Wednesday 05 March, 2008 at 2:55:25 pm
filed under school
The picture speaks for itself.
The U of Chicago letter was one of the first to arrive. Only Chicago, of all the schools in this game, sent out a letter apologizing for the admissions process:
Is it ironic, or sad, that we say that test scores do not much matter and then select you on the basis of your scores as someone who should hear our message? (Or, is it ironic and sad that you open our letter because of our ranking in a magazine, or because of the National Research Council’s astonishingly gratifying ranking of our academic departments?) Yes, ironic and a little sad, but we have learned to rely on the convenience which comes with the numbers which make our lives easier.
The University of Tulsa sent me a postcard addressed in a gorgeous cursive hand on the second of August, just in time for it to arrive before the rest of my birthday cards. The folks in Oklahoma wished me a “Happy Birthday! Warmest regards, Danny Lin p.s. We have great scholarship opportunities for National Merit Finalists!” and left me wondering how much more they knew about me.
USC sent me, unsolicited, a small tome of some 144 pages which appears to describe in detail every class ever offered at the school and the biography of every alumnus or alumna that has ever graduated.
The Olin prospectus arrived sealed in a static envelope and bound with a piece of duct tape. It is currently being used to store several banks of RAM.
ASU sent a mailer roughly the size of my bed, filled with beautiful, glossy, full-page pictures that succeed in making Tempe look almost as exciting as Berkeley. In order to better showcase the pictures, it contains almost no text (and none worth reading), but it’s still wonderful to look at.
Brown’s “Building a Life” appears to be trying to emulate the Arizona flier. It fails. It lacks any kind of a consistent color scheme or graphical coherence; a line of rhetorical questions snakes drunkenly across every page; random typographical flourishes manifest themselves without warning and every section is started with such unenlightening headers as “PERSEVERANCE +++ Surpr!se” or “Charcoal + Satin”. Most of the other mail from Brown had the restraint and good taste that one would expect from an Ivy-League institution looking for people to reject, but it seems that the admissions office was having a bad trip when this one was made.
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