Focus On Fit

As the school year winds down, college admissions season is ramping up. The Common App might not open until August, but once your APs are over, it’s time to start figuring out your college list. To do so, it’s more important than ever to see beyond the rankings and focus on fit. Test-optional policies have driven application numbers to new heights, while available spots have decreased due to Zoom-ed out admits taking gap years. Acceptance rates should rebound—at least a little—from last year’s historic lows, but the best way to make your case to admissions officers is to show how you and the college of your dreams are the perfect match.

Fit can be hard to fathom, though, especially if you’re not sure what you want from your college experience—besides, you know, actually being able to show up in person. Maybe you already have a color-coded spreadsheet comparing the merits of every engineering school with gourmet dorm food and a competitive gaming club. But maybe it’s still murky. So let’s break it down.

The first thing to consider is geography. Excited by the idea of being buried under feet of snow from December to March? Can’t live without Texas BBQ? Want to be on a subway line, or at least the Metro-North? Answers to questions like these can help narrow your choices—as can considerations of size. If knowing everyone in your class—and maybe the whole campus—sounds appealing, a small liberal arts college might be the best bet. On the other hand, if you want a student body that can fill an entire stadium, the flagship state schools could be in your future.

The next circle in the Venn diagram is academics. For those with a major in mind, be sure to explore what classes are offered, who’s teaching them, and how many students are signing up. Are there opportunities to work closely with professors? Do most majors engage in research or write senior theses? For the undecided, bear in mind that knowing what you don’t want to study can be just as helpful as already having mapped out your next four years. If math + you = never again or you want to consign history to its proverbial dustbin, consider schools with open curriculums, where you’ll have the most freedom to explore your interests.

Of course, college is about much more than papers and problem sets. If you’re STEM-oriented, explore the labs you could join to do the kind of paradigm-shifting research that, after graduation, could help you land a job or entry into a PhD program. If your goal is to drop out by sophomore year to run your own start-up, make sure your dream school has an incubator to get you going (and a generous leave-of-absence policy in case your funding dries up). To get credit for gaining real-world experience, consider schools with strong co-op programs, where you can burnish your transcript while building your resume.

Perhaps the most important aspect of college—and the aspect that’s hardest to get a handle on—is culture. Do you want an atmosphere that’s preppy, hipster, nerdy, sporty? Are you down for deep philosophical conversations in the dorm? Are you more excited for kick-off than Kierkegaard? Do you want to not just join the political protest, but organize it? To get a sense for campus life, check out student newspapers, humor magazines, student club websites, and the endless YouTube videos. Also take a look at sites like Unigo that feature student surveys and reviews. Thankfully, campuses are starting to reopen, so you should be able to visit in person this summer and fall. When you do, be sure to talk to current students. Most of them will be more than happy to tell you about their experiences—and if they aren’t, well, that will tell you something, too.

Navigating through all the information out there can be daunting, but the more you learn about what’s available, the more you’ll recognize what you want. So as school comes to an end, start thinking about where you’d love to be eighteen months from now. The perfect fit is out there—just waiting for you to discover it.

— Colin G.

Colin is Head College Process Strategist at Intelligentsia. He received his BA in English and History from the University of Pennsylvania, his MA in History and MA in Humanities from Stanford University, and his MFA in Fiction from the University of Houston. He specializes in College Process, History, Literature, Writing, German, and Standardized Tests with 20 years of experience tutoring and teaching at the high school, college, and graduate levels.

A Reflection on Resiliency & Grief

On October 1, 2020, the organization Brooklyn Heals Together hosted A Service of Remembrance & Healing, a virtual event to honor those lost to COVID-19 in the North Brooklyn community that Intelligentsia calls home and beyond. The organizers, Diana Zelvin and J. Rebecca Pridmore, asked our president and founder, Hilda Guttormsen, to be one of the speakers that night. In honor of this year’s collective grief, we share her address from that evening with you all.

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It’s a deep honor to be a part of this service today and to gather with all of you, even online. To begin to talk about resilience, I do need to talk about grief and mourning. Grief is the organic process that begins when we experience the acute pain of loss. It is our psyche's way—its medicine—to deal with the pain. Mourning is what we do together to express and move through this grief collectively. We mourn with our family, with our friends, with our community. We’ve all experienced such unimaginable loss from Covid19. Most painfully the loss of loved ones, but we’re also grieving the loss of the rhythm of our lives, our connections, our work, the experience of gathering together for performances, celebration, and to mourn those we’ve lost.

As a Jungian psychoanalyst, I learned in my training that grief typically occurs for 6-12 months after a loss. I learned that there can be five stages to the grieving process: denial, anger, bargaining, depression and acceptance. I intellectually tried to understand this profound process and recognize the timing and the stages, but it soon became clear that each person’s process is so different and what one person may need could look nothing like the next. Helping someone grieve requires a psychoanalytic attunement to the individual, a willingness to be with the person where they are for as long as they need to be. To be in the discomfort of not trying to fix or make better, but to be with someone in their unbearable pain so that eventually, they can access a self-regulating principle nascent within them.

I became deeply and personally familiar with grief when my husband, the father of our three children, Matt Seidman, slipped away from this life a little over two years ago. Everything I thought I knew about grief became insignificant—this experience of tragic loss defies language. There are no words for the wound that opens up in your heart when someone you love is taken suddenly. All we can do is surrender to this pain and move through it in our own time with whatever support we can find and is available to us. I was extraordinarily blessed to be caught and held by our community, dear friends, family, and the kids’ school, but my greatest lessons in navigating grief have come from my children. At four, eight, and ten, they had no degree in mental health or a therapeutic understanding about stages of grief and how to process the exquisite pain of losing their father—they just did. They are my greatest teachers in resilience.

In the wake of watching their father die, they still needed to be held when they cried, fed when they were hungry, sleep when they were tired, laugh and play when they felt like it, and rage at me or each other when that’s what they needed to express. They still needed routine and space to acclimate to the new reality, a reality without their father. They still needed to be silly, to dance and to sing. Even in the midst of tragedy they didn’t stop being children, they didn’t stop being themselves. Together we found our way.

Resilience isn’t a method or a treatment plan. Resilience is our life force that is within all of us, in every heartbeat in every breath. It’s our animating principle. Sometimes it takes our world falling apart to realize that we are ok. We are resilient because we’re still here.

I’ve found a lot of resonance these days in the Greek myth of Pandora. In this story, a beautiful woman created by the gods is gifted a magnificent box that she is told must remain sealed. Her curiosity overcomes her and she cannot resist opening the box. Pandora unleashes disease, misery and death upon the world. Pandora is stung by the evil creatures that are realeased over and over again and she slams the box shut. Pandora cries in pain but can still hear a voice inside the box. Believing that the worst had already been released and no more harm could come to her, she opens the box again. What emerges is hope in the form of a dragonfly alighting on her wounds and healing them. Although Pandora has released the ills, she has also released the hope to follow.

— Hilda Guttormsen, LP

[Original address has been edited lightly for online publication.]

Student Spotlight: Reframing Remote Learning at Barnard

Student Spotlight features pieces authored by current and former Intelligentsia scholars. Today’s post comes to us from Taylor, a junior at Barnard College, telling us about her experience with online learning over the last two semesters.

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Online learning began under the guise of temporariness. “We’ll be back after spring break” suddenly became something more indefinite. The communal living spaces, shared bathrooms, and dining halls, plus the inevitability of parties, means that colleges are possibly the highest risk educational environment. We’re also arguably the least important. While other school-aged children are going through such crucial stages of brain development (not to mention some of them can’t even read in order to log on to a computer), college-level classes translate much easier to Zoom.

In March, the second semester of my sophomore year, Barnard College announced that we were permanently online for the rest of the year. Like most of my peers I was too overwhelmed by the looming pandemic to pay much attention to the nuances of remote learning. In fact, it seemed irrational that I still had essays and finals due during a time when the world was both literally and figuratively ending. The grief of mourning opportunities that never came to fruition (missed internships, nights with friends, the independence of living away from your parents) seemed selfish but also important. School was just a part of survival, another box I had to tick in order to get through the month.

When classes started again in September, instead of an atmosphere of panic, there was a certain acceptance of our shared situation, due to an increased understanding of the virus, low case levels in New York, and a whole summer for professors to develop a more adaptable curriculum. Nothing can replace the sense of place that a real classroom creates and the productivity of studying in the library, but there are certain aspects of online classes I have begun to enjoy, maybe even love this year. Firstly, no commuting time to and from classes means my days are much more my own, and nothing can beat feeling hungry in class just to turn around to your own fridge. I have also really appreciated the geographic diversity that has been created, having classmates, and even professors, physically in other countries is definitely unique. Deliberately selecting my classes to be as small in size as possible and favoring seminars, which only meet once a week, have been other ways I minimize my Zoom fatigue and continue to build a sense of community.

Like many college students this year, I debated whether or not to take a semester (or even a year) off from school. Ultimately, because of an in-person internship I have through Barnard, and a need for stability and structure during a time of chaos, I decided to continue attending. Do I feel like my college experience has been ruined? If I have learned anything about college during this time, it would have to be that the idea of a college experience means nothing compared to the choices we need to make in order to live fulfilling and healthy personal lives. If that means sacrificing the social aspect of school in order to live safely in a pandemic, so be it.

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Taylor is an NYC native, studying visual art and art history at Barnard College. A painter and with a love of baking, her favorite place in the city is the Brooklyn Botanic Garden.

Tutor Spotlight: Hyped On Melancholy with Bob Ryan

Aside from being brilliant educators, Intelligentsia tutors have a variety of outside interests and pursuits, which we take great pleasure in highlighting here. In addition to teaching and tutoring, Bob Ryan is an essayist and co-editor of Hyped On Melancholy, a quarterly magazine that celebrates and examines the more somber side of music. We love the magazine and today we’re speaking with Bob all about Hyped, why essays are such a rich format, and much more.

Intelligentsia: We know you as a tutor, teacher, and curriculum-creator multi-hyphenate but who are you outside of education?

Bob Ryan: An expansive, tricky question! I think fundamentally the thing that unites my many hyphens -- and the person I am outside or alongside them -- is that I am someone who has always been really, really invested in art and literature (speaking broadly). Recently a family member asked me why I went to graduate school in the first place, and I didn't really have a great answer beyond "I was super interested in books and I felt like I couldn't learn it all on my own." As I worked my way through an MA and eventually PhD I had occasion to start writing more seriously and I became interested in writing in a lot of different forms and about a lot of different topics not strictly speaking "related" to my dissertation. One of the topics that clicked kind of immediately was music, in large part because it was something I had always had a special relationship to, whether it was playing in bands or seeing shows or just being a really enthusiastic fan. And so I started writing essays for the Los Angeles Review of Books about various musical concerns and became preoccupied with what it meant to write intelligent music criticism (and I’m not sure I’ve yet found an answer!).

Hyped On Melancholy seems like it may be a natural expansion of that last bit. How did the magazine come about?

Hyped grew out of an idea I'm sure was kicking around my head for years, but wasn’t given voice until I had a conversation with my dear friend Adam Southard (of the band 100% Black and Ithaca's wonderful record store Angry Mom Records). Adam and I had had the good fortune to see the reunion tour of a band called Neutral Milk Hotel somewhere around 2011 or 2012, and we both had a really meaningful connection to that music, and the show, as I remember it, was a somewhat emotional affair. And so time passed and I was living in Chicago doing a PhD and was talking to about Neutral Milk Hotel and texted Adam about a particular song -- “Holland 1945” -- and he immediately replied "Oh man that song gets me so hyped on melancholy!" If you knew Adam, you would know that he is prone to exactly this kind of compact burst of genius, but this particular phrase just stuck with me. It seemed like a really useful way to describe a whole category of music I was interested in, which is, put simply: sad songs that are counterintuitively fun or joyful to listen to. Or even more broadly, I was interested in the way pop music is so often predicated on heartbreak and frustration and anxiety and yet it’s such a joyous expression of those things. The contradiction seemed really dense and meaningful and I wanted to explore it. Shortly thereafter, I met my co-editor Sarah Osment for the first time in person (we had "met" on Twitter maybe a year before) and she seemed really smart, and really cool, and really perfect for the magazine (all things that proved to be 100% true) and so I pitched her the idea. She immediately was on board and so we wrote up a little description and asked some of our smart friends to write essays, and we wrote some essays and bought a domain name.

Why that format—essays, often quite personal?

I think because essays were what I knew! And I liked the idea of people being vulnerable and not terribly arch about their tastes. Our first issue has this incredible piece by David Hollingshead about Taking Back Sunday and male intimacy and some of the really terrible gender politics going on in the emo and pop punk of my generation's youth, and David was able to work through those contradictions in a really honest and rewarding way, and he did so with his own past on full display. I thought that was incredibly smart and brave and -- when done right -- extremely effective. I didn't want it to be a reviews site or like, a place for hot takes. I think the essay form allows you to work things out and be really thoughtful, to be personal but also intelligent. It's a very malleable form!

Speaking of youth, what would you say to someone who isn't able to see the "hyped" part of the equation just yet?

I liked the idea of “hyped” because it connotes excitement or interest rather than happiness. Music is a strange affective companion, and sometimes it just feels perversely good to dwell with the melancholic. I think moments of being "hyped" will happen to anyone who is sincerely invested in the music. Maybe it's hard to see in our especially turbulent moment, but I think the simple act of listening closely and taking music really seriously will eventually lead back to excitement, comfort, and moments of joy. It always has for me, at least!

In that way, it seems like sad music can not only run parallel to a “happy life,” but even help keep it on the tracks?

Yeah, I think it actually might even expose happiness as the wrong thing to be after. Happiness, after all, doesn't exist -- at least not as a static state. We have moments of happiness and moments of grief, moments of boredom and ennui, and so on. Paying attention to something like sad music (or the sad undercurrent in happy music) has always given me a sort of comfort, that the way I am feeling has been and is shared. It's kind of hokey, but being able to be excited about music with friends is one of life's great transient joys.

In your experience, does a song need to have sad lyrics to be sad?

It doesn't have to have lyrics at all! One of my very favorite bands is Explosions In The Sky, who make incredibly soaring and melancholy instrumental music. My favorite category though, is sad lyrics set to a kind of ebullient music.

You mentioned playing in bands. How does your musical background influence your writing and editorial voice now?

I grew up playing guitar and piano, but I'm not sure I was ever especially gifted at either. I never could hang around lessons very long. I would learn enough to get by and then go off and fiddle around on my own. I think the main thing playing in bands and writing music gave me was a more intimate sense of how songs work -- how verses and choruses work, how melodies can shift the affective weight of a song. The importance of a hook! It just helped me pay a kind of close attention to things.

What’s the best thing about collaborating with your co-editor, Sarah Osment?

She's so much smarter than me! Sarah is someone with an incredibly sensitive and intricate mind, especially in writing--she can see what an essay needs almost intuitively, and she has an extremely dialed-in sense of voice. She's also incredibly kind and generous as a person, and I've found that working with people you like is the single most important part of any undertaking.

The impossible ask—what's your favorite Hyped piece?

Depending on one's tastes there are a lot of lovely pieces: I think one that balances intelligence and graceful personal detail is Peter Kim's piece on Mitski. Sarah's piece on Wilson Phillips is extremely well-tuned along those lines as well. One for full-on tears is Jared O'Connor on bluegrass and his brother's passing.

I would be remiss if I didn’t also ask you for a perfect melancholy song recommendation.

On the turntable at this very moment is Nick Cave's "I Need You" from his record Skeleton Tree, but, man, that one is pretty dark. One of the songs that I find useful to think about a lot is "They'll Need a Crane" by They Might Be Giants. Oh, and all of In the Wee Small Hours by Frank Sinatra. A masterpiece of melancholy if there ever was one.

What's something you've learned from creating and editing a music magazine?

To be 2000% less precious about edits when I am on the other end. Editors have eyes that writers don't, and that is an important lesson in humility.

Finally, can you shout out an educator that was influential in your life?

In my master’s degree, William Spanos, who has now sadly passed, taught me Moby-Dick and changed my life forever in that he put on full display what it meant to be fully committed to a work of art. In undergrad, it was Jennifer Stoever, who taught a class on pop music and representation, and whose book on race and sound is endlessly useful. My best friend, James Fitz Gerald, though -- who I met during my MA -- has probably taught me the most over the years in wide-ranging and energizing conversations.