.
When applying to college, it’s difficult to discount constructive criticism because the stakes are too high. My friend Alice’s college counselor said her dream school was a reach, which is admissions lingo for ”you probably won’t get in to that school.” Her counselor suggested similar, less elite, schools to Alice, but the criticism stung. Yet after researching her dream school some more, she realized the counselor was right.
Instead of ignoring the counselor’s advice and applying to a school she couldn’t “reach” even if she had a ladder, Alice applied to another great school and was accepted! Alice learned a valuable lesson. She realized that the fact that she did not have the kind of grades or test scores her dream school looks for does not mean she is a bad person. And the fact that her counselor told her so does not mean the counselor is a bad person, either.
2. Life’s Not Fair
This is possibly the most important, and definitely most difficult, lesson the college application process teaches girls. I learned this lesson…..big time. I was deferred from my first choice college. And it’s not clear why. Unlike Alice, I was given the go ahead from college counselors; my extra curricular activities are off the hook (if I do say so myself; Ed.’s Note: They most certainly are), and my grades are strong. Guess I just didn’t have that elusive ‘X factor.’ I could spend all day theorizing about why I wasn’t accepted.
But at the end of the day, I know I’ve learned an important lesson. Things don’t always work out. How you react to bad news is often a better indication of someone’s character than if they received good news. In other words, getting into college is really hard, and when you get in to a school people will be able to quickly ascertain how smart you are based on where the school you are going to falls on the USA Today list. But if you don’t get in to college the first time around, people will be able to see what kind of person you are based on how you handle the news.
Girls try so hard to be perfect, so it is difficult to imagine that our hard work will not pay off. Sometimes it does, but often it does not. We won’t always get the guy. We won’t always get the credit we deserve. When I got deferred I learned that you can’t always rely on the powers that be and you can’t rely on the fact that things should work out. But I now know that, regardless of the magnitude of the disappointment, I can rely on my ability to bounce back. And that is a lesson I hope every girl learns.
Lilly,
I look forward to reading your blog every week! Regarding the “constructive criticism” part… I think that the college admissions process is so hard because you rarely get feedback from colleges about WHY you didn’t get in. It’s easier in many respects to get a bad grade, because it’s often obvious (maybe after the fact) why you got the grade you did. Even if someone breaks up with you, you’ll often get a reason why (maybe not always a truthful one, but an answer nonetheless). But, to my knowledge, colleges don’t send back a letter saying *why* you were deferred or not accepted.
Also — and this is admittedly a big generalization — my experience is that girls tend to personalize criticism more than boys (getting a bad grade means I’m a bad PERSON, not just a struggling math student, and my teacher now HATES me).
Anyway, I just wanted to write a comment — look forward to reading next week!
Suzie
Suzie,
I’m so glad you are enjoying the blogs! I think girls may personalize criticism more than boys do because so much of being a girl depends on relationships. When relationships are paramount, every interaction begins to feel personal.
I think part of the “life isn’t fair” lesson is realizing that not everything is YOUR fault. Sometimes stuff happens, and it has nothing to do with how hard you worked or didn’t. I think you are already saying this but I want to make the point more clear. So…it’s not all about us Good Girl — things don’t rise and fall on our work. Sometimes, annoying circumstances intervene.
I once gave this advice to a former student who was starting his college search:
Aim high. Aim even higher than you think is reasonable. Really, what have you got to lose? If you’d be satisfied with UIC [the University of Illinois at Chicago], apply to the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Texas. If you can see yourself at one of those state schools, take a crack at the University of Chicago. If you think you could handle the University of Chicago, why not Cornell? If you think Cornell is within your reach, go for broke — Harvard, baby! And if you’re so confident that you know you can get into Harvard with a snap of your fingers . . . dare I suggest Oxford?
Think “1-2-4-2-1″: If you apply to 10 colleges, then make one of them your dream school — the one you’d choose to attend if you were twice as smart, twice as rich and twice as good-looking. Next choose two schools that you think represent the absolute limits of your academic reach, like the Frisbee that you can catch, just barely, if you leap for it. The next four should be schools that you’re fairly confident that you can get into and fairly certain that you can succeed at, without selling yourself short. Two should be schools that are a little less competitive — you know you can get in — but offer something special that would make them worth the tradeoff. And the last one is your safety school, if Murphy’s Law kicks in and everything that can go wrong does.
To give you an example of this strategy, if I woke up tomorrow and were in high school again, here are the 10 colleges I’d apply to: [1] Harvard, [2] University of Chicago, Columbia University, [4] University of California at Berkeley, University of Washington, NYU, Amherst College, [2] St. John’s University, Carleton College, [1] University of Wisconsin at Madison.
If you flat-out can’t afford to apply to 10 colleges, at least apply to six: one dream school, two limit-pushers, two good bets and one safety with something special. Do not let anyone talk you out of applying to the dream school.
ps. sorry for the typos. *can’t *pathetically
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