Tag: MIT

Close to Closing

Posted in An Ongoing Journal...4 Comments

This is a first.

I’m writing this post, using thumbs only, on my phone. And my kid has been rejected by his top three choices for college.

Although letdowns of this magnitude are not Elihu’s usual lot, he is being characteristically stoic and undaunted. Rather, I’m the one who’s most upset at the recent news.

This will be the briefest of posts, for I wish only to convey something of an update on our life’s progress here at the Hillhouse.

With my son’s having a GPA of 4.3 and a slew of exceptional accomplishments in many disciplines – plus a mind possessed of top-notch critical thinking skills and fluency in four languages – I cannot understand how it is that Elihu was not accepted by MIT, Yale nor Princeton. Truly, we had thought the challenge ahead would simply be choosing between the acceptances, not coming to terms with the rejections. At the moment Elihu is on the final waitlist at Harvard, but they had over fifty-seven thousand applicants and have fewer than two thousand spots. So it doesn’t look very hopeful. I get it. And so does my son. But still. It’s a challenge to accept that his future reality will be quite different from our imaginings.

This college application experience reminds me a lot of what it feels like to buy a house. When you find that perfect place, you fall in love with a vision of how your new life will be when you live there. And you begin to imagine all the details that will go along with it. The finished basement, the gorgeous backyard. The programs, the campus… Your mind’s eye gives birth to a whole new world which your heart instantly and happily inhabits. You know what your future feels like in this new neighborhood, in this new school. You can just feel it. You know it deep in your bones. This will be your new home. This will be your new school.

There are superstitions that come into play before the deal is closed, before that acceptance letter arrives, that time in which your future hangs in the balance and nothing is certain except for your strong feelings on the matter. Before that house is yours, before that college accepts you, the world is open to all kinds of signs and foreshadowing of the success to come. You stop to pick up pennies in the parking lot that previously you would’ve stepped over, and they become lucky signs from the universe that things are destined to go your way. The year of your father’s graduating class at Yale pops up in the tally on a receipt and you think to yourself that it’s a done deal: some all-knowing force is surely giving you the nod; your kid is in.

And then – just like that – the deal falls through, the college sends a letter of rejection.

The house will not be your home after all. And your dream college will forever more remain just a dream. And then your thinking changes. No amount of lucky pennies or prayerful friends seem to have mattered in the end, did they? Had the prayers and good energy meant nothing? Perhaps all of your hopeful preparations had been for naught anyhow, perhaps the outcome had already long been determined by divine providence… But in the end, none of this really matters. Because no matter the hows and whys, the big question still remains: just what happens now?

Today we find ourselves in a completely new place. In a strange limbo we hadn’t anticipated. It seems that all we can do is continue to live. Collect the eggs, do the homework, enjoy the arrival of spring. We’ve made our offers, so all we can do now is wait. Elihu has had a fairly high-end technical school in his back pocket the whole time, much of it already covered by a generous scholarship which he was awarded this past year. It had always been there as a sort of last-ditch insurance. So it’s ok. It’s just not ideal. And I’m sorry if I come off sounding like we’re entitled, but my child has worked his ass off and I believe he deserves to study at a top institution. These rejections have been a bitter pill for me to swallow, but of course the kid is being level-headed and pragmatic about it all. We both know that covid is to blame for the flood of applicants. We both know that it is an unusual year. But me, I’m a mother who’s always done everything I could to support my child, so I can’t be anything but deeply disappointed.

What’s done is done. Elihu can have no regrets, he’s done everything right, he’s done everything to the best of his ability. There are a couple of schools remaining on the list, and by the end of this month we should know what the options are. Before long we’ll find that new home, we’ll sign on the line and close the deal.

Like Us

Posted in An Ongoing Journal...5 Comments

“It’s not easy for people like us” Elihu said, his dark eyes looking directly into mine from across the table.

We were sitting at the tiny island in the kitchen, a place at which we’d shared hundreds – nay, thousands – of conversations over the twelve years in which we’d lived here. The topic this time was how we two have always felt different from just about everyone we’d ever met. Sometimes I jokingly refer to us as being “fully loaded”. What do I mean? What did Elihu mean? At the risk of sounding like a snob, I’ll try my best to explain. Because it is a problem. When it comes to relationships. Friendships, romance – any of it. It’s not always easy being people like us.

Having an awareness of so many things: different cultures, different climates and physical environments, different ways of living in the world, different values, different ways of thinking, of interpreting the world, of celebrating, dressing, eating, making music, dancing, working, playing, relating to others – being deeply and legitimately interested in and somewhat educated about such a huge variety of human experiences can put one in a tricky spot. A place in which you can imagine yourself to feel somewhat at home in all of the experiences yet never truly at home in any of them. Does that make sense? My highly literate and exquisitely expressive son had said it much better than that, but sadly he is not a contributor here, so I’ll have to muddle through this idea as best I can. Basically, we feel that our awareness of the world greatly reduces the number of peers who feel as we do. Sometimes knowing too much puts one in a lonely place.

This came up in the context of discussing colleges. For as long as we can remember, the goal has been MIT. And when we went to visit last year (the only campus we visited!) we felt immediately at home. The place and the people – I believe the word favored here is ‘culture’ – it all felt so good, so natural. We even loved the smell of the old buildings, the crazy-long corridors in the landmark domed building, the music department and its cozy, aged atmosphere. But recently something has begun to nag at Elihu’s thoughts regarding MIT.

At its core, it is a tech school. It is the repository of the mathsiest students in the nation. It is a flagship of science and research. Sure, there’s a music department, sure my kid could minor in linguistics, but at the end of the day it is not a liberal arts school. Everyone is there for tech and science. If you were to take a random sample of ten students, you might not find a one of them participating in the arts. And at this stage in Elihu’s development as a person, while tech is at the heart of his interests, his music has become a huge part of who he is. And so perhaps, just perhaps, it might be a good idea to consider a college culture in which he may find more of his artsy peers.

“Harvard, Yale, Princeton” Elihu listed the options that he was now seriously considering. “Those places are full of people whom I could relate to easily” he said. I was surprised, but I wasn’t. (Secretly my heart leapt at the idea of Yale; my son is named for its founder, Elihu Yale, my father went to school there, and then went on to teach and become the curator of its ancient instrument collection, an institution which resides on Hillhouse Avenue. And I myself was born in New Haven. Are those not all lovely symbols of serendipity?) I’d known that Princeton had a good aeronautical engineering program, as one of Elihu’s mentors had gone to school there, but I wasn’t aware that Harvard or Yale had aeronautical engineering options. I was leery about them being candidates. But Elihu began to get a little excited when talking about these two ivy leaguers. It was new to me, this whole turning of the trajectory; it had always been about aeronautics – languages and music were the sidebars. But my son is a very gifted writer too, and a visual artist of some skill. He is multilingual, he is a poet, a composer, a reader and a thinker, an autodidact. Truly, he is a renaissance man, and it’s of utmost importance that he find his tribe. I feel his plight deeply.

Finding one’s tribe is at the heart of this whole conversation. When you can identify with so many other tribes, how can you find the one in which you should live? Me, I’ve resigned myself to living out my life simply observing – I don’t have many friends in my area, hell I don’t have many friends in any one area of the world these days. Now they are now scattered across the nation, the globe. So I will likely remain here, alone. I’m content to watch the world from my seat here at the Hillhouse. But my son – he needs to find his people. This is no small decision.

I am completely thrilled for the adventure that awaits my son. Thrilled. Yet as the same time, on a purely selfish note, I’m growing anxious about his departure. Our conversations are always rich. We love living side-by-side here surrounded by nature. We enjoy playing music together. We love all things hilarious, and we notice nuance where others often do not. We read aloud to each other. We practice accents and languages together. We think. And we share what we think. In short, we are a deeply connected tribe of two. But this will change so very soon as Elihu finally discovers the correct direction in which to head out and to be on his own.

Soon he will find the path that leads him to his new tribe, that path which will bring him to his new home. And it will be a place with people – like us.