Passion Over Pursuit

I’ve been contemplating this post for months. Today I could wait no longer.

I have the great honor of serving as a mentor on my sons’ robotics team. Their team is filled with bright, hardworking and kind students. Each is very special to me, especially those whose growth I’ve had the pleasure of watching and in some small way contributing to over the past few years.

As college early action and early decision envelopes arrive, my hardworking and earnest seniors will meet one of three fates: acceptance, deferral or the dreaded denial. I find this incredibly painful to watch because often the results do not positively correlate with their effort, nor the mythos of the “perfect candidate”.

For every student admitted, far more are rejected. And in the end, it’s not personal; it’s a numbers game. But tell that to a high school student for whom time has not yet bestowed the benefit of hindsight, nor the wisdom of “failing forward.”

Sometimes the planets align and a match is made between student effort and college acceptance. But some proverbial shoe-ins, known by their academic standing or litany of awards, will nonetheless find themselves in the “losing” column. And others, who on the surface present no outstanding nor obvious merit, will now hold the mythological golden ticket in the eyes of their peers.

This poignant post by a high school student still awaiting her admissions results sums up the feeling many of my students share:

“I had this mini existential crisis in the middle of my midterm in which I questioned my entire academic career and purpose. To keep a long story short, I still don't know what my purpose is and the past 13 years of my academic career seem to boil down to 4 o'clock on a lovely Wednesday evening. To top it all off I nearly didn't finish my AP Stats midterm because I was on the verge of flipping my desk and driving home to cry. So yeah. “

Should a 17 year old know what his or her purpose is? I don’t know my purpose and I am way, waaaaaaay past 17. Way past.

As each result trickles in, good or bad, I search for a pattern, a rationale. But no magic formula exists— only a system created and administered by well-intentioned humans, designed to meet the “institutional priorities” of their respective employers.

I cannot glean the secret college admissions recipe. I doubt anyone can. Yet as the process unfolds before me, it strengthens my convictions, which I share with my sons daily:

Choose passion over pursuit, I tell them. Invest your precious time on experiences that will hold meaning far beyond the moment of acceptance or rejection. Reach for the top, though not to win over others, but because in doing so, you will experience the joy of overcoming challenges and the confidence that accompanies such joy.

To believe that admission to one specific college will set in motion a person’s fate is to practice false idolatry. Sure, success may be bought in the short term. But sustaining that success means paying one’s dues long after the baccalaureate.

In a recent HuffPost article, which I’ve paraphrased for brevity, Melissa Chen, a Bay Area college consultant, says it well:

“I try to dissuade my students away from perfection. Naturally, this is not advice that many of them listen to, even if doing so improves their application's chances while helping them to live a saner life. College admissions is not scalar -- not being perfect is not a point against an applicant's chances. I tell them to take the time to enjoy life, discover what their true hobbies are, develop passions and intellectual curiosities, spend idle time with friends, forget about the rat race and work on discovering who they are as individuals. The cynical benefit of this is that such an attitude can make them more interesting people, who have stories about forming garage bands and learning how to skateboard, which can help their application stand out in a crowd. But taking a step back has obvious intrinsic benefits, too, which will last much longer than any given application cycle.”

Don’t misunderstand my point. I believe in hard work. I believe in excellence. I want my children to have the best educational opportunities they can attain. But no college, no matter how elite or renowned, can compensate for a lack of drive and vision, let alone the absence of grit and determination.

Perhaps passion over pursuit is a luxury of affluence. I acknowledge that. But I nonetheless believe that for those students who can do so, the benefits will flow not only to themselves, but to the world as a whole. We need original thinkers who are driven by placing their healing imprints on society, rather than a sticker on their parents’ rear windows.

After all, college is the easy part. What follows, not so much.