Can I Send Different Parts Of College App At Different Times

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How College Changed My Life

We asked readers to discuss how the people they met and classes they took influenced them, and how much going to an elite school matters.

March 23, 2019

Credit... Max Whittaker for The New York Times

To the Editor:

My admittance to Stanford was my golden ticket to a college nicknamed "Paradise," where learning from Pulitzer Prize-winning authors and being mentored by paradigm-changing scientists were normal . Stanford opened doors I never even knew existed, having grown up in a small, agricultural town in Northern California. A little thing called an "endowment" changed my life .

When I graduated in 2018, I was no longer a small-town girl, but rather a young adult, itching to contribute something meaningful. Stanford transformed my flimsy desire to become a doctor into a fiery passion to become a leader in health care — all because I had witnessed this leadership in my mentors and friends.

Today, I still question what it means to attend an "elite" college, especially as admissions scandals unfold. But what I do know is that these colleges can open doors for those who want to rectify flawed systems and are hungry to elevate others. Small-town girls like me just need the exposure. To those on admissions committees: Admit more of us. Doing so can improve communities and generations to come.

Shin Mei Chan
San Francisco

To the Editor:

I have a vivid recollection of the conversation that occurred in the parking lot of an independent prep school where I taught years ago. A colleague asked me, somewhat incredulously, "Wait a minute — you went to a state college?" There was a pause as I nodded in the affirmative, then came the kicker: "Oh, but I thought you were brilliant."

In places such as these, and too often in the job market, attending an "elite" college matters very much. The fact is, it shouldn't matter at all. My dad was retired; we could not afford an expensive college. I earned a full-tuition scholarship and paid my own way. I pursued graduate work at an "elite" engineering school and earned an advanced degree from a large university. Neither was inherently superior in terms of the education it delivered.

The college experiences that shaped my life the most centered around getting to know people from diverse backgrounds and learning to solve problems independently. Where or if a person went to college should matter far less than what a person has learned and become along the way in life.

George Whittemore
Princeton, Mass.

To the Editor:

My community college experience saved my life. After graduating from high school, moving around and floundering in minimum-wage jobs, I returned to my hometown to live with my parents. I was depressed and attempted suicide. During my recovery, I started attending the community college in my hometown. At first, I resisted enrolling in our local community college because I felt there was a stigma. But when I did, I found a menagerie of students from all walks of life and professors who were deeply passionate about their students.

Class by class, the depression that had held me down for so long began to lift. I joined the honors program and then helped mentor other students. I presented at an undergraduate research conference. Along the way, I met my fiancé and built a network of peers and mentors who helped me get where I am today.

I cannot emphasize enough the importance of community colleges. Their support systems, small and tight-knit communities, and affordability are truly unrivaled. Today, I am working to destigmatize the college experience I owe everything to.

Sarah Olson
Corvallis, Ore.
The writer will be an undergraduate transfer student at Oregon State University in the fall.

To the Editor:

I arrived for my freshman year at Yale still wondering why I had been admitted. I was delighted and humbled by my access to all the resources, human and physical, that a great and prestigious university has to offer. I wish I could do it again, but as an adult. Yale was an amazing treat, like being taken on an exotic vacation.

My diploma must have conferred a little prestige when I went looking for a job, but that's all. In my 45 years in the working world, I always saw employees judged on cooperation and performance, not pedigree. In fact, being thought of as an intellectual fancy pants became an obstacle once in a while.

A degree from a fancy school is like having a fancy suit. Delightful if you care about such things, but overpriced, overhyped and meaningless in our universal quest toward living a life we love.

We are all blessed with immense and unearned privilege the day we are born. It is called being an American.

Philip Bowles
San Francisco

To the Editor:

Duke . That single word changed my life in 1966. It's right there on my license plate. DUKEMD. I had never been south of Washington, D.C. I had not even visited the campus of my "safety" school in North Carolina. I was going to Yale. Except I didn't get in.

I found myself in a foreign land of segregated restaurants, hushpuppies that you ate, not wore, alpaca sweaters, tassel loafers, ties at football games and something called Brunswick stew. I also discovered that people with thick Southern accents could run rings around me in chemistry class. And I thought I was smart!

I was pre-med, but I took many mandatory liberal arts courses. Thank goodness I did. It was in Religion 2 that I first read the New Testament and in psychology that I read Freud. Those classes left the biggest impressions on me as they opened my horizons to novel (for me) ways of thinking.

I owe the rest of my 50 years, including meeting my wife in Duke Medical School, to that very foreign land in Durham, N.C. Did it matter that I went to Duke? I bet my life it did.

Leonard A. Zwelling
Bellaire, Tex.

To the Editor:

I graduated in 1957 from a competitive public high school in Brooklyn. After my brother entered Swarthmore in 1951 when I was 11, my mother began grooming me and pressuring me to get admitted there, too. I worked hard academically, became an editor of a school publication, and took tutoring lessons all to prevent the catastrophe of being rejected.

I did get into Swarthmore, and during my first semester began to experience the incapacitating depressions that would haunt me for the rest of my life. I still remember clearly my first visit home at Thanksgiving. I was riding the IRT subway to Brooklyn and looking at the other riders and thinking, "I wonder if any of these people are smart enough to go to Swarthmore, but I'm sure they are all happier than I am."

Elsa Prigozy
Slingerlands, N.Y.

To the Editor:

Can four years change your life? I arrived on the Brandeis campus in the late summer of 1982, a fresh-faced kid from a small town in upstate New York. During my time at school I met the woman who would become my wife. Made friends who are still my closest. Became a Deadhead. Partied a lot (sorry, Mom and Dad!). Studied a bit. Began playing guitar.

I learned how big the world actually is, and realized for the first time how much a part of that world I was. My mind grew, opened up. My heart changed. I became, essentially and fundamentally, who I am today.

One conversation with a professor sticks with me. I was a middling student. He grabbed me after class and we talked for maybe five minutes. I don't remember exactly what he said. It had something to do with my potential, with something he saw in me that I didn't see. I walked out of his office and thought of myself in a different way. Suddenly there was an intellectual curiosity, almost a kind of muse, that I am still following. I wonder if he ever knew?

(Rabbi) Steve Schwartz
Baltimore

To the Editor:

I was accepted to M.I.T. as a transfer student in 1975. It is hard to overestimate the impact of that elite name on the undergraduate degree I earned there in mechanical engineering. People's response to me changes when they hear I graduated from M.I.T. It's like an automatic in. Forty years later it is still featured prominently at the top of my résumé.

Gail Whoriskey Zwerling
Somerville, Mass.

To the Editor:

I earned bachelor's and master's degrees from South Dakota State University in the 1990s. Immediately after graduating I moved to the East Coast, where many people I met couldn't find South Dakota on a map and had certainly never heard of the university. I was able to find jobs with good companies in various large cities and to build a decent career. After a few years in the work force, it seemed to matter more where I had worked than where I went to college.

I was probably not called in to interview by some companies because I hadn't attended a prestigious university, but there are plenty of great employers who look at more than alma mater. All that said, I've seen how attending certain schools opens many doors. It's not a guarantee of success, but there's no denying that graduates of top schools have a leg up.

I have a 2-year-old and I already think about where she'll go to college. It will ultimately be her choice, but I will strongly suggest elite institutions. Despite my own positive experience and my desire for it to not matter, it absolutely does.

Jennifer Healy Keintz
Eden, S.D.

To the Editor:

My undergraduate college experience was scattered, extraordinary and rich. The first year was spent at the College of St. Benedict in central Minnesota, where my eyes were opened to the Benedictines' world of history and literature. Sister Colman cast me in Shaw's "Arms and the Man" and I fell in love with the theater.

The next year I studied with the Franciscans at the College of Saint Teresa in Winona, Minn. Sister Bernetta's huge graphic representation of Dante's "Inferno," which occupied a whole wall and an entire semester of study, will stay with me until I die.

My last two years were spent at the University of Minnesota, where professors like John Berryman, Saul Bellow, William Van O'Connor and Robert Penn Warren were astonishing me daily. A new world opened. I began to question everything, and to embrace learning as a means to a fulfilling life.

As Rilke says in "Letters to a Young Poet": "Try to love the questions themselves. ... Do not now seek the answers, which cannot be given you because you would not be able to live them. And the point is, to live everything ."

Judith Koll Healey
Minneapolis
The writer is a novelist and biographer.

To the Editor:

I graduated from LeMoyne College in Syracuse, N.Y., in 1989 — good Jesuit liberal arts school, but by no means "elite." The best professor I had there was a poet named Barbara Clarkson . A student of Auden and Roethke at Bennington College, she taught us how to write and be passionate about poetry. Her office was in the basement next to the janitor's closet. She smoked cigars, ashing them into a cracked teacup she kept on her desk. I still read and write poetry today, and it's because of her.

This is college to me: not so much where you go, but whom you meet once you get there.

Michael Tucker
Bath, Me.
The writer is the course materials specialist at Bowdoin College.

To the Editor:

I went to an "elite" college — one of the Seven Sisters — in the late 1950s when they were all single-sex schools. I confess to have attended only to prove to my parents, my friends and myself that I could "get in." Although I made several lifelong friendships and, because of a captivating professor in the music department, developed a love for music that sustains me to this day, I was far too immature to benefit from the potentially excellent education that I neglected to take advantage of.

Although I confess to having enjoyed the cachet evoked by my school's name, I've often regretted that I didn't attend a large coed school with football and basketball games (and parties) to attend — or wished that a "gap year" had been available so that I could have had a year to experience the real world before being immersed in an ivory tower that, perhaps at one year older, I would have appreciated more.

Peggy Sweeney
Sarasota, Fla.