April is the cruelest month
by Guest Contributor | June 28th, 2006Contributed by: Heather O’Neill
Associate Director of Admissions, Vanderbilt University
“April is the cruelest month…”
- T.S. Eliot, The Wasteland
As the May 1 deadline for students to submit a matriculation deposit approaches, I find myself in complete agreement with T.S. Eliot. For those in admissions, April is the cruelest month, yet also one of the most joyful and gratifying. It is a month thick with contradictions, 30 days spent vacillating between counseling denied seniors and their parents through their grief and hyping the university to eager juniors visiting campus during Spring Break, between traveling to junior college nights around the country and being on campus for admitted seniors visiting one last time before making a commitment, between this year and the next.
The transition between the final exhausting days of admission committee meetings in March and the first days of April was particularly abrupt and jarring this spring. We mailed our decision letters early on a Saturday morning and assumed that Monday would be quiet, a buffer zone between the end of reading season and the start of the avalanche of phone calls. Apparently the U.S. Postal Service made Vanderbilt admission letters their highest priority that weekend, however; because the calls came flooding in from students around the country who received their news in Monday’s mail. The end of reading season is always draining, emotionally and physically. The reality of a 33% admit rate is that each of us lost a number of battles for students in whom we became invested and that pain can make it excruciatingly difficult to maintain a professional demeanor when faced with a parent irate over his or her child’s lack of a merit scholarship offer when you know how hard you fought just to have that student admitted. Each day in April, we span the continuum of emotions from elation when a student we have championed in the process decides to attend our college to heartbreak when another does not. We are frustrated with parents who cannot understand that there were students who presented stronger applications than their child and we are grateful to those who thank us for the time we spent answering their son or daughter’s questions even though he or she was not admitted. We host admitted students for final campus visits, answer their last-minute questions (Are there soundproof rooms in the freshman residence halls where you can practice the drums? Let me find out for you…), and keep our fingers crossed that enough of them will choose us that we achieve our target freshman enrollment.
In the midst of this emotional roller coaster, we begin recruiting the current high school juniors who will comprise next year’s applicant pool. My first spring college night was on April 10th, just two weeks after we mailed decision letters. I received my first question about the admissions process ten minutes into the fair. “What do you look for in an application?” asked a shaggy-haired boy in a polo shirt and flip-flops. My mind raced as I tried to form a simple answer and I eventually stammered out something about a challenging high school curriculum, contribution to the school or local community, strong writing, etc., all the while thinking of the multitude of students with those qualifications who did not make it this year. “Just be true to yourself and do the best job you can with your applications and then let the chips fall where they may,” I told him, “It’s hard to see now, but you will end up with a great college home next year.” He looked at me quizzically and asked for our average SAT score. Clearly the wounds from this year’s selection process were still too raw so early in the spring. Not enough time had passed for me to gain perspective and remember that juniors are not immersed in this process yet, that they just want to hear some general statistics so they can begin differentiating between the hundreds of colleges whose names they know.
These spring college nights are proliferating as the rise in Early Decision and Early Action applications means that the college search process now begins in earnest in the junior year of high school for many students. They do offer a wonderful opportunity for juniors to gather information on a wide variety of schools, but, for admissions officers, the month-long split personality disorder that they induce is difficult to handle. Our loyalties are divided between the seniors we have admitted and hope to enroll and the juniors just starting the search. Like the parents and teachers they are leaving behind, we need the summer to ease our emotional attachment to this year’s seniors and find closure as we hand them off to our faculty and student life staff. Only then are we prepared to go out to high schools and college fairs across the country to meet a new group of prospective students, finally ready to fall in love all over again. So April truly is the cruelest month, forcing us to flirt with next year’s class while our hearts still belong to this year’s seniors. We look forward to May 1, when the final matriculation deposits are in the mail, our phones stop ringing off the hook, and we can turn our full attention and affection to next year’s class.
