Hello friends,
I'm stuck here. This is sort of hard.... I just stumbled across a letter I wrote a long time ago to... well..
Stanford.
I haven't edited it at all, except for typographical stuff as I read along. This is some very, very deep stuff. I should have listened to myself. I was so smart a year ago when I wrote this...
Anyways. Here is the letter that Stanford never received that probably wouldn't have removed me from the waiting list any differently than I was removed.
Keep in mind, I wrote this to Stanford, and I probably didn't agree then with what I wrote about Williams College. I certainly don't agree with it now.
This is a long post. I don't expect you to read it, dear reader, let's just say this is another blog entry more to guide me with my decisions than for your enjoyment.
Greetings from South Dakota,
I am writing to you about my placement on the Stanford waiting list. The waitlist information suggests updating my résumé. I assume you would like to hear that the application process for colleges did not exhaust the intellectual curiosity of waitlisted students.
As is probably the case with many high school students who chose to apply to Stanford, I will have some difficult decisions to make before May 1. Right now, there are three schools I am interested in attending. In mid-march I was accepted to Caltech, a great school for engineering, math or science. In late march, I was accepted to Williams College, a great school for a liberal arts education. Despite the options I have, Stanford has been my number one choice since (and before) I visited Stanford for the first time last summer.
Last Thursday, I saw a play put on by Stevens High School, “Cyrano de Bergerac”. One of my best friends, Zack Abrahamson, did a marvelous job portraying the lead. Despite the many minor annoyances that usually accompany plays by our drama department like speakers buzzing (in a show without sound amplification of any kind), an antsy audience, or a curtain not opening and closing properly, the last scene literally brought tears to my eyes. I will admit that I do not know the deeper meaning of literature or art, or even what it may mean in my own life, but I know for a high school performance to evoke a real emotion from a theatre attendee is amazing (to me). I called my friend Zack to congratulate him after the play, and I was invited to Perkins to eat and celebrate with the cast and crew since they had finished their final performance. I accepted, but when I reached the restaurant I saw my friends’ cars, the same cars I had seen daily when I worked with the theatre. I realized I was not truly a part of them. Just then, I felt alienated. Between my other extracurriculars, getting into and preparing for college, and fear of earning bad grades in my three college courses and AP classes, I couldn’t fit “Cyrano” into my schedule. Would I have a chance to be part of a drama production at Caltech, where the science and math workload alone could be prohibitive to adding extra activities to my schedule? Probably, but at the expense of another part of my life, whether it was sleep, grades, or social life.
Today I finished a visit to Williams college. A few things struck me about the lifestyle of the campus, for example a student in my host dorm disappeared one night and mentioned when he came back smoking weed and playing Beirut (beer pong). Was his group of friends a microcosm of Williams? Was it a microcosm of the Little Ivy schools? Was it a microcosm of college life? I don’t know. Apart from my limited experience with the more “exotic” side of Williams, I will let you know that I thoroughly enjoyed my visit to Williamstown.
The major experience of my trip occurred when Thomas Friedman spoke to a packed hall. His talk was a discussion of his latest book, “The World Is Flat”. He talks about Globalization 1.0 (countries going global, 1700s to 1800s), 2.0 (companies going global, 1800s to 2000), and 3.0 (individuals participating in the global market, 2000 to present). Forgive me if you have already read his book. He also discusses 10 major “flatteners”, like the internet, Windows operating system, and outsourcing of jobs to India. Towards the end of the discussion, he made a list of jobs that are not going to be affected by globalization 3.0, like your brain surgeon, and “butchers, bakers, and candlestick makers”, those people who have a specific job to do in a specific place cannot be outsourced to India or China. During his speech he quoted an executive of a technology company in India who said “In the next few years, we know what our job is going to be. Our job is going to be doing your current job. Your role in the future is to create just that…. the world’s future.” Friedman ended his talk by saying “Green is the new red, white, and blue. Green is the most patriotic thing you can be.”
After his speech, a passion sort of became realized in my head. Ever since I read Atlas Shrugged for the first time (I was about 10, I’m sure I didn’t understand a third of what I read) I was fascinated by the concept of harvesting static electricity from the atmosphere. Granted, the concept is metaphorically used in Rand’s novel as a representation of “the next great idea”. I have always been interested in how things work. In particular, after reading Rand’s novels, locomotion, automobiles, energy, infrastructure, really just everything that is today presenting us with a problem because of the upcoming shortage of oil that we will encounter. In short, before today when I was asked about my plans for study in college I would respond with a myriad of different subjects from Spanish to chemistry. Now, I feel that I have an area I am truly interested in for a reason; that area is alternative energy. By coincidence I was randomly assigned the topic of alternative energy for a research project in my AP government class. I have been immersing myself in Wikipedia pages, magazine articles, and books about alternative energy. I want to explore alternative energy in detail as part of my undergraduate education.
Coincidentally, Friday, April 7 was the date of the Chadron Academic competition, where hundreds of students from dozens of high schools in Wyoming, Nebraska, and South Dakota take tests in subjects from health and consumer sciences to advanced mathematics. My friend Alan and I took the economics and American government tests and we both placed in the top three. Granted, this is no national competition, and many of the smartest students from this region of the country were not in attendance. Zack, who will be matriculating at Princeton, Cornell, or Yale this fall couldn’t attend because he was working on the play. While in Chadron I thought about the pros and cons of Williams college. While they do have a neuro-science department as well as good physics and chemistry programs, as many of the so-called “little ivys” do, I am worried that the advanced physics and chemistry programs and facilities like SLAC that interest me at Stanford would be lacking in my education at Williams. (I just recently installed the Folding@Home software on my computer, without realizing it was a Stanford chemistry department program.)
I have not perfected my SAT scores, solved a major scientific or mathematic enigma, or won an international academic competition since I applied in December. I have, however, been reading and pursuing my academic and athletic interests. In particular, finding cleaner and more efficient ways to fuel motor vehicles and to generate electricity now intrigue me after reading the book Beyond Oil by Kenneth Deffeyes. I have been learning the Adobe software Photoshop and Illustrator, and recently created T-shirt designs that were printed on our Ultimate Frisbee team’s “uniforms”.
Stanford is ideal for me. I imagine myself doing undergraduate research in physics or chemistry and playing ultimate Frisbee on weekends. I imagine socializing in Palo Alto with the brightest and most diverse students in the world; and not students who are interested only in the same areas of study that I am. I imagine participating in drama productions put on each semester by doing publicity, audio, or tech work.
I imagine myself in Palo Alto.
I look forward to hearing back from the admissions committee about a place in Stanford’s 2006 freshman class. Thank you for your time.
/robert karl
