March Madness Part 1: Reading Season
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's Vice President and Dean of Admission and Financial Aid, and this is Admissions Beat.
It's March. If you live in the United States, people always refer to it as March Madness because the NCAA College Basketball tournament unfolds and there's mayhem and excitement and activity. And the month is kind of crazy. If you work in college admission, it's also March Madness because we are in the penultimate moments of the admission cycle. We've been reading, we've been reading, we've been reading, and now we're starting to decide, and we are a couple of weeks away from releasing decisions for the regular decision round for the class of 2030. And so this week is the first of a two-pack. We're going to talk about March Madness reading and next week, about March Madness deciding. So those of you who are high school seniors or juniors or parents or guidance counselors will have a sense of what's going on in a college admission office now.
And I hope as you listen to this conversation about reading with four of my colleagues from Dartmouth, you will be reassured that the file that was submitted on January 1st is making its way through a process that you don't see, but is nevertheless very thoughtful and comprehensive. So when we come back, we will meet four members of Dartmouth's admission staff and the five of us will have a conversation about reading season. We'll be right back.
(music)
So I'm excited to welcome four colleagues. As I often say on Admissions Beat, this is sponsored by Dartmouth, but it's not about Dartmouth admission. But in this particular episode, we've got five Dartmouth admission officers chattering about reading applications for Dartmouth. So we're going to use a little poetic license with Dartmouth as a case study, not necessarily a how-to guide about how to apply to and get into Dartmouth College. But say hello to, in alphabetical order, first by their first name, Anthony Fosu. Hi, Anthony.
Anthony Fosu:
Hey, Lee. How's it going? I am an admissions officer at Dartmouth where I graduated with the class of 2024, studying government, human-centered design and public policy. And before that, I was a member of the class of 2020 at Matawan Regional High School in Monmouth County, New Jersey. And actually it's one of the places I read now, most of New Jersey, along with parts of Pennsylvania.
Lee Coffin:
So next up is Carolyn Yee.
Carolyn Yee:
I'm the admissions officer here at Dartmouth College, graduated in the class of 2025. Before that, I was class of 2021 at Ingram High School in Seattle, Washington, which like Anthony is also a school that I get the chance to read now along with a lot of the Pacific Northwest.
Lee Coffin:
Thanks, Carolyn. And listeners, as you're hearing this, it's quite common to see an admission officer as territory manager for a place where they went to high school. So that familiarity of place is something that a lot of colleges just make sense. Have someone go home, visit the schools, introduce applicants through that environmental lens. Isabel Bober.
Isabel Bober:
Hi, everyone. I'm a senior associate director here at Dartmouth in the undergraduate admissions office, and I'm also a proud member of the class of 2004 at Dartmouth. I am the elder millennial of the group. When I was applying to college, it was still in the 1990s. And so I am a class of 2000 graduate from Bridgewater-Raritan High School in New Jersey.
Lee Coffin:
And rounding out our cast this week is Kevin Donohue.
Kevin Donohue:
I'm a member of the Dartmouth class of 2021 and a senior assistant director of admissions here at Dartmouth. I'm coming up on five years in the office, but I'm originally from Long Island, New York. You wouldn't guess from my proclivities for hiking and my beard on my face, but I graduated in 2017 from high school in New York City. Actually, I commuted on the Long Island Railroad to attend Regis High School, the Upper East Side, which is a quirky, small Catholic school, which we claim to be the only tuition-free private school in the United States. So three different places, suburban, Long Island, urban, New York, now rural New Hampshire.
Lee Coffin:
And you read Northern New England as an admission officer?
Kevin Donohue:
You got it. I do New Hampshire and Maine, kind of our backyard here. And I also do Long Island where I'm from, as well as now parts of the nation of India, which is much different than both of those places-
Lee Coffin:
... Keep it mixing it up, Kevin.
Kevin Donohue:
Exactly.
Lee Coffin:
Isabelle, what do you read?
Isabel Bober:
So I read for the small island of Manhattan, New York. And I also actually with Carolyn, which is a delight and a joy, we oversee most of the Bay Area. One of our colleagues does a bit of East Bay, but I get to live this really fun bi-coastal life through the lives of our applicants.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And Carolyn, so you read San Francisco Bay and where else?
Carolyn Yee:
Yes. And I also read Washington, Oregon, and Greater Houston. It's a little all over, but all very exciting.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But as we just shared that tidbit, that territory management, as we call it, is the way we connect travel season, which is the other big chunk of time we spend with reading seasons. So in a lot of admission offices, the person who visits a high school or does a program in a place is often not always, but often the person reading the file as a territory manager and bringing that local perspective to the way we read. So when I say reading season, which for listeners, reading season starts in late October and goes all the way to March for first year applicants, but then we do transfers. So it kind of wiggles all the way to the end of May, maybe even June. So reading season is most of the year. I often say it's the work of the work. It's the fundamental task we have as admission officers at a college. But to the four of you, when I say reading season, describe it in one word.
Isabel Bober:
It's my favorite.
Lee Coffin:
Your favorite. Why?
Isabel Bober:
We get to meet people from all around the country and all around the world. And yes, there's a selection aspect to it, but before that selection, we meet people. We get to put ourselves in the lives of another person, understand where they're coming from, what are they excited about for this next phase of their life? And then what are the opportunities to bring that perspective and that person to this really special place? So I love that. It is a fundamentally positive and optimistic part of the year for me, even though our admit rate often says otherwise. And it's what's kept me doing this work for now over 20 years.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, Isabel, that last point was really important because I think saying this is your favorite part of the job and it's an optimistic part of the job, I agree. All of you have heard me say, "You open every file and look for a path to yes." Can't always happen, but that's the goal is to knit together all of these pieces into a story that leads to a decision that invites someone to join us. Anthony, Carolyn, Kevin?
Kevin Donohue:
I agree with Isabel. I say we travel in the fall and we get to run these really cool programs on campus, but it's still ... Reading season is my favorite. But the word that comes to mind right now in March is the word "long."
Lee Coffin:
Long.
Kevin Donohue:
Long. The seniors are in their long process, which of course they're writing their applications in the fall. That might start months beforehand and years beforehand when they start to think about what's going into that, and then they maybe settle down once those are submitted, but then that's when the long begins for us. And I think it's one of the human parts of the process is that we spend just so much dang time doing this. When you say late October through March, just thinking about what that means and realizing when I think about it, there's probably only two weeks during that time, the holiday break where I'm not actively 8:00 to 5:00 every day thinking about or reading these applications. It's intentionally long, which I still do really enjoy. It's one of the parts I do take pride in is that we embrace that long and truly embrace every moment of it.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Anthony, you're in your second year as a reader. Has it been easier than your first?
Anthony Fosu:
Easier in the sense that it's more familiar, but it's still a process of getting to meet a person, hear their life story, and attempt in the most professional way possible to understand, condense, and then represent that story to my colleagues so we can make an informed decision about whether this person would be a good fit for this place and whether they're qualified to be here. And I think it relates to the word that I would choose to describe the whole process: intentional. And for me, it's important that we get to see each person as who they are, fully human with complex stories. And I have a job that allows me to imagine so many people throughout the course of a day, strangers that I may or may not get to meet, to imagine them as complexly as I imagine my coworkers and imagine myself. And in that process, I get to participate in seeing if I can elevate their story and see if they can play a part in the story of this place that I've called home for the past six years now.
Lee Coffin:
Carolyn, you are navigating your rookie year.
Carolyn Yee:
Yes-
Lee Coffin:
So as a reader, and I've said this to you in person, but I'll say it on air, you intuitively figured it out right out of the gate. As a brand new reader, you were one of those people that the light bulb went ping and you just seemed to know how to do it. But as you come into the very late steps of reading your first cycle, what's your word?
Carolyn Yee:
No, that's so kind of you to say. I think my word that I was thinking of was all-encompassing.
Lee Coffin:
Oh.
Carolyn Yee:
With the hyphen, it's one word. I remember when we were talking about learning to read and we were told that you want to give to the application the same amount of care that these students have given to us. And that's something that I've held very closely to my heart as I've been reading it, to my mind, as I've been really immersing myself in these students' lives and in their worlds. I think it is such a privilege to have a job where you get to go in and find and see potential in people. Your whole job is to see someone's potential and really parse those strings out. And I think it's a really optimistic and beautiful lens to have on a person. It's also really all-encompassing in the sense that it's shaped my own life, my own perspectives a lot, to really have your finger on the pulse of what a lot of the younger generations are thinking and feeling about the world today, some of the best and brightest in the nation.
It helps me think about the world. It's altered the way that I view a lot of different topics. And it's especially meaningful coming from my hometown or a lot of territories that I am very familiar with to see how it's changed since I've been there or to see myself in a lot of these students. I think I try really hard to give myself to the application in an all-encompassing way that provides a very fruitful experience.
Lee Coffin:
So Carolyn, you were just talking about hometown, and I mentioned a lot of us as admission officers will read places where we were raised or where we went to high school, but I would even elongate that and say a lot of us bring our own story to the way we read. So I say all the time on the pod, I was public high school, first gen, lower middle income, and I read that type of application with a very personal lens. I know the who. I'm like, "That was me 40 years ago." And talk about that, how you bring yourself both into each file and then how you navigate both, this isn't about you, but your personal story informs your reading. Let's bat that around for a little bit. Do you catch yourself doing that, Carolyn?
Carolyn Yee:
I do. I do often. I think that it's very easy to see yourself in a lot of the applicants and to relate to where they're coming from. I also worked a lot of part-time jobs when I was in high school with long hours. And when I see that on an application, it's extra context that I know the amount of work and the amount of time that goes into balancing that on top of academics. And to think about how students from certain regions that may have different levels of resources would think about a school like Dartmouth. I know from my high school, I didn't know a lot about Dartmouth or four-year colleges or things like that. And so that does shape how I view how these students express themselves and their interests in Dartmouth and how they might've found their way to us.
Anthony Fosu:
What you're hitting on is just this aspect of empathy, that we have an opportunity to see ourselves in the students that we read. For me, I'm thinking about all the suburban and urban New Jersey kids that are talking about their faith or talking about their family or their love of Dunkin' Donuts, I see myself in them and I think about the challenges that they're facing and the opportunities they have and the worries they have. And I'm like, that's where I can see myself. And I imagine the person who was sitting in my seat before me who saw that in me and then decided that I was worth taking a chance on.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So Isabel or Kevin, you're more experienced readers. Piggyback on what Anthony and Carolyn are saying and talk about environmental context. Help explain to an applicant how we really do look at where they are and read them accordingly.
Isabel Bober:
To pick on Anthony's use of the word empathy, reading has made me just a more empathetic person in general, and it has changed and shaped me. So I grew up in Central New Jersey, went to a solid public school. I didn't have a lot of context for just all the different experiences that my fellow Dartmouth classmates were going to bring. And coming into the work of admissions, I've been exposed to so much and it has really helped me to learn how to put myself in the shoes of another person, another family, another environment. I've read across the country domestically, internationally. I used to joke when I first started that, look, I never lived high school as a teenage boy, so I don't really understand ... I was just type A, high achieving theater musical girl, and I did a lot of that at Dartmouth. But over the years, it has really strengthened that muscle of putting yourself in the shoes of someone else.
Also, I'm now a parent. I have four elementary and now middle school aged kids. And becoming a parent and looking at these applicants not more as a peer-to-peer, but thinking about them through that parental lens has also changed how I think about applicants and the pressures they're facing and the real humans that they are. We get these super wonderful polished versions, but there are raw, real humans underneath there as well. And I hope that people understand that we are humans trying to understand other humans who are existing in this really messy and chaotic world and not expecting perfection and not expecting always that perfect polished version, but really seeking to find that genuine human who's going to then come and join this group of other genuine humans on these college campuses that we call home.
Kevin Donohue:
We use a lot of numbers in this process. I mean, we have to, with so many, so many implications, but every time I see a number and anytime any of us sees a number, we're looking at it through the lenses of empathy and the lenses of context. No number is just a number. I think we've put out a lot of communication over the past handful of years since bringing back SATs scores, and that's been a really big thing for me where I've seen how much we put those in context. And we think about what students achieved, what opportunities they have. That's the really big question for us. And that's really the lens we approach all of our numbers, all of our decisions through. And so that weaves in the contextual piece we've all been thinking about and understanding that and really absorbing that into whatever decision we make. And it also brings in empathy. It's understanding. It's knowing what someone has gone through.
Lee Coffin:
Well, and Kevin, what's so interesting about the territory you manage is you're pinging, you're like a jukebox with that ball going from Northern Maine, rural, first gen, low income kids from the woods to Long Island, like supercharged public high schools with lots of resources connected to New York City sometimes. And now you're doing India, which is a completely different ... So every time you move from Maine and New Hampshire to Long Island to India, you have to change the lens with which you read.
Kevin Donohue:
Yeah, you got it. I mean, the student in India that is doing cancer research and has founded a national nonprofit to alleviate rural poverty is on one hand much different than the student in the middle of Maine who's working on their family hobby farm and president of their student council at a school that has 60 students a class. Yeah, a lot different. Those achievements look a lot different. But in some ways it's the same. It's the same in their own context, both what we're looking for, students doing really well, caring about their communities.
Lee Coffin:
Well, I think the way I would describe it is they excel in different contexts.
Kevin Donohue:
You got it.
Lee Coffin:
And we work at a place with a lot of high achieving students, but that high achieving phrase doesn't mean the same thing as you work your way from docket to docket.
Kevin Donohue:
Those two motivated students are going to come to Dartmouth and they're going to be friends and they're going to start a club together.
Lee Coffin:
Right. Right. It's the intangible things that link them all together. So I want to back up a step. So last season, Shonda Rhimes joined me for a conversation about storytelling, and we focused that conversation on the ways in which an applicant could tell her story and bring herself forward so that ultimately we meet her in her own words. So we read and then we decide, but we can only assess what's there. Do the four of you see yourselves as storytellers as you meet each applicant and create your evaluation? Because I think you are. Not to lead the witnesses here, but I think what you each do one by one is what Anthony was saying. You read it to understand it, you condense it because you have to summarize it, you evaluate it in some way because we work in a competitive environment, and then you have to introduce that person in a summary way so that people who did not read the file can also meet the person. So you're a storyteller.
And sometimes you've heard me say, "You have to be Rumpelstiltskin." You're moving through that under-resourced rural high school Kevin's talking about and you see the evidence, but the place isn't quite as savvy. And so you have to spin some of the straw into gold with a degree of poetic license because you see it's a high achieving good kiddo, but they just have a little bit less polish.
Anthony Fosu:
Sometimes you're Rumpelstiltskin or sometimes you're like a griot, like a historian, storyteller, poet, because every storyteller receives stories to tell. They're able to then transmit that when it's appropriate, when it's relevant, when it's impactful. That's what makes a good storyteller. They're always full of stories because they've either been told stories or they've lived stories. And our work, whether it's through an essay or supplement or a recommendation, it's piecing together a story because even what we're exposed to, and I think about this whenever ... Because right now we're in March and we're in committee and I'm having to go back to stories I read back in January, sometimes back in December, and I'm having to think about, is this person a good fit? Is this person qualified? Is this person right for the institution at this moment? I'm thinking of the story that we're trying to tell, and at the same time, I'm also trying to transmit a new story about them.
The good thing about it is that every opportunity to tell a story is to live that experience, to really put yourself in the shoes of someone. In New Jersey, I see this often of kids who are coming from backgrounds where they're facing some type of adversity, but they are resilient and resourceful in a way that inspires you. And so I can see someone who I read back in January and I'm like, "Oh, it's this kid who created this really cool group of kids to support other homeless youth or unhoused youth, or it's this kid who decided to collect books for kids that just didn't have the opportunity to read like they did." And I think it's precious to me that I actually get to be someone who remembers those stories and can carry them forward.
Carolyn Yee:
I agree. And I think definitely along those lines of remembering stories and especially piecing them together. Oftentimes students, they are submitting their own stories through their essays, through their supplementals and even their activities. But we then take all those pieces and we see things that the students won't see, like their letters of rec, their school context, things that they might not even know. And we have to put that all together into one narrative of who they are and be very thoughtful about making sure that we're doing justice to them as a person. One of my favorite things when I'm writing these up is when you'll see an essay where there's just a string of words that is so beautifully and eloquently written that you have to put it into your summary. And those are always lovely because it's the student's voices themselves. But otherwise, we really are essentially braiding together a lot of different parts of their background to create our own story based on them.
Isabel Bober:
Lee, I actually think the applicants are the storytellers, and I see myself more as this conduit or this facilitator. And I want to embolden students to be proud of their stories and to not feel or worry or be anxious that their story is somehow not strong enough or different enough. Because I think so often in these highly selective environments, people are like, "Well, why me? I haven't done X, Y, and Z really cool or interesting thing. I have a very similar experience to a lot of other people." And that's just not true. The combination of who you are with all your context makes you absolutely distinctive even from someone who has sat next to you in the same set of classes from that same high school. And so I use a phrase that our president, Sian Beilock, talked about as "me-search." Instead of just focusing on college research, think about "me-search." And the way to put together those ingredients for an application that helps me find that story is to know yourself really well, to not be too consumed about how that's going to compare.
You're not in control of that. You're only in control of your own experiences, how you process them, and then how you share them. You know how people always see you differently than you see yourself? We're really hard on ourselves, and so we get this wonderful kind of full 360 view of not just how you see yourself, but how others see yourself, teachers or other adults in your high school community, your friends. And when you stitch that together, that's what brings that perspective of, wow, these are all the different elements of what this person can bring to a college community. And that's where I see myself more as this kind of facilitator of listening to their stories and then having that professional expertise to be able to share that in a way that we can act on it.
Lee Coffin:
And build a community. You just said it. I think that's the part, we'll talk about this a little bit next week on deciding, but each of us as readers is asking, "Can I see this person on this campus?" So Anthony referred to fit. That's fit. Whether it's, do you want to do linguistics? And we have a great department in linguistics and the fit is clear from an intellectual academic scholarly dimension, or it's you're Kevin Donohue with the flannel and the lumberjack look, and you're meant to live in the woods, and that's fit. You have this outdoorsy vibe that makes sense that this place would be your place, and you're thinking about that. But I mean, as alums, you each have a very unique opportunity to help your college build its future.
I mean, Kevin, you and I have talked about this a lot because for listeners, Kevin was a member of my very first class when I was dean, and now he is on the admission staff. And Kevin, it occurred to me as you're introducing yourself and you said you're the class of '21 and you're 5 years out, the juniors who are listening to this are the college class of '31. So you've seen almost 10 years, the classes that were here when you arrived, but also the 9 or 10 that have come after you. What excites you about participating in that?
Kevin Donohue:
It's super exciting. One of the parts I really do love and really cherish about the job is that I really do have a big hand in that, or at least a really defined impact in that. We each are contributing to this big hole here, but our opinions and our recommendations are taken really seriously, which is something I've always appreciated and a responsibility that I've always tried to uphold. And I bring that into my reads. I think you're talking about that fit, and we were talking about that fit earlier, maybe that outdoorsy person like I was, or that person that sees a good fit with our offerings here, but I always try to have an eye on what might be the future of the institution as well.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. And it's part of the reading process that most applicants have no idea that we think about these kind of things, every campus, but especially the smaller ones where you have to be, go back to Anthony's word, intentional. You're building an intentional community, and so you have to have intentional reads as we figure out who's qualified, almost everybody, and who's competitive, a lot of people, and who could we admit, a smaller percentage of that qualified. Isabel, so you've been doing this for 20 plus years at this point. So with me, you've seen a lot. You go back to those pre-volume moments. What's different? What's the same? So I mean, a parent who may be one of your classmates coming in with an applicant to the class of '31, remembering something from 1998 that isn't true, but there's a lot that still is. What's your more veteran perspective on what we're talking about?
Isabel Bober:
I've been lucky enough to work here now for, gosh, I think it's about 15 years. And there's a remarkable amount that is still similar, these kind of through-lines that I can connect to what I saw when I was a high school student stumbling off the highway in all the woods and arriving here and being like, "Oh, wow, this is here. This is kind of special and different and not what I expected." The values of looking for and finding people who both have that capacity to do the work, are absolutely qualified and are also competitive, but then also approach it with an energy or an impulse towards valuing people, not just ideas, valuing both, how the two of them come together to have really profound impacts. I think that's something that I see as a through line.
But then you think about the world that we exist in today in 2026 compared to the world I grew up in as a high school student and how that's changed and made some of those aspects maybe that much more important. So you see there both through-lines and differences. The challenge is the volume. And so I grow concerned about the way the hyper-selectivity has gone and the way it makes people feel, I don't know, less valued or less recognized because some of the decisions. We can't take all of the great amazing students that would make this place and places like ours so phenomenal.
Lee Coffin:
So let's talk about that for a second. What's it like to say no? I mean, I said earlier our goal is to find a path to yes, but a byproduct of the path to yes is we can't accept everyone who's qualified and compelling. So bring some empathy to the students who receive a deny.
Isabel Bober:
So this is such an important point because I'll joke that our titles are admissions officers. My title is not a denial officer. And I take that very seriously, and that's how we approach this work. We do not open up a file and look for reasons to say no. We open a file and we first try to understand who this person is, where they're coming from, the context, and try to pull and tease out what is their story, who are they? And then secondarily, we think about how does that kind of play within the environment that we're in, this particular year, this applicant pool.
So we're not looking for reasons to say no. I think of it more as the admits rise to the top, and it's not that we are pushing others down. But that we eventually run out of room and space. And the amount of time that we take to make these really difficult decisions, I don't think people feel that or see that when they get that letter that says, "We regret to inform you." But I wish there were so many more decisions than just admit, deny, or that middle ground of defer and wait list. I wish there was a way to showcase, we're really excited about you and what you want to do out there in the world and a little envious of where you do land because they're really going to benefit from your add to that college campus.
Lee Coffin:
Carolyn, of the five of us, you are the closest to being a high school senior. Speak to that perspective. What surprised you as you've started doing this job?
Carolyn Yee:
Something that's been really surprising, and Kevin touched on this when you said a number is never just a number, and I think that applies to everything. An essay is never just an essay and letters of recs are never just letters of rec. Seeing how much thought and genuine intentional care is put into acknowledging and receiving every part of the application does give me a lot of optimism. I remember being in high school just four or five years ago, and it was really stressful and admissions felt like this big black box where the applications go in and the decisions come out and everything else is all up in the air of how you want to think about it. And so seeing how everything is really thoughtfully processed and really looked at with such an empathetic and intentional lens does make me wish that more high school seniors knew about that. And I know that's why you have the podcast, just to reassure people about that.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah. Well, if I go to economics 101, it's supply and demand. We have a small class and a lot of volume and demand. And as readers, we learn how to sift through that and make the best decisions we can with the information we have for the place where we work. But I also can't take everybody. I mean, I'll call out Carolyn because I think as a newbie, I think if I looked at your recommended acceptance rate, it's probably higher than the other four of us. Great. You're seeing the story and you're responding and you're being optimistic and positive. And at the end of the day, they're not all going to get in, but that doesn't mean you didn't read them with care and see potential. But I want to end with a speed round of words that are attached to reading season and just have each of you react. So when we talk about holistic, what does that mean to you as a reader, the word holistic review?
Carolyn Yee:
Everything's looked at within the context of its environment. In particular, I think of it as almost like quilt making. We're given a lot of different items of fabric and we snip out certain little pieces, but we piece it all together into one whole blanket that makes up an applicant.
Lee Coffin:
I love that.
Carolyn Yee:
Like that.
Kevin Donohue:
It makes us warm.
Lee Coffin:
It makes us warm. Yeah, I love that metaphor. Thank you. All right, so that's holistic. What's "point of excellence?"
Anthony Fosu:
Point of excellence. It just makes me think there's several things I could point to that would make me say this is a star and you could give me a number of reasons, but that might be the reason for me to say yes to that file and want to elevate it because it's that one point with the rest of the story and the person and the context that helps us actually get to yes. So yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah.
Isabel Bober:
Can I add to that, Lee?
Lee Coffin:
Of course.
Isabel Bober:
When I hear "point of excellence," I think about this classic well-rounded student or pointy, and this fear that we have to have this one thing that we're really good at or really passionate about or this very clear, I am this, especially as a liberal arts curriculum in college, there are some students for whom many different things are still really interesting and exciting to them. And so when I hear "point of excellence," I don't want a high school student to feel like, well, what is my shtick? What is that tiny little elevator pitch? It may be complicated, it may be complex, it may be multifaceted and layered.
And at a liberal arts college, that's actually really exciting for the faculty and for us to think about the kind of multiple perspectives and angles that you might bring to a particular academic discipline or just kind of content area. If you're super excited and passionate about one thing, awesome. Be yourself. If you don't have that, don't try to manufacture it because you think you need that point of excellence to be a strong candidate.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. The point of excellence could be the sum of all the parts. The quilt is excellent as Carolyn has now given me a new way of thinking about that. But it could also just be—I read a file yesterday and the whole file was about dialogue and the student never said it. It was each piece of the file, the student's work, the teachers, the interviewer kept saying, "This is the person in the class who plays devil's advocate, who makes each classroom a safe space for dissenting opinions." And I thought, that's a point of excellence. That's not manufactured. It was organically there. And as a reader, I reacted. Okay, that was POE. How about texture? When we say a file has texture?
Kevin Donohue:
That they're living.
Lee Coffin:
They're living.
Kevin Donohue:
They're a person who likes to do stuff and is a teenager and that kind of just naturally comes out and they are not a flat sheet of paper called a resume. Yeah.
Isabel Bober:
When I think of texture, I think of how an applicant might talk to their friend or to their aunt or uncle versus how they might talk to an admissions counselor. Applicants who have texture let that part of themselves shine through. They're not so worried about being perfect and polished. And it's not that there is one kind of texture, we all bring that different kind of flavor, but showing that to us that you are this 17 or 18-year-old who is still growing and learning, that lets us grab onto a little bit of that texture unless that kind of superficial, polished, perfect version that people so often feel like they need to present in a college app.
Lee Coffin:
And it's the flavor of a kid. I think that high school is not the end of someone's story, sort of a preamble and an important one, but everything is developing, emerging, growing, shifting. How about testing?
Anthony Fosu:
It's important insofar as it tells us how well you can do on this test and perhaps to an extent how prepared you might be academically, but even in that it doesn't tell the full story. And even with that, you have to put that number in its context. You cannot look at a score and say definitively of an applicant, "This is someone who's going to get in. This is someone who's not going to get in."
Lee Coffin:
I think that's one of the most misunderstood things about testing is people think this number is the key. It's part of the quilt.
Anthony Fosu:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
It's not the quilt. Okay. Last one, fits. Kevin, what's "fit"?
Kevin Donohue:
Fit is a lot of things, one of which is, have you sat down and reflected, done your research and said, "You know what? I'd love to apply to this college for some good reasons. I can see myself there. I can see myself being happy there." And we're responding to that deep level of reflection of research and genuine interest. That's something we care about as well in our process. As well as when we're thinking about, gosh, who do we want on this campus? What kind of student body do we want? The sort of personal qualities and dialogue and backgrounds and all the conversations happening on the green? Who do we want there? How do they fit, these puzzle pieces fit together? Also something we're thinking about.
Isabel Bober:
When I think about fit, it is both something that an applicant can show to us and can be very almost tactical. I'm really excited about the location or the programs, but fit is also something that can almost unfold itself out of a file. The way that people talk about your impact in a community, the way you talk about what gets you excited or the kinds of relationships you're seeking. So fit is something that is both delivered to us via an application, but it's something that we can also discover in that holistic process as all of the pieces come together. So it's kind of both tactical and, I don't know, I can't quite think of the right word for it.
Lee Coffin:
It's like emotional.
Isabel Bober:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Okay. Last question goes to Carolyn. How do you think about potential when you're reading a file?
Carolyn Yee:
I think about potential in the sense of whether a student has really made the most with what they have. Have they maybe reached the bounds of their small pond as a big fish? And do they have maybe excitement and energy to keep reaching on further if we were to bring them to Dartmouth, into a bigger pond or students who are in big ponds already and have really extended themselves outwards and would continue doing so at Dartmouth? I think of it similarly to fit in some ways and how would they thrive at Dartmouth? How might they take root here, but also extend further and find potential not just for the student, but also for our campus with the student being here?
Lee Coffin:
Amen. I think about, it's growth. It's does this student have the ingredients for creativity and innovation and success in whatever they're telling us? It could be you're an actress and potential is going to be in the arts. It could be you are an engineer and potential is this kid's tinkering with some really interesting things and get out of the way and let this makerspace take her somewhere else. So what I think we've covered in this conversation is a really helpful way of pulling back the curtain on what I think of as the most opaque part of the college process. Campus tour, info session, a school visit, an open house, how you write your essay, testing. We talk about all these other things, but helping people understand reading, particularly in a selective space is trickier.
So I think the four of you have brought great warmth and empathy and I want to say humanity. We are not AI bots reading these files and making decisions. You're humans reading a little book called an application and reacting to it. So thank you each for joining me on Admission Beat.
Isabel Bober:
Thank you, Lee.
Anthony Fosu:
Thank you, Lee. A lot of fun.
Lee Coffin:
So March Madness Part Two will be next week where Jack Steinberg, our recurring guest from the New York Times, will interview me about the way we shape a class. How do we decide? How do we take what the four of them have read and evaluate it and turned it into an invitation to join a class? That's next week. For now, this is Lee Coffin and friends from Dartmouth College. Thanks for listening.