New Orleans Instrumental No. 1

Just as life is pushing me along right now, so has it always been.

I had no college plans at all – honestly. I knew nothing about the whole process, had no idea how it might matter if I went, and, quite frankly, was so unable to picture myself after high school that I thought I would die before graduation. However, I was required to take the PSAT because of the way that I was tracked in high school – they even waived the fee. So I took it.

A few months later we got our scores. I had no idea what they meant – assuming that my percentile was no big deal since it was consistent with how I scored on the Maine Educational Assessment exams I had taken every couple of years up to that point – just some indication that you were learning what they wanted you to. That spring I went to a Russia on a sister-city exchange and returned to an entire trash bag full of college recruiting materials. Fortunately, my PSAT score also prompted Peterson’s academic publishing to send me a free copy of their Guide to American Colleges and Universities. So, I sat down and went through it all – looking up each school that had contacted me and checking to see how many little mortar boards they were indexed with (indication of overall rank), checking the male to female ratio (that’s right – as a probable math major I assumed that schools with more men than women would have better math programs – a bias that implicit association tests still detect), and whether or not they had any other possible majors: journalism; Russian language and literature; French literature; and photography. I requested applications from every single school that had 4 mortar boards (the highest)/or promised me a full-tuition scholarship, more men than women, and majors in mathematics and one of my other possibles.

So, spring of my junior year I learned that I would go to college and developed a list of possible schools. I received from the schools themselves information on the application deadlines and admission criteria.

Fall of my senior year: you’d expect me to be on top of the application process, right? Wrong. I only visited one school – a school that offered to bring me out for a visit. The applications were long and tedious. I had to use an old type-writer to fill them out. My parents refused to fill out the financial aid form, instead giving me their tax forms so I could fill it out on my own. On top of that, I was in love. My boyfriend, Andrew, graduated a year ahead of me and had just returned from a few months in Europe. He had deferred his admission to Stanford and was working a 9 to 5 job. I spent most of my time with him and used the remainder to complete schoolwork.

It was Andrew’s parents who sat down with me and made me fill out my applications. His mother kept better track of the deadlines than I did. They helped me with the financial aid form. They commented on my essays. They hounded me until I sent out each application.

In the end I attended the school that had brought me out to visit – also the school that offered me the most financial aid. I began with the intention of studying mathematics but, when the advanced calculus section I wanted was full, I registered for Russian instead. The rest, as they say, is history. It’s disconcerting to realize how passive I am in the face of life.