Songs to Wait By

While time certainly seems to be flying, especially for seniors nearing graduation, college acceptance letters are still a good month or more away from arriving. To help get you through this next month we’ve compiled the second annual “Songs to Wait By” list, with links to listen / watch online. As you can hear, inter-office group car rides can get crazy…

You Can’t Hurry Love – The Supremes
Pressure Drop – Toots & The Maytals
The Weight - The Band
Dog Days Are Over – Florence + The Machine
Temple of Time – Koji Kondo
Mr. Postman – The Marvelettes
Mr. Postman – Cragga Dub Remix (Apologies to the purists)
Hang Me Up To Dry – Cold War Kids
Hold On – Wilson Phillips
Tell Me Something Good - Chaka Kan & Rufus
Say- John Mayer
In the Waiting Line – Zero 7
Rumour Has It – Adele
A Change Is Gonna Come – Seal
Time Bomb – Old 97′s (Live in Seattle)
Ain’t Too Proud to Beg – The Temptations
Hello Goodbye - The Beatles
Ooh La La – The Faces

We’ll call those seventeen good for now, but look forward to a series of  “Songs We’re Reading By” posts starting next week.

Promoting Failure

The inevitable, glorious deluge of applications is upon us! Reading between 6 to 8 hours a day of applications three to four days a week is a brand new experience for me, and intense in a rewarding sort of way even for the most seasoned admission officers. You can correctly assume that it’s hard to find the motivation to read much else–I certainly don’t have any plans to finally start War and Peace anytime soon–but we officers are mustering up enough energy to read, of course, college admission related news articles.

One of my favorites that was sent around the office this week was this article entitled “Want to get in to College? Learn to Fail,” by Angel B. Pérez , the Dean of Admission and Financial Aid at Pitzer, on the importance of failure as it relates to teenagers’ growth in all areas of life and the college application process. Our entire staff loved it, probably because of its relevance to our own lives right now as we comb through hundreds of Common Application resumes and essays trying to decipher who belongs at Whitman next year. The gist is the importance of failure to development and that admission officers actually often rejoice when they find acknowledged and discussed imperfections in applications. It’s a great, quick read; go check it out, especially all of you who will be writing admission essays and interviewing with your dream colleges in the near future.