School Information System

College Admissions: Tense Times in Bronxville

Susan Dominus:

IN THE WEE HOURS OF THE MORNING last Halloween, Maria Devlin and her mother, Donna, were both wide awake in their apartment in Bronxville, N.Y., scanning an essay that shared Maria’s most profound thoughts on “one or two of her principal intellectual interests.” The buzz from what had become, of late, a 10 p.m. ritual hot chocolate — part soothing balm, part energizing caffeine — had come and gone. Now they were struggling to focus on proofreading that essay as well as some other college application forms due to be mailed the next day. On photocopied pages, they practiced squeezing Maria’s many accomplishments — National Merit finalist, area all-state flutist (honor ensemble), numerous playwriting awards — into the too-small lines scattered throughout the page. Once Maria’s mother found a way to make it all fit, with abbreviations and tiny, neat letters, Maria would commit the list to the official page in clean, precise writing. Around 2 in the morning, a friend sent Maria an e-mail message: What are you doing? Maria told her and fired back the same question. A.P. American history, the friend wrote. Gotcha, wrote Maria. She had already aced her Advanced Placement exams in American history, world history and French, not to mention calculus, a class she took her junior year, one of only four students in her grade at Bronxville High School to do so. It was accomplishments like that, as well as her near-perfect SATs, her near-perfect G.P.A., her in-progress novel and her natural gifts as a studio artist that put Maria, then 17, in line for the scholarship for which she was applying.

That night, she was finishing off her application for the Woodruff Scholarship at Emory University in Atlanta, a full ride that would cover room, board and tuition. Other students worried about just getting into a good school; Maria was worried about getting one of those schools to take her in its arms and give her everything she needed and perhaps a little bit more — money for books or maybe funds for summer travel. Her father’s income as a computer programmer placed the family in that awkward spot, comfortable enough that they couldn’t be sure of comprehensive financial aid but so stretched with three kids in a high-tax town that even a generous scholarship, if it was incomplete, would leave them in difficult straits. In applying to a typically competitive school, her classmates were looking at odds like 1 in 4 or maybe 1 in 10. Maria, in shooting for a full merit scholarship, was looking at odds like 1 in 100. More than 2,600 students were nominated by their high schools to apply for Emory’s scholarship program, for example, but only 23 would be chosen for the Woodruff.

Posted by Jim Zellmer at September 30, 2007 12:00 AM
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