The Admissions Director

Original work, college applications done. Enjoy. I will try and resume posting again.

Benjamin Kimball. Age 17. Senior at Waterloo High School in Waterloo, Minnesota. A tiny, backwoods, leaky public school if there ever was one. Hardly offered honors courses, let alone AP. Average ACT score - 22. Known around the immediate area for having a really high dropout rate, with most of the seniors staying only for the food. This kid was the first in his family to apply for college. He’d gotten a 32 on his ACT, and he had nearly perfect attendance. He had actually gone to another school in another town one day to take an AP test. He already had the beginnings of an activist record. His essay was a moving story that somehow connected catching fish and curing cancer. 

Louis Peverell, a fat cigar perched between his fat lips, looked the application over. The scores were good, yes, and the essay was good, yes. But there was something that Louis just didn’t like. Running his fingers of one hand through his scraggly beard, he used the other to circle small grammatical mistakes in Benjamin Kimball’s essay. Mistakes like that show a certain carelessness, he thought, disregarding the going-to-another-town-to-take-a-test thing. As he looked through the boy’s application again, he liked the boy less and less. Grammar. Handwriting. Font. The kid seemed rather snotty and judgemental, if you asked Louis. 

In the end, it was rejected. 

Nikita Lai. Age 18. Senior at Millard Fillmore High School in Taylor, Missouri. Not as revolting a town as Waterloo, but still rather small and backwards. Louis was a bit more familiar with Fillmore. It graded hard and pushed its students to the brink and back. This girl had an almost-perfect transcript, appeared to speak five languages, and won a state award in debate. The essay was uncompelling and rather poorly-written, but she was still able to get her points across. 

Louis liked his job as a senior admissions director. It was cushy. Comfortable. Unlike many of his colleagues, he enjoyed sitting in the fourth-story room for hours on end, thumbing through endless and endlessly-diverse applications from around both the country and the globe. He felt bad, of course, when he rejected somebody - who didn’t? - but he always felt a sense of power and stability when he held a student’s best shot of a future in his hands. 

He remembered his own application to college. Different time, of course. All he needed was a good test score and a good essay and he was in. There weren’t many Louis Peverells out there then - most of the ones that did exist were too poor or were of the wrong race or gender to do much with their Peverell-ness. And there was plenty of room at the best universities for the ones who remained. 

Now Louis had six applications spread out before him on the table. All of the applicants were ranked first in their class. All of them had a spotless GPA. All of them were leaders in at least three extracurriculars. All of them had produced outstanding essays, in Louis’s opinion. Gender didn’t really matter to him (at least, consciously). To Louis Peverell, all six of these kids were exactly the same. There wasn’t room for six exactly-the-same kids at his university. Poor them. 

I will not be arbitrary, he told himself, but in the end he was. He told himself it was because one girl just shone more brightly than everyone else - seemed more promising - but it was really because he liked the font she used the best. It wasn’t arbitrary, he told himself again. But it was. 

He’d be getting angry messages, he knew as he looked over Sarah Jester’s application, which he would ultimatlely reject because she was vice president of the debate club instead of president. He always did. Admissions is such a crapshoot, furious parents and students and media would complain. But it really isn’t, Louis thought. Because you’ve got people like me going over this stuff. People who know what they’re doing. Yes, people who deserve to get in don’t, but they’ll still do fine. They’re just not good enough for us. It’s not like we didn’t have to go through the same thing. 

Louis Peverell did not.