Admitted!
It was late August, 1976. Every year after all the kids returned home from summer camp or wherever we'd been all summer, my family would take a short road trip vacation. My older brother was going to be a senior in high school, so this year it was time to visit colleges. Our vacation consisted of visits to several colleges in New England: schools like Amherst and Wesleyan . They seemed so tiny. And somewhere in there, we visited Yale . By the time our tour guide got us to Ezra Stiles College , I was sold. "This is where I want to go to college." Was it Saarinen's building? It was the coolest dorm I'd seen, for sure. Whatever the reason, from that moment on I had one central purpose to my high school years and that was to get in to Yale. In hindsight, I can say that was a profoundly awful purpose; one that I don't recommend for anyone today. My brother was not admitted to Yale. Nor Amherst. Nor Wesleyan. He "settled" for Cornell , my mother...