Season 2: Episode 6 Transcript
Finding Your Place
Lee Coffin:
From Dartmouth College, I'm Lee Coffin, dean of admissions and financial aid. Welcome to the Admissions Beat.
On last week's episode, we discussed the pull of prestige and rankings as elements of the college admission process. The college advisors who joined me for that conversation were unanimous: rankings are useful, but not determinative guidelines. They were also unanimous in another important piece of advice. As your college list comes into focus before the application deadlines, you should weigh some very personal qualitative considerations such as place, especially as each place emerges from the glow of its reputation. Sometimes a sexy rank or fantastic buzz ignores your own compass about what feels right. Only you can detect that truth.
So before we get into this encore episode from my original podcast, The Search, which aired in April, 2021, allow me a quick homily that centers this really important but intangible topic at this mid-fall moment of your senior year. Let's channel Goldilocks as you refine your list of options. After all the campus tours and the visits and online exploration, it's time to keep some options in play and let some others drift away. Which places linger? Why? Which ones—know that that's a plural noun—feel right to you? And when I say you, I mean you. Goldilocks didn't ask the bear which bed was the most comfortable. She chose. Fair warning, everyone around you will have an opinion this fall, but what option makes sense for you in their humble opinion?
And you'll probably get some well-intentioned, but perhaps uninformed thoughts about your odds of admission. Listen to your guidance counselor. Listen to your parents. But most importantly, listen to the little voice inside you because that voice knows what it's talking about. Staying true to your own priorities and feelings as the deadlines draw closer will be a challenge, but own it. If you can, surrender the notion of prestige as a guiding impulse, as you finalize your application list. Yep. An Ivy dean just said that. A rank or buzz will not help you feel what's right for you. To be fair, those perspectives do matter, and they can overlap with your sense of fit. But don't let the reputation alone drive your final choices.
Where is your place? As your search has played out over the past year, this has always been the essential question as you've wandered from discovery to the doorstep of applying. So when I invite you to consider program, people, and place as the guiding three P's of your search, place is the most challenging one to assess. Place is more abstract than program and people. It has different interpretations. Place can be literal, geography, architecture, rural, cosmopolitan, woodsy chic, cows, pigeons, campus quads, crowds, distance from your parents, stadiums. You get the idea. Or a place can be a vibe, and vibes are so important but really hard to capture.
There's a key question that you have to answer for yourself as you decide where you will apply. And I'm not talking about, can I get in? Don't ignore that one, but don't start with it. Instead, focus on this question. Can you see yourself here, wherever here is? Does the place speak to you? Are you excited by it? Does it feel comfortable? Or do you want to stretch beyond your comfort zone and be uncomfortable? College can be a time to experiment, to explore, to reinvent. Or not. That choice is yours. What do you want? Once you answer that fundamental, very personal question, your application list will take shape. The act of applying should be intentional, not haphazard. Every place on your list, whether someone dubbed it a reach or a likely, should be a place where you can imagine yourself.
Okay, end of homily. Let's meet today's encore guests.
My two wise and wonderful guests today work outside the admission process, but they're certainly adjacent to it, and they have firsthand insights from the undergraduate experience at Duke to help guide our thinking about this. So we're saying hello to Mary Pat McMahon, who is vice provost and vice president of student affairs, which means she's the chief student affairs officer at Duke. And Mary Pat and I worked together for several years at Tufts where I was dean of admission and she was dean of student affairs. She's also worked at Bowdoin in Student Affairs, and way back when, she was an assistant director of undergraduate admissions at Yale. So even though she's a student affairs person, once upon a time she read some files, so Mary Pat, hello.
Mary Pat McMahon:
Hello. Thanks for having us. This is great, Lee.
Lee Coffin:
Great to see you.
And so my old friend, Mary Pat, is joined by my new friend Gary Bennett. Gary is vice provost for undergraduate education at Duke. He's also the Bishop-McDermott family professor of psychology and neuroscience, global health and medicine. A lot of fields there, Gary. And that means he leads and coordinates undergraduate, academic, curricular and co-curricular policy. So Mary Pat and Gary, thank you for joining us. As you heard me tee this episode up, from your seat in the college environment, what jumped out at you as you think about this idea of finding place?
Mary Pat McMahon:
,The first thing that jumped out at me, Lee, is this idea of how you think about fit and place. When you start thinking about where you're going to live, how you're going to learn, who you're going to meet, and where your undergraduate experience is going to take you, where do you get to bring your messy, authentic self? Not your fanciest, shiniest self, but the one that really is ready to explore new areas, things that think about different aspects of who you are, maybe that you know you're ready to open up new pathways when you get to college.
Maybe you're not sure what those pathways are, but you know that there's going to be risk involved, intellectual risk, personal risk, opportunity to grow, opportunity to fail. And what environment is going to be the one that supports that, which is different than the environment that is ranked how or where. And I think it plays into everything else that you just said around what all the different vibes are. Because the vibe thing is important because the person in you that is so ready to grow is the person who's the authentic and much messier version of you.
Lee Coffin:
You've said that again, and I loved it the first time you said that, "your messy and authentic self," because, well, I think messy and authentic are awesome qualities in an application. I think they get ironed out as the application comes into being, and then as we meet people through that place. But then you show up and there is laundry to be done and there are exams to study for and roommates to meet and negotiate and all that fun stuff that happens during the first year.
Mary Pat McMahon:
Yeah, it's years of time. It's not a half an hour interview. It's years of your life, which you can't get away with, you can, but you're better off not trying to get away with the polished version. Got to go to your whole self.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Gary, what struck you about this topic?
Gary Bennett:
I had a much more kind of pragmatic vision, which was when you said place, the thing that went through my mind is the thing I sometimes tell students about, which is the first time that I saw Duke. It was late in the evening and it was cold by North Carolina standards.
Lee Coffin:
You could say cold is relative.
Gary Bennett:
I lived in Boston for a long time. It wasn't really cold, but I didn't know that then. And I drove up what we call Chapel Drive. And at the end of Chapel Drive is the chapel, and it is majestic. When you see the chapel for the first time, particularly as you drive up Chapel Drive, and particularly as you see it the way I did, clouds behind it, and it's sort of illuminated from the ground, and it just emerges and just takes over just your entire field of vision, it's captivating. And it just represented everything I thought about the place and everything that I wanted to experience as a student. And the instant thought I had was, "I could see this every day and not get tired of it. This is a place I could live."
And the challenge that I see so many of our students, I see many students experience, is that they haven't asked themselves that question, "Do you want to live here?" We often to talk about college as your home. And part of living in a place is just, it's fit. Do you like the way the grounds look? And do you the way the flowers bloom? And is this a place where you really feel like, I love this messy, authentic self can just, I don't know, just get where you can just experience the place to its fullest. And there's some places that speak to you in that way and others that quite frankly don't. And I fear for so many of our students that they prioritize other kind of features of the university experience. And I just think that one, you can't miss that one, because you're going to be here for a long, long time.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well you're inviting them to be a bit more romantic in the way they embrace the options they have, and the fit is going to be personal. I often will say to students when they'd say, "Well, what's best and what's this?" And I say, "If you go into Baskin Robbins and say, 'What's your best flavor?' No one's going to give you an answer, because how I taste that ice cream, I'll say pistachio." My niece who works in an ice cream shop says, "Only old people order the ice cream with the nuts." And it's like, "Okay, guilty." But that reaction to a place is really important. So people hearing the three of us say this are going to say, "Yeah, great, we can't come to every place." So how do they get that place feeling? What would you advise them?
Mary Pat McMahon:
I would say, can you find somebody that either you know from high school or that you found as a student leader? You can go on and see where student group leaders are. There's usually contact information. Say you want to be involved in a dance group and you look and you see who the dance groups are. And I think most students who love their school will say, "I'd love to talk to prospective students here," and then say, "Can I just give you a call?"
I know people are more sort of interested in texting in a lot of ways, so you can certainly do it that way too. And then to have some questions. Sometimes I think it's hard to know how to start on the question of a cold call with a college student if you're a high school senior. But they have all been where high school seniors are, in general. And I think they're all sympathetic to the predicament of trying to figure this big decision out without being able to come to campuses and walk around and smell the air and reach around a little bit.
Lee Coffin:
How about social media? Is that a reliable place to sniff this out or is that too loaded?
Gary Bennett:
Yes-ish.
Lee Coffin:
Yes-ish.
Gary Bennett:
I mean, I'm inclined to say this is the one time when going down a social media rabbit hole may be a good thing, at least to provide you a data point. Of course, we're all putting our best selves and our most exciting selves and we're all selecting from 37 images to figure out which one is going to go on Instagram, so you have to, I think, review those with a bit of a grain of salt.
Lee Coffin:
So Gary, you were talking about place in the Duke sense of there was this romantic visual kind of the geography and architecture of campus spoke to you. That's how when I saw my college for the first time, I had that same feeling. And it was also a chapel, which is interesting too, but I remember driving in with my parents. It was the Easter Sunday, and dad loaded us all in the station wagon and we drove the hour and a half. We pulled in through the gates and I went, "Oh, this is what I thought college would look like." And I had this very strong atmospheric response. In some ways, I think when parents hear their kids have that reaction, they think, "Oh, that's silly," but I think it's important. So am I overthinking that part of inviting them to be feeling more than analytical?
Gary Bennett:
I think that's exactly right. I mean, we want you to fall for the place. Students are going to invest a lot of themselves in these places over the next four years, certainly through their coursework, maybe through their service. But our student activists are investing in the places because of their love of place. The students who see us as we're walking across campus and point out the thing that we need to fix or ask us for the thing that we haven't considered, all of that starts with a love of place. And so I personally feel like we desperately want that for our students. We want you to think of the place and feel those heart strings a bit, because you'll be a better student and you'll be a more invested alum. The university experience is formed by the people who make up this community, so if you have a choice to love it, I hope you do.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. But how would you advise prospective students to filter some of the less rosy things they hear? Because inevitably, you pick up a student newspaper, you're on social media, maybe there's a protest while you're on campus. And if you're an outsider, that might seem off-putting or hard to interpret. But to me, it's also just a reality of this is a community. It's an imperfect community. It doesn't mean it's a broken community, but it's part of the world, and you have to learn how to move through it. So whether from undergraduate education or student affairs, where does that conversation happen and how do parents help students stay focused on what's really good information versus noise?
Mary Pat McMahon:
First, I think there are plenty of people that will look at a school and say, "Okay, well that's getting involved and creating change." And I think this generation of high school seniors, this generation of college students are so significantly about creating the experience that they want. I think there's a dynamism to any place, so if I'm picking up a newspaper and seeing this school, people really want to see a difference here. And there's sort of advocacy this way or activism that way. And when you think about a college or university, it's really an incubator, so it's all good data. It's all good data. There is no noise, I think is my upshot.
Lee Coffin:
The place is the geography, it's the vibe. Is it the city? Is it rural? But place is also an academic experience too, so there's this literal, "I'm going to Duke because they have a good program in this, and I want to major in that." So that's one thing. But there's also place could mean a classroom. And how does this classroom experience on this campus play out?
Gary Bennett:
This notion of, they have a good program in that or they're good at this or good at that, I often wonder how people define that. Are we talking about the quality of the instructional program? Are we talking about the quality of the scholarship? Are we talking about the national reputation in industry for say an engineering program? Are we talking about how other scholars feel about them? Are we just talking about what other people tend to say up on Facebook about that program? And for me, when I have my faculty member hat on, some of the best departments in the country in my area are not places I'd want you to study as an undergrad.
Lee Coffin:
Why?
Gary Bennett:
They're seemingly good. These are great at producing graduate students and producing scholarship. They may do a wonderful job receiving grants and running studies, but almost in some respects because of the investments in those areas, they don't do as great of a job in the classroom, in the undergraduate classroom. And fundamentally, undergraduate students need to be concerned about what happens in the classroom and whether, if they're interested, they can avail themselves of opportunities to get involved with faculty, say in research opportunities. And those really have to be, I think, primary in this decision-making process. These kind of generic notions of who's good and who's on top, it doesn't matter on a day-to-day basis for most students who are studying in some of these places.
Lee Coffin:
So if that doesn't matter what does?
Gary Bennett:
First, I'd say the classroom experience. Are faculty at that university in the department of interest, are they teaching the classes? Or are classes taught by others? Are they, when you're doing your cert on the various kind of course evaluation sites, what do students say about the instruction? Do they teach small classes? Do they teach really large classes? And where do you want to find your place? At our institution at Duke, we put a premium on small class instruction. You have to want to be visible and vulnerable in that way. We have relatively few really large classes. And so it's important to know how that classroom environment is structured and who's in the classroom, who's at the front of that classroom. Because there are some kinds of universities and some programs where the faculty aren't doing a lot of the instruction, and that may not be a problem given the area you're interested in or it may be.
So I'd say that level of competition, it's sort of that, the student ethos in and around the sort of academic environment. Is this a place where people tend to be reasonably collaborative in group projects? Or is it that 10 people tend to work by themselves, be more kind of stingy in those kinds of environments? Is there kind of a premium placed on doing group work and developing community in route to having more collaborative interactions in the classroom? Those kinds of things are really, really critical.
And the third one is care. And I cannot overemphasize this. What's the infrastructure for providing advising, both pre-major and in the major? What's the infrastructure for providing academic support? If you're stressed out, where do you go? If you have some test taking anxiety, as so many of us do, where do you go? If you need a learning consultation because you may have an accommodation for a learning issue, where do you go? Are those resources available? And is the experience of help-seeking normalized in that environment? Those things, I think, absolutely critical for making the academic decision.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, what I love about that answer, Gary, is it hits its place, but place includes program, the curriculum, how it's delivered, in what format, semester, quarter, trimester. It's also people. So a lot of these three P's I talk about as admission considerations are very much centered around finding your place, because the combination of them makes the community, it makes the experience, and ultimately it makes the equation for you to be happy, which I think is an undervalued part of this.
Are you happy? Are you challenged? Are your peers interesting people to chat with at night or in a classroom? It's not just in the classroom. I've always said that some of my most memorable college moments were two in the morning, after we had a pizza delivered and we'd be arguing. I had one friend who used to say, "I'm a communist." He'd be talking about Marxist political theory. And I had another friend who was very Republican and, obviously, they disagreed. And that was really interesting, as somebody who is neither, to listen to that conversation and to try and find my place in this political context in that example.
Gary Bennett:
As you said that, Lee, as you were talking about thought that I was also imagining, as you were talking about happiness, I was thinking about, so psychologists, we have a lot of views about happiness, but we could spend two hours talking about that. But it boils down to this point, which is it's not important to be happy all the time. It's important though to be able to bounce back when you're not happy, and place is a really important part of that. And I was having a memory of college of sort of midnight, 2:00 AM sitting around with my friends in the dorm, when I wasn't feeling really well.
There was a way in which those kinds of, our dorms were structured in such a way that we could get together in the common room and just lift each other up. And occasionally, we would see this guy, he would pull up along the street near our dorm. He was a pizza delivery person, and invariably somebody had called for a pizza and wasn't available to pick up the pizza or randomly called it to be delivered to somebody else's dorm room. And if you could meet this guy, he would sell you the pizza for five bucks. We would have the pizza, and he was always there when we needed him. Those are the memories I have, and it made me happy in the place.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. P for pizza, pizza is the prototype food of college too. I've never thought of that. Yeah.
Mary Pat McMahon:
Yeah. So there's something I really want to say, which is, in my experience at multiple places where we have a community that gets pulled together from across the globe, a lot of students don't know senior year of high school, they may know or they may not know that accessing those resource is going to be important. Because in my high school, when I went to high school, I didn't need any help. And when I got to college, I did, as far as the academic preparations, time management, bio, oh my heavens. And so there was a huge gap for me between what I needed to do to smash it in high school and then what I needed to do to hang with my peers in college.
And so that question of what do you need, study strategies, group work, speaking up in class, thinking about what kind of prep work, maybe gaps if you don't have that particular physics course that you might need to really help you in engineering at the beginning of your first year? There's lots of different pieces in there. And I bring that up here because I think my belief is that a lot of high school students didn't know that they're probably going to need some help, but they're worried that when they show up on the first day that it's going to be a sign of weakness, and that they're going to have to hide the fact that they want help and they're going to have to show.
I didn't go to office hours of my own volition until between my junior and senior year of college. I probably should have gone the first week, but I was trying to show people that I knew what I was doing. I don't think that's changed in the time since, and it's been a while now, since I was a college first year. So I just want to name that, because I think that stuff can come through in the meetings. And in some ways maybe a virtual checking out of your campus environment allows you to do that a little better.
Lee Coffin:
So let me jump to a different definition of place. Talk about residence halls. So if college is your home, that quite literally is your home, you sleep there, but all colleges and universities don't do residential life the same way.
Mary Pat McMahon:
Correct.
Lee Coffin:
So what guidance would you give around these three, four things matter?
Mary Pat McMahon:
Yeah. I think probably the things that matter are with whom will you live and how will you both or how will you all be supported? So in some cases you might be in a suite. And then thinking about what the support structures look like in that building. So some schools have very robust onsite faculty and staff presence in a first-year building. Some have first-year dedicated buildings. And then others have first years intermixed with returning students, which it changes the culture significantly. And there are campuses that you can do one or the other. There are places that think a little bit more about how you might identify early in a theme house or sort of a cultural identity-based group. Lots of that stuff is sort of in the mix.
So a lot of people coming in a typical year are curious about, is it going to be sort clean and tidy? Is it going to be sort of sanitary? Generally speaking, most places you manage that part okay. And then I think the next question is, am I going to have privacy and space and a chance to get my own academic work in my space, and how much do I have to navigate space with other people? Most places, you're going to navigate space with other people as part of that first year experience. And engaging the process in the summer will help you get connected to somebody with whom you have some decent amount in common to live with them.
first-yearCampuses have different policies on all-gender housing. They have different policies on what is sub-free or chem-free. Most schools have some kind of wellness or chem-free, knowing that some students will choose to go out and party and then come back. And the idea is the students that live in chem-free or sub-free are not choosing to go out and do stuff. Everybody's supposed to be following the law, but the actual living environment is very much student-controlled and student-directed.
Lee Coffin:
When you talked about gender, it sparked the question, as an admission officer, I see more students talking about gender fluid identities or non-binary identities. There may be transgender. Any thoughts for them?
Mary Pat McMahon:
I would call, what we have at Duke is the Center for Sexual and Gender Diversity. And I would talk to the director and get a sort of handle on how does housing work? What's happening in your school? There are a couple of different websites to help people navigate that. That question seems especially important to call on and just get a sense of what's the support like. With whom will I be placed? How much agency do I have? How much can I share about how I identify, so that I can get connected to a roommate that makes sense for me?
Lee Coffin:
How about climate, more broadly? A lot of applicants this year are writing about social justice, racial justice, socioeconomic justice. Justice is a word that's very present in the files of the students who are about to be admitted. But if you are specifically a Black Latinx or Indigenous high school senior, coming into this place called college, how should we be advising families to think through that, to feel that part? Because that's important too. Place is also the community around it. Some of us are in cities, and the place and the college blur together. Some of us are more remote, and the college is a community unto itself. And where does this question of climate and diversity intersect with place?
Gary Bennett:
I'd encourage families, and in this case, I really mean families, to trust their instincts. In any one of these environments, there are many unknowns. And part of traversing early adulthood is learning how to manage the unknowns. I think in many cases, particularly for families of underrepresented students, part of the challenge is allowing students to enter into these unfamiliar places with full recognition of that there will be unknowns and trusting that students will have the skills to navigate some of those new situations. I think that's just part of the process, and it's okay. The gift that the current generation has that my parents didn't have is that our students are connected with their parents all day long.
So I think what's really nice about that for this question is that some of the students I know get the best advice at navigating the complexity of these circumstances from their families with whom they remain pretty connected, and I think that's a really good thing. The only other thing I'd say here is that I think it's important, I think Mary Pat's point about getting a set of views and really making sure you're doing your precinct work and talking deeply with people in the community is a really good thing. And I would encourage families from underrepresented backgrounds to just be sure that they get a diversity of views in that work. There's a way in which we don't pay quite enough attention to the within group diversity in some of our underrepresented groups.
All of our students aren't coming from the same background. Some have lived in more homogenous circumstances. Some have grown up in more heavily homogenous and in variety of different ways. And some have grown up in more heterogeneous circumstances. And it's important to really situate, I think, one's thinking based on where a student is really coming from. And so in that work, I just strongly suggest getting a lot of views from people who were here recently. You would make a major mistake at an institution like ours, getting feedback from people who graduated 10 years ago, maybe even five years ago. Places have changed a great deal, so updating that information's really important.
Lee Coffin:
That's really great advice. So before we wrap, what do you think is the missed question?
Mary Pat McMahon:
I think the missed question is, when I change my mind about the path, not if, because people, there's this seeking for certainty. When I change my mind about what I want to study, how I want to engage, ways I want to lead, moments I want to have, when I find out there's more to this place and then I kind of grow and sort of pivot and gyrate around a different direction, gyrates the wrong word, probably, what happens then? Does this place hold me and support me if I go way off script, because it's likely that I will.
Gary Bennett:
That is 100% my answer. The vast majority of students change their mind, change their opinions, change their identities, have a completely different outbound experience than the one they imagined on the inbound. And recognizing that that is bound to happen, is this a place where you feel vulnerable or you can feel supported? Is this the place for that?
Lee Coffin:
In the swell of media coverage about college rankings that populated the Admission Beat this fall, one piece struck an important note for me. Brian Howell, an anthropology professor at Wheaton College in Illinois, penned an opinion piece that ran in the Newcastle News. He wrote, "Ditch the research on comparing institutions and rankings, but delve into the qualitative data you collect yourself. Find the place where you can thrive. That's the only ranking that ultimately matters." And as you just heard, our duo from Duke heartily agrees with the professor from Wheaton. Next week we'll focus on price, an important fourth P as a primer on how to navigate the financial aid landscape.
If you liked this episode of Admissions Beat, please leave us a rating or a comment wherever you download your podcasts. Your feedback helps other listeners discover the conversation, and it helps us make a better show for you. If you have a question you'd like us to answer in our season finale, please share it with us at admissionsbeat@dartmouth.edu, and I'll pose it to our panelists on that final episode. Admissions Beat is a production from Dartmouth College, but it's not about admission to Dartmouth College. It is produced by Charlotte Albright with editorial guidance from Jack Steinberg and Marketing Strategy and Promotion from Kevin Ramos-Glew and Sara Morin. For now, I'm Lee Coffin. Thanks for listening.