Let Inga Tell You: Haunted by a rejected college application of old

Watching my friends’ grandchildren wrestle with the college application process, I am reminded of my own saga of applying to — and being rejected by — Brown University. It turns out the school requires you to be able to locate the state of Rhode Island.

My older granddaughter, a high school sophomore in Los Angeles, is already pondering colleges, and given that she has spent considerable time in the Northeast with the other grandparents, she definitely has Brown on her radar. But she fears that I have sabotaged her chances. I have assured her they don’t keep application records that far back, but she is not convinced.

If legacies were a guarantee of admission, I would have been a shoo-in at Brown. My father’s family was from Rhode Island and Brown was almost like the local community college. You could go to Brown and still be home for Sunday dinner. It’s a small state.

I should mention that Brown (all male) and its associated women’s college, Pembroke, merged in 1971, making Brown a coed school. My parents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. My grandparents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage.

My mother’s Ohio family, definitely not wealthy, were all educators. My great-grandmother graduated from college. My grandmother had a Ph.D. in zoology. My mother snagged a full scholarship to Pembroke, where she met my father in an honors Shakespeare class at Brown.

All the aunts and uncles had gone to Brown or Pembroke. My brother, a year older, was already at Brown.

Everyone hoped I’d go there, too. I frankly had no interest. Fortunately for me, I was a long shot anyway.

I’ve covered in previous columns my uncontested status as the family idiot. I was the blond sheep in a family of brown-eyed brunette geniuses. My younger son is fortunate to have inherited the lightning-fast mind of my siblings, and fortunately much better social skills.

Let Inga Tell You: Exploring the mysteries of the middle child

Speaking with my brother (whom I love dearly) awhile back, he observed that if he were in elementary school now, he’d be diagnosed with Asperger’s syndrome. No argument from me! (Only Asperger’s?)

I was always deemed to “not test well.” This was based on the illusion that this poorly designed IQ test simply failed to capture my obvious intellect. Looking back, I think I was simply not very good at much of what it was testing and that my scores were an accurate reflection of that.

In fact, when I was applying to graduate schools, I screened for any requirements for tests that required heavy abstract abilities. I could study for the Graduate Record Examinations (GRE) standardized tests, but if a test gave me a series of numbers or geometric figures and asked what the next one in the series would be, my only answer was “Beats me!”

Because I didn’t “test well,” I was by seventh grade in a track of kids headed for a less-competitive state college or possibly vocational school. My siblings, of course, were in the top track, already headed for the Ivies.

I did have one superpower, which I have to this day. I am pathologically persistent. You will never outlast me. My grades were always better than my siblings’. I try harder.

I was also fortunate to have a mother who early on recognized my love of writing and encouraged it in every way. I still remember her advice: Write what you know. Write from your heart. Find your own voice. I feel so grateful to her to this day.

She always praised — never critiqued — anything I wrote. She wanted writing to be only joy. But in hopes of subtly encouraging the better stuff (“better” being very relative), she’d ask if she could buy her favorites for a nickel.

Writing has been a lifelong coping mechanism for me. No matter how bad things get, I’m always thinking, “How will I write about this?”

So by the time I was applying to colleges, including Brown, I was a legitimate candidate in many ways — top 10% of my class, editor of the school paper and president of the school’s service group. Wrote a great essay. But my SATs in the high 500s were most definitely not Ivy League level.

One thing I’ve learned over the years is how many different types of intelligence there are. My first husband, for example, was born with homing pigeon instincts. He could find a place he’d only been to once 25 years earlier.

Neither my second husband, Olof, nor I possesses this skill. We are both directionally disabled. As my younger son, Henry, used to lament as we ferried him around to soccer games all over the county, “if there’s a 50% chance of turning in the right direction, you guys will get it wrong 90% of the time.” Sadly, he was correct.

Back when I was applying to colleges, a personal interview was required for the most competitive colleges. For reasons not clear to me now, my parents allowed me, a 16-year-old, to make the four-hour drive from Pleasantville, N.Y., to Providence, R.I., for my interview at Brown. Afterward, I would spend the weekend visiting my grandparents in the area.

The only directional support at the time was a road map. Off I went, allowing plenty of time. I listened to the radio and sang along.

After I’d been driving for a while, I kept thinking I ought to be there by now, so I pulled into a gas station in Seekonk, Mass., and explained to the nice guy at the pump that I was trying to get to Brown University in Providence and I seemed to be lost.

He inquired what direction I had come from. “The I-95 from New York,” I replied.

“Sweetheart,” he exclaimed, “you drove all the way through the state of Rhode Island and right through downtown Providence!”

He got me turned around and I did find Providence, and Brown, but I was two hours late for my interview. I regaled the admissions director with my hilarious story about not being able to find Rhode Island.

Brown rejected me. My grandmother, a substantial contributor, never gave them another dime. I was so relieved.

Had I subconsciously sabotaged my interview? Maybe. My directional disabilities probably didn’t help. Or then, maybe they did. I ended up at the school I had really wanted to go to.

Still, my granddaughter is convinced they have records of this somewhere and that her own application will be doomed — that somewhere in their computer, even after all these years, it will say, “Grandmother couldn’t find Rhode Island.”

Inga’s lighthearted looks at life appear regularly in the La Jolla Light. Reach her at inga47@san.rr.com.