So people keep asking me for advice on how to get into college and speak as a panelist on this whole college admission thing because I go to Amherst College and most of my tuition was paid for by the school. What they don't know is that I can't give them advice because I relied on ignorance and dumb luck and affirmative action (my tuition was paid for because I two years ago I could only afford what they're charging me after the financial aid by a small margin--my family just recently moved out of New York City to pay off morgages and shave off living expenses) and that my story is anything but inspirational. I was, in fact, horrible at this "getting organized" thing with the application. But anyway, here's my story. I hope it helps.

In the summer of 2000, I still wasn't thinking of college applications. That was bad idea number 1. If you're applying for colleges, don't do that. Think about everything early. Anyway, since my high school had about 3600 people and three college counselors, all of whom not exactly helpful, and one of whom bitchier than any Amherst dean you can name (yes even her), I wasn't very well-adviced on anything college-related with the following exceptions:

1 - College is expensive and I will end up in debt.
2 - All classes are insanely huge in college and I will get no personal attention from my professors.
3 - I simply must apply to MIT and Harvard, and a subset of CalTech, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Stanford, ...
4 - I also simply must apply to Polytech, a technical school about three blocks away from my high school, as a safety because about 10% of my high school go there. Same for NYU, aibeit not as a safety.
5 - It is recommended that I do shiny things besides math to make myself "well-rounded", as if I'm not already round.
6 - "Oh Wing you're a great guy once you go to college you're going to find a girl in your school who'll like you and I'm gonna go make out with my new boyfriend in the hall now bye!"

Oh how fucking wrong they were. How very fucking wrong.

Anyway, so back (or perhaps forward) to the summer of 2000. I was at Hampshire over the summer and during that time encountered the two deciding factors that made me decided on considering Amherst: Tom Wexler, class of 2000 and the owner of The Creative Needle. Tom stopped by to give a talk on the 5-color Theorem and during the following dinner I overheard one line of a conversation between him and Will Chan. "You should apply to Amherst, I like it better than Harvard" said Tom. (As a side note, Will is now at Harvard.) Some time before that I visited the yarn shop down at the Carriage Shops, where the lady and I had a good 30-minute talk about how I should consider going to one of the Five Colleges. So yeah, now you know why I decided to apply to Amherst.

By the end of the summer I actually had a plan in mind. I would apply to MIT, University of Chicago, Cornell, Columbia, NYU, Amherst, SUNY at Binghamton, SUNY at Buffalo, Polytech, and several CUNYs for absolute backup. My preference as in exactly that order. My expected chances of getting into the institutions were in the reverse order. "AMHERST? BELOW NYU? WHAT THE FUCK WERE YOU DOING?" You see, I didn't actually know what Amherst was back then. I never visited the campus (although I did look at Converse from a distance, that counts, right?) nor have I actually picked up a college guidebook. Nor did I know what a small liberal arts school was. So those are bad ideas 2 and 3. Research is important, in retrospec. Yes it is...

The application process itself was quite hellish. Those of you who've seen me deal with documents should know what I mean: I'm disorganized as hell, unless the documents happen to be pages of proofs. The CUNYs were easy to apply to, since they were desperate for students they just accepts anyone with a B average or above on site. But since the bureaucracy of my high school was horribly slow, all our stuff had to be in a month or two early to be processed. That means the early decision/action deadline was mid-October for me. Originally I wanted to apply early action to MIT. I saw how thick the form for MIT was, figured that I couldn't get in anyway, and crossed it off my list. (Bad idea number 4: paperwork should not scare you away.) Then I decided to apply to either Cornell or U of C early. The deadline approached, and my essays were done. I said "whatever". Bad idea number 5: laziness is not a good thing.

During mid-October, a representive from Columbia visited and talked to us about the school. Wait, he didn't. He told us about Columbia and then decided that since we were all colored folk he'd ramble on and on about the special "get in Columbia even if you're stupid as long as you're a minority or special in some way" program. It's a program that only people with less than a B can apply. A-/B+ folk like me were, of course, screwed. So I walked out on him and crossed Columbia off my list. The SUNYs got my application pretty quickly since they were easy. Polytech I crossed off my list also out of spite and laziness. Let me repear: don't do that. Bad idea.

So now my list got reduced to U of C, Cornell, NYU, Amherst, and... oh wait, that's it! Yay! Only three essays to write thanks to the common application. The U of C essay I forgot about since I hated the topic. My common application essay was, well, standard in the non-standard sort of way. It went through 17 revisions--not because of grammar and spelling, but content. It was too honest, apprantly. I don't think I'll go more into that, really.

It was the Amherst essay that I spent the least time on. Let me backtrack: there were two topics that year, one being some community thing. I tried writing something with that, but it ended up being something that resembles repeated stabs at my high school. Then I decided to tackle the other topic: the first paragraph of If On Winter's Night a Traveler, now one of my favorite books.

This is what my college application looked like: math, math, math, math, math, math, math, math, math, math, math, some bullshit community service crap, math, math, stuff with computers, math, math, math, math, math, math, math, math, .... My letters of recommendation had slightly less math on it. For example, the one from my English teacher said "he wrote a poem about mathematics in the style of the Canterbury Tales", instead of "he did math during my class". I won't mention the others, as they were written by mathematicians.

Now, an interlude. I was interviered by an UChicaho alum one evening. She was this manager person of this shiny business thing in some tall building in Manhattan who dressed conservatively in pink. I think the fact that I knit scared her, a lot. It was around that time that I remembered that I should've had one of the teachers I worked with send an additional letter to U of C, since she is an alumna. Oopsie. Bad idea number "I lost count".

As expected, I was accepted into all the public institutions I applied to. SUNY at Buffalo gave me a grand sum of 450 bucks for my merit scholarship. CUNY thinks I'm both rich and green-card-less, so they charged me a whopping 9 grand a year.

Then NYU sent me a wait-list letter. I began looking into buying some new winter coats. I mean, they did accept me and gave me 450 whole dollars per semester.

Then U of C sent me a wait-list letter. Oh well, the only reason I wanted to go there, in retrospec, was because this cute girl went there. Besides, I couldn't accept this place once I heard about the lack of a core curriculum in Amherst anyway. (This girl was the Emily who had a cult. Obviously, I was in her cult's second coming. Ask me some time and I'll tell you stories about birth control pills and airplanes and stupid boys.)

Then the package from Amherst arrived, exactly when everyone was telling me how it's impossible that I didn't get into NYU and how I can impress them by sending them info about the shiny things like theater and dance and more math that I did in the last month.

Then more results from math completitions (that could potentially let me get very ahead on both wait-lists) and the rejection letter from Cornell came. And I pointed and laughed. And two months down the line, my high school gave me an award for being poor and recieving a shitload of money from Amherst. Apprantly they didn't understand that need-based aid is not merit-based aid. To bring this back a full circle: I visited my high school for the last time during December of 2001, and when one of my teachers asked us how big our math classes were (so that he could demostrate the fact that people in college don't care about you and give you individual attention like in high school) I said "8, including myself, and yes this is the whole class, not a section of it". Not exactly his expected 200.

So what's the moral of the story? If you do stupid things then you'd get into a great school with most of your tuition paid by dead white men? Yes, but don't do that. To this day I still wonder why the hell I'm here. I have a feeling that I'm an affirmative action case ("Look! He's Asian, his mother dropped out of elementary school, and he's a mathematician!" "By golly! Someone who doesn't want to major in English!" "Yes! We can meet our math major quota this year!") or that one or more deans of admissions were drunk either in Amherst or somewhere else. Yeah, this is why I refuse to offer general college application advice to people.