Selecting for Cynicism in the Ivy League

I did high-school in Chile, graduating in 1985—but I only got around to applying to U.S. colleges in 1990. When I finally did apply, I was a flat broke 22 year-old—naturally, I applied only to need-blind schools: There was no point in getting into a college I couldn’t afford. So I pinned my college hopes almost exclusively on Ivy League schools, because all of them had need-blind admissions. 

Baker Library Tower
Dartmouth College

This wasn’t as fool-hardy as it sounds. I had the grades and the test scores—99 percentiles. But what I later realized made me so attractive to admissions committees was that I’d done stuff: Travelled through the Peruvian jungle, complete with a run-in with Shining Path guerrillas. Protested the Pinochet dictatorship, and gotten sprayed by a guanaco (water cannon) for my troubles. Lived through a 7.7 earthquake. Taught English as a second language. Written a first novel.

(I’d also done a few things which I realized wouldn’t go down so very well with the various admissions committees—like arranging my first FMF threeway at 19, brokering a sizable pot sale at 20, and other such adventures. These achievements I kept to myself.)

So when the envelopes from the various admissions committees finally got to my mailbox, they were all fat—I was lucky enough to have my pick of schools.

For fairly ridiculous reasons mostly having to do with the nearby Skiway and the shiny computers every freshman was supposed to get on arrival, I chose Dartmouth as my school. When I got to Hanover as a proud member of the Class of ‘95, I was surrounded by kids who were completely different from me.

Not in their brains or even their backgrounds. Most of them were—like me—private school kids of well-to-do parents. Most of them were—like me—incredibly smart, yet fairly arrogant about those smarts. Most of them—like me—had read pretty much everything, and could talk—knowledgeably—about just about anything.

But there was one big difference between me and my peers:

Community service, and volunteer work.

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