College fair... starting young

So, this week I participated in a college fair which I thought was going to be for high school students (possibly because the email invitation I received said it was going to be for high school students). Yes, I did find it a little confusing that the location was the middle school next door to the high school I thought it was going to be for... and didn't I already do a college fair for this high school's district, last fall?

Things started to make more sense when students arrived and turned out to be middle schoolers.

I think the other college representatives at the fair, of which there weren't many really, may have felt a little baited-and-switched. I sure did, at first.

But for me, this was a great opportunity. I actually prefer, in some ways, to do recruiting among younger students. In this part of the state, and in this part of the country generally, parents and counselors have almost no good information about how to prep for admission to a highly competitive college. It's very satisfying to give them advice while there's still time to use it. (Take the PSAT early and often! IB is preferable to Running Start in most cases! There's such a thing as need-based financial aid! Look out of state!) It just took me a few tries to get my spiel switched over and figure out how to talk to these much younger kids and their parents.

I think the community outreach organization that helped put on this college fair is in a bit of a bind... baiting and switching isn't cool, but if they worried that most colleges wouldn't bother to come for middle schoolers, they're probably right. A companion problem, however, is that most full-time professional college recruiters don't have a spiel for younger kids and their parents. I'll be interested to see whether this particular fair takes off or crashes next spring.

Regrets

When I talk nowadays to prospective Smithies about the college's amazing offerings, I can't help but feel a twinge about the chances I didn't take advantage of myself. Being the sort of person who goes after what I want (no! really?), I have a tough time getting my brain around the notion that some opportunities really have, permanently, passed me by.

A#1 biggest regret was failing to take a junior year abroad. It didn't occur to me that grownups don't just get to take years abroad later. At the time, I felt I had good reasons for not going. In my sophomore year, I went through a pretty rough estrangement from a family member, as well as some financial problems, and my Smith housemates became my replacement family and primary sources of support... I couldn't face the thought of never seeing half of them again. (Unfortunately, the ones I most relied on were already seniors and I had to cope with their "loss" during my junior year anyway. Denial is a sad, sad thing.) I also wouldn't have been guaranteed a space in my house upon return, and it didn't seem worth the risk. Considering how close I still am to so many Hopkinites, and how important it was for me to graduate with them, this might have been an OK decision after all. I suspect I'd make the same choice again given the same circumstances... but I can't help wishing I could have had it all, can I? :)

The other big regret was that I never made it into any of Smith's famous a cappella singing groups. I auditioned for two... the Noteables, as a youngster, where I went in unprepared, was terrified, quavered pathetically, and deservedly wasn't called back... and the Smiffenpoofs, later, where I prepared my heart out, sang my heart out, got called back, sang my heart out again, and didn't get picked anyway. That one hurt. Music was a big part of my life at Smith anyway, and if I hadn't had time to sing in the College Choirs for Jessel Murray or sing in Darshan with Cindy that probably would have been a great loss as well and I wouldn't even have known any better. But when my first-year recruits get into singing groups and immediately excel and are embraced by an amazing musical community, I can't help but wonder how it might have been to be a superstar myself. :)

However, I'm not sorry I quit the parli debate team as a first-year... I got all the good I was gonna get out of that one after I met my debate partner Heidi, and I still have her. :)

Strangely enough, I'm also not sorry I didn't get selected as a first-year-alum Head Resident, even though that was probably the most devastating thing ever at the time. I literally cried for days. It felt like a repudiation of me and my very Smithiness, and I do still wonder what it was about me that wasn't good enough. But nearly everything good in my life now was made possible by the fact that I was forced to find other avenues after graduation. If Smith suspected I was trying frantically to delay growing up, they were right, and I owe them my thanks for giving me the shove I needed. (But if they think I wouldn't have been a good HR, they can bite me.)

Which reminds me, I do regret that I wasn't able to return to my Grrrl Scout troop at the Clarke School after graduation... in spite of not picking up the HR post (with its cushy free rent and modest stipend), I had made certain promises that I'd move back to Northampton, get a menial job, live in poverty, and keep my commitment to those wonderful girls. I didn't, and worse yet, I was too cowardly to make any serious attempt to contact them over the summer to tell them so. That was uncool, and it does leave me with much to atone for... somehow.

No, we shouldn't wallow in regret, but once in a while we have to remind ourselves to live. :)

Gender bending and breaking

The NY Times had a great, detailed article on the subject of F2M transgendered students at women's colleges ("When Girls Will Be Boys", March 16). This is a topic with which I was already slightly acquainted on account of Smith's SGA changing some important charter document to gender-neutral language a year or so ago, baffling we alums who were under the impression that Smith is still a women's college (it is).

The article mentions that colleges are dealing with trans issues more directly nowadays specifically because "adults who wished to transition historically did so in middle age. Today a larger percentage of transitions occur in adolescence or young adulthood."

I was inclined to some eye-rolling about all this before, but the NYT article brought me up short a little bit by pointing this out:

"In a sense, transgender and genderqueer students could be said merely to be holding women’s colleges to their word: to fully support women’s exploration of gender, even if that exploration ends with students no longer being female-identified."

Oh, right. That Women's Studies major I did, it said something about all that.

(Pwned! By the NY Times! On the subject of gender conformity! Oh, the shame.)

Anyway, I've read and heard now a few different attempts to explain or understand this new trans* generation:

1. It's a natural extension of postmodern feminism, in which the very foundations of gender (and, often, biological sex itself! I've done it!) are seen as social constructs open to be questioned. (In other words, it's my fault. :) )
   


2. It's a fad. Possibly a dangerous fad, given the longer-term implications of hormones and even surgeries. Being queer, being "bi-curious", getting pierced, whatever, no longer edgy enough... so trans* is the next envelope-pushing idea. (In other words, it's my fault. LOL.)

Something kinda strange occurred to me the other day, though, when I started putting this together with the huge amounts of reading I've been doing lately on the marketing of gender roles.

I guess I can't substantiate, but I believe, that our culture is imposing gender roles on children a lot more than was commonly done in the 1970s and 1980s. Even parents and aunties who don't want to participate actively in this phenomenon are fighting an uphill battle (see "Unisex Baby Hell", December 2006). Just yesterday on outside the (toy) box was this:

"...my wonderful nanny recently told me about a friend who asked her pediatrician what to do because her son kept asking for a stroller. Not a boy with a stroller! Someone DO something!"

What if, by pressuring our very youngest children to conform to restrictive gender roles, we're sending them the message that if they are interested in anything remotely gender-nonconforming, their only solution is to become a conforming gender?

What would that mean? If gender roles are constructed, does that make it a bad thing to want to uphold the construct but just switch to a different one? Don't we go into a culture war with the culture we have? I've even heard it suggested that those who transition might even be selling out the rest of us who nonconform in the bodies we were born with! I don't think that can possibly be the case... it's not like extremely conservative/traditionalist types love trans* people for upholding all of their preconceptions about gender. :D

I wonder what the complementarians think...?!

Great Experiments in Sexual Orientation

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Smith College Fall Social

There are a lot of things about Smith College that make me feel like I'm in over my head. My super-studious first year roommate was one. Social events with Seattle-area alumnae are another.

So I got this invitation to something called a Smith College Fall Social Event. This is anxiety-inducing on so many levels that it practically requires a war plan.

Part 1: the look

What to wear to a Smith College Fall Social Event? In Eastern Star I make it a point to wear a skirt or dress to almost everything. (What I'm trying to convey by doing this is a topic for another post, possibly on another blog.) In any case, Smith feels like exactly the opposite. I want to look successful (trousers and shaped jacket), dressy (no jeans), yet fun (loud orange print top).

I have a bit of time between work and the event, and Madison Park is nearby, so I decide to stop in the Aveda store at U Village to redeem a free sample card (for unrelated hand cream). In the throes of Smith College inadequacy, I decide to check out tinted moisturizer, which is—gasp—makeup, though only just barely. It looks pretty good, though flat, so I try a cream blush. No escaping it now, I'm wearing makeup. It looks great. I feel great. I blame Carmindy.

(It occurs to me later that trying brand-new cosmetics half an hour before a big event is probably not the best idea; fortunately, I don't suffer any surprise allergic reactions this time.)

Part 2: the location

I've been doing a fair amount of work as an admissions representative this year, so my co-workers ask whether this social is being held at my house. Horrors! No way! This is at the home of a 1953 alumna who is also a member of the Board of Trustees. It's in Madison Park, near Broadmoor. Probably some mansion, I say, chuckling. No, I'm kidding, but I'm sure it's a nice place.

OK, it's totally at a mansion.

Not just a mansion, either, but a vaulted concrete creation more like a modern art museum (dropped in the middle of a neighborhood full of mansions). I feel like Fraulein Maria arriving at the Von Trapp house with her battered straw hat and guitar, singing "I Have Confidence" as I drive up but finishing on "oh, help," as I reach the front gate.

Our hostess is petite, dressed in a black ruffled tuxedo shirt and vibrant purple print velvet pants. She looks like one of her own art acquisitions. We hear that she frequently leads her guests on guided art tours, but the crowd's too big this time so we have to explore the pieces on our own.

The entire roof of the house seems to be vaulted glass, and there's at least one elevator. The upstairs bedrooms have views of both the Evergreen Point (520) Floating Bridge and the Lacey V. Murrow (I-90) Floating Bridgeplex (making "panoramic" redundant).

Part 3: the program

Is this one of those parties where you arrive on time, or fashionably late? My Eastern Star training has me suspecting "a program," i.e., at least perhaps a formal greeting by the hostess or a short talk, if not a full agenda. I decide to get there on time. This works excellently for scoring a parking space in the neighborhood, but there does not turn out to be a program. It really is a Fall Social Event and the only item on the agenda is mingling.

Part 4: the generations

One of the reasons I stress out about Smith College social events is that I'm so awkward around my Smith peers. Two problems: one, hardly anybody from the late 1980s/early 1990s era ever attends these things, and two, I find 1990s alumnae difficult to talk to. I'm not sure why, but we wade through the obligatory small talk about our career/family choices, we commiserate about the dining room consolidations, and then things dead-end in the vicinity of the new Campus Center. I wonder if it's because you never know what's going to offend a 1990s Smithie (but you know something will)? Plus, the existence of alumnae after about 1995 makes me feel really, really old (hi Eszter!).

Once it becomes clear that this really is a purely social event, at which mingling is expected, I decide to take some advice from noted anthropologist Rick Steves: choose to be an extrovert; it's the only way you'll have any fun. I dive in. I start barging into small circles of alumnae I don't know.

I get great news from the official Alumnae Admissions Coordinators (who are a lot of fun in spite of being 1990s like me): they've interviewed at least two, possibly three, of my recruits from the south end. Holy cow, my outreach program is working! I express my desire to singlehandedly drain the financial aid pool dry and they agree.

I'm talking to another relatively younger alumna (1980s, I think, who is decidedly introverted and inching her way to the door), when a stately lady from the class of 1943 (clearly also operating on the Rick Steves plan) barges into our small circle and starts up a conversation. My Eastern Star background kicks in and I adore her immediately. We all have a million questions for each other about what Smith was like, and life was like, in our respective eras. It occurs to me that perhaps we 1990s don't find each other as interesting because we aren't different enough and we don't have enough questions to ask.

Later I barge in on some other alumnae, cousins from the late 1940s and early 1950s who actually attended Smith from Seattle, not a very common occurrence. One majored in chemistry! This is why Smith women are so inspiring. Plus, they think I'm "young".

Part 5: the cuisine

Wine and hors d'oeuvres are being passed around on trays by catering staff. Somehow, in my circle-hopping, I manage to be standing with people who all already have wine every time the wine comes around, so I never get offered any. Note for next time: get wine early. (This facilitates the Rick Steves plan, too.)

Tasty treats include tuna tartare (remarkably like Hawaiʻian poke and equally delicious), fingerling potatoes with truffle salt, minced pork on a crisp bruschetta-ish bread, and quince pastries with whipped cream.

After more than an hour of mingling, the formal living/dining room has cleared out and we who remain hypothesize that the party is dying down. I wander toward the door and discover a packed corridor leading to what turns out to be a palatial kitchen overlooking a "casual" dining area for six and a reading/conversation area with (yet another) fireplace. The caterers are working madly at the center island, the footprint of which is larger than many rooms in my house.

Here's where I discover les petites madeleines chocolates, fresh-baked and devoured by alumnae pretty much as soon as a batch emerges from the ovens.

Part 6: the reunions

Around the kitchen, I discover a couple of people I actually know: an early 1990s former neighbor, who looks exactly the same (i.e., gorgeous) as our Smith days; and a real live 1993, whom I sang with in choir and who, it turns out, also goes to St. Mark's (as do all good upper-crust Seattleites, I suspect). The former neighbor used to work for Real.com. Did you know Maria? we ask, jokingly, referring to the newly-reelected Senator Cantwell, a Reallionaire. "Actually, yeah." I have got to be more careful what I joke about. The choirmate and I exchange email addresses and I get to relate my gossip about the Amherst Regional High School West Side Story debacle.

My boss, a Barnard alumna, asked me to look for a Smithie grad-school friend of hers and I find my target at the "casual" dining table. She works for the city, and we end up deep in conversation about North Highline annexation.

This is one of the best things about being a Smithie: at some random Fall Social Event, one can find someone else who knows the Growth Management Act in detail and is passionate about it (who accurately guesses my lot size from its location) and can meaningfully work through issues of governance, zoning and Detached Accessory Dwelling Units while sipping wine and nibbling tuna tartare in an art gallery mansion.

Can't wait for the next one.

Another reason to give women's colleges a look?

NYT: To All the Girls I've Rejected

(Women find higher hurdles at college is identical; NYT doesn't always expire their op-eds, but just in case.)

To sum up: at many competitive co-ed colleges, female applicants outnumber male ones, but the colleges want to maintain gender parity in the classes they admit. The result is pretty simple math: well-qualified girls will be rejected to make room for less-qualified boys.

This is a challenge. I'm an alumna of a women's college and I have been working to encourage high school students in my area to consider not only my alma mater, but highly competitive colleges in general and women's colleges in particular. On the one hand, if female applicants are at a demographic disadvantage at co-ed colleges, that's a rock-solid argument for them to look at women's colleges instead. On the other hand, it's hard to brag about a college being easier to get into, at least among the caliber of students I'm trying to attract.

"Be surrounded by all the girls who were almost good enough to get into Kenyon"?

But, wait. That's only half the story. What about going to Kenyon and being surrounded by all those even less qualified boys?

Now which campus is looking more competitive?

It's interesting, because Smith takes a big hit in the U.S. News rankings for having too high an acceptance rate. (I don't think that's the only reason Smith has been slipping for the last many years, but that's the most glaring difference between itself and its peers.) Smith loses that one on two fronts, because its applicant pool is half the size of its co-ed counterparts', but its incoming class is twice the size of its single-sex competitors! I'd love to see us back in the top five again, but I think I'd rather brag about the wealth of opportunities we offer to a truly diverse pool of amazingly talented women and girls.

In any case, I shall be curious to see what effect the demographic shift has on Smith and women's and co-ed colleges alike, in the coming years. Maybe female-dominated campuses will be the wave of the future for all of us. ;)