Like many of the high school seniors I mentored this summer, I approached the college process with a certain wariness. To start, it was likely cultivated by hours spent on Google and College Confidential, where I never failed to be stunned by the impossibly slim admissions rates. My go-to catch phrase during this whirlwind of a time soon became, pardon my language, “it’s all just such a crapshoot.” The example essays I read seemed to glimmer, packaged with just the right balance of humility and confidence, of neatness and nuance, while the jumble in my head felt glaring in its dullness. My efforts to protect myself from this “crapshoot” were stymied by the inevitable weight that the college process carries: its power to determine my future, and even, it seemed, my worth. Toggling between both a visceral desire to detach myself from the experience altogether and an acute awareness that my fate was in its hands left me feeling anxious and on guard; everything college-related felt like a battle. How to put just enough of myself into the process that it felt authentic, but not too much that a rejection would rip me apart?
Admittedly, it is my love for self-reflection and my memory of its complete absence during my college process that drew me to an internship with The Mindful Applicant. Though each student was infinitely unique, I found pieces of my own experience refracted back to me from different angles. The college process, it seems, can be relied on to unearth in us a plethora of insecurities and anxieties ranging from not being enough, to uncertainty about the future, to the struggle to listen to your internal voice in the face of the inundating expectations of others. To provide a space, as TMA does, to sit with those doubts and fears at the same time as brainstorming for a college essay-- to be holistically supported for all of the emotions and thoughts that the college process brings up, rather than simply sitting down to ‘write your essay’ or ‘unload your emotions’-- that is what I believe so many of us have been crucially missing in our own journeys.
About halfway through my first session with each student (we met weekly for 1 hour via zoom), after we finished reflecting on their first free-write exercise about what gives them energy and drains their energy, I would transition to asking about their essay: how were they feeling about it, had they started it, had they thought about it? I soon sensed a pattern emerging. Shoulders would tense up, accompanied by a heavy exhale or an anxious “ummm.” My students’ eyes, once lit-up from explaining what it is about a sport they love, or recounting a special tradition they have with their family, would often dart around their room as they were brought back to the relentlessness of this process. Whether it was a self-protective caginess arising from an attempt to endure the “crapshoot” of a process, or paralysis caused by a fear that what they had to say wasn’t unique or interesting enough, transitioning to talk about the college essay almost always unearthed murky feelings of self-doubt, prompting my students to retreat into themselves. I began to approach these moments with an odd kind of anticipation. I became so well-practiced in my spiel of reassurance, gesticulating whole-heartedly as I affirmed that their story was worthy regardless of how trivial it seemed to them, and that the most important thing was that they be authentic and true to themselves. What seems so simple but what runs contrary to what the world coaxes high school students to believe is that they don’t need to pretend to be anyone other than themselves to write a compelling essay; they already have everything they need within them.
I won’t overly flatter myself by claiming that my enthusiastic reassurance was life-changing for these high school seniors, but what was especially powerful about my time with TMA was watching, throughout the course of our sessions, this philosophy truly sink in. Though students would often come into the first meeting on guard, like I imagine my eighteen-year-old self would, through the process of talking about their family, their friends, the parts of their life that energized them and made them tick, their tightly secured armor would begin to loosen. As the process of writing the college essay continued simultaneously alongside guided free-writes and they were given the space to simply talk about themselves and what they cared about, they began, eventually, to associate the college process not with the expectations of others, but as a true process of discovery: one that is worthwhile and meaningful no matter where they end up.
This holistic focus is at the heart of what TMA does: in their initiative to leverage technology in order to reach more students, their passion for accessibility and equity, and in their commitment to co-creating an experience with students, rather than imposing an agenda on them. Much of TMA’s mission is guided by the conviction that a transcript is a painfully limited document through which to capture a student’s educational journey; in reality, students are so much more than any collection of numbers or external markers of intelligence that we can offer them. TMA envisions a world in which we not only track test scores and grades, but skills of emotional intelligence and relationship building-- skills, simply, of being human.
Though during my sessions with students I often did my best to channel the mantra “I am an empty vessel for your self-discovery,” even my own human-ness, and my reflections as a current college student, made their way into my work as a mentor. Mentorship, and education generally for that matter, is not a one-sided experience in which the student receives knowledge from within a bubble; it is through bringing our full, authentic, messy selves to everything from our reflections to our collaborative learning, that we grow into our potential and the paths we imagine for ourselves.
by Emma Tapscott, Lead Mentor for Brain Alive
