In The Waste Land, T.S. Eliot observed that “April is the cruelest month.” He obviously never worked in a college counseling office.
I find myself numb and exhausted as we enter November. I apparently survived October, although that was in question until the last minute, but wouldn’t claim to have recovered yet.
Back in my admissions days, I would wake up on Sunday mornings in the fall and my first thought would be “Shit, I have to drive to New Jersey today.” (Please excuse my French, and no disrespect intended for New Jersey--it was the thought of the drive, not the destination.) Now each fall, when October comes, my first thought most days is “Shit, I have to write a recommendation letter today.” At the end of September, I apologized in advance to my staff, because I know that I am tired and grumpy throughout the month of October.
Last month I wrote a recommendation letter every day, including weekends. Once upon a time I could write multiple letters in a day, and I am in awe of all my college counseling colleagues who have that superpower, but one rec a day, except in an emergency, is all I attempt in order to maintain my energy level and focus. I wish that I had as much discipline and organization in all parts of my life as I had last month, but it still took a toll both physically and emotionally.
My two children, both now adults, grew up with an intuitive understanding that recommendation season was different than other times of the year, that Dad was preoccupied with the need to get recs written. I remember many Halloweens when I would take the kids trick-or-treating and then come home to finish a last recommendation for November 1. But October, which I have in a previous blog post described as Rectober and which I have seen other colleagues refer to as Suck-tober, seems worse today.
That is not my imagination. Over the course of my college counseling career I have seen the application process become both accelerated and compressed. My son was born 35 years ago in my second year as an independent school college counselor. He was due around February 1, and the first sign of what a great kid he would be was that he waited until after the deadline to be born (I had second thoughts eight months later when he woke up crying and caused me to miss the ground ball through Bill Buckner’s legs, one of the most memorable plays in baseball history, especially for those of us cursed to be fans of the New York Mets). February 1 was still a major application deadline for which a number of my students were submitting their first application. Today I expect my seniors to have all their applications completed before February 1, and I would panic if one was only starting the application process then.
For the bulk of my career the fall was a series of waves, with a deadline every two weeks, with the period in December leading up to the January 1 deadline being the busiest couple of weeks of the application season. In recent years, however, November 1 has been a tsunami as more and more institutions introduce Early Decision and Early Action options, and now October 15 isn’t far behind in application volume. What used to be a three to four month process is now crammed into three to four weeks. The burden of recommendation writing largely dissipates once November hits. This year 70 of my 90 seniors applied somewhere by November 1, and I’m sure that percentage is small compared to plenty of other schools.
The question is whether it’s healthy. It’s great for colleges, spreading out reading over a longer period. But what about the rest of us? I wonder if I can make it through another October like this one. I worry even more about my seniors. The current admissions calendar forces students to make decisions about their futures before many of them are developmentally ready. In particular, the number of selective colleges admitting more than half their classes in Early Decision makes the decision about whether and where to apply early monumental, since deciding to use an ED chip for one institution lessens a student’s chances in regular admission at other places. The larger question is whether college admission offices have any clue about the realities of being a high school student.
I am sure that I am not in my right mind at this time of year (ECA readers may argue that “at this time of year” is unnecessary), but I’m not sorry to see October in the rear-view mirror. And I’m grateful for colleges that have early deadlines on November 15 or December 1.