Most of what I read was pretty nice. One of the two admissions officers called an essay I wrote “a bit cheesy for my tastes,” which turned out to be a huge understatement; the essay was included in my files, and it was so dripping with schmaltz that I couldn’t make it to the end. At one place, one of my readers must have confused me with somebody else, because she made a note in her text box about a summer job I didn’t have; it was way cooler than the one I actually had, so I’m not complaining.
Even the numerical indexes the readers used to grade my application were extremely subjective. Admissions officers selected numbers to represent how much my teachers and interviewers liked me. But while the first admissions officer thought that my alumni interview translated into a “9,” the highest score available, the other read the same document and gave me a more tepid “6.” The first admissions officer thought my teachers’ recommendations were both “8”s; the second gave them a “5” and a “6.”
