Of shape rotators and rooftop gardens
I’ve recently become aware of the shape rotator vs. wordcel meme. I’m late to the game; I don’t use Twitter!
Shape rotators, according to this joke dichotomy, are people with innate visuospatial skills, which translate into a facility with math, physics, programming, etc.
I’ll let the pseudonymous “Roon” explain who wordcels are:
“verbally gifted writers and speakers who, when pressed to visualize some math problem in their mind's eye, must helplessly watch their normally high-octane intelligence sputter and fail...They'll do great (sic) in English class, and terrible (sic) in physics.”
“Wordcel” sounds rude to me, so let’s switch in “word-lover.”
Of course, this is an exaggerated joke that takes a small slice of cognitive science and blows it out of proportion. But let’s have a little fun with it.
Admissions officers generally fall into the word-loving camp. Let’s look at a little evidence.
Here’s a snippet from Jon Boeckestadt’s blog:
“If I had a dollar for every admissions officer who told me they ‘don’t like numbers,’ I’d already be retired.”
Boeckenstadt is a numerate guy who uses data to prove his points. His blog is pitched more at fellow professionals than applicants or their parents but is interesting.
Now let’s look at some numbers to assess the numeracy of admissions officers (whoa).
First, their undergraduate degrees, from a National Association for College Admissions Counseling (NACAC) survey. I would guess the numbers don’t sum to 100 because of some missing category; NACAC’s report is proving my point about numeracy!
Humanities/liberal arts: 24.5%
Social science: 15.5%
Business: 14.4%
Communications and journalism: 12.1%
Psychology and social work: 10.3%
And their graduate degrees, from the same survey:
Education: 42.5%
Business: 15.5%
Other: 15.4%
Humanities and liberal arts: 8.0%
Law and public policy: 5.2%
Another bit of evidence I find convincing is the existence of companies like EAB, which do data analysis for colleges trying to revenue-optimize admission. If colleges could save money and do that analysis in-house, they almost certainly would.
Sure, very interesting, you say. What does this mean for getting my kid into college?
When your kid is writing essays, he or she must tell a compelling story to people who like words more than numbers and who value narratives about people highly.
Here are two examples from the Harvard admission office’s casebook, a compilation of anonymized past applications it uses to train new admission officers. In it, there’s an application from a young woman whom the accompanying discussion guide calls a “clear admit” with “unusually compelling personal qualities.” She got in and ended up enrolling at Harvard.
One of her essays was about a project she started at the housing cooperative where she lived. She started gathering gray water from her neighbors and using it to water a rooftop garden. Then she and her neighbors cooked some of the vegetables together.
This is a sweet and touching story about neighborliness, avoiding waste, and the satisfaction of growing your own vegetables. The applicant is an enterprising young woman who saw a gap and took the initiative to fill it.
But did her rooftop garden really materially help the environment?
Let’s consider another applicant from the casebook. A young man wrote an essay about helping set up wireless sensors for a coastal monitoring project—something likelier to have some material environmental impact, by informing researchers.
Did this kid get in? Nope. Not even the waitlist.
The obvious next question is whether there’s something else about their applications that would explain those outcomes.
The first student mentioned above, Ms. Rooftop Garden, got a 2100 on the old SAT, which included a writing section and had a maximum score of 2400. The second kid, Mr. Wireless Sensor, who didn’t get in, got a 2360.
They were both underrepresented minorities.
What can we learn from these examples?
Essays that feature emotionally compelling stories, without much science or math in them, are a better bet for admission. The admissions officers who are reading them are far likelier to have degrees in education or English than in science or math. Opt for essays about people, not systems. Stories, not analysis.
Would you like more insights like this? More takeaways from the documents that Harvard had to turn over for the Students for Fair Admissions litigation? They weren’t easy to find online—Harvard must pay its lawyers well—but I’m tenacious about pulling on loose threads.
You can sign up for my online seminars here. If you’re interested in essay advice in particular, I recommend booking an hour or two of one-on-one time. You can do so here.
