<p>I originally wrote this for a local newsletter, but then realized that nobody would really get it except you guys. Tell me what you think!</p>
<p>Alice’s Adventures and College Confidential: A Parent Falls Down the Rabbit Hole</p>
<p>How Lewis Carroll, in 1865, managed to write a satire of a social networking internet site is a mystery. He managed to capture the wonder, the absurdity, and the shifting of identity and personality in an anonymous world beautifully.</p>
<p>Almost every participant on college confidential is anonymous (except for Roger Dooley, one of the site’s founders, and a smattering of official representatives of various colleges). One of the benefits of anonymity is that it is freeing one feels free to ask questions too embarrassingly simple to be asked IRL (in real life). These questions are the ones, of course, that everyone else wanted answered, too. The uninhibited atmosphere is disorienting at first:</p>
<p>“I almost wish I hadn’t gone down the rabbit hole and
yet and yet it’s rather curious, you know, this sort
of life! I do wonder what can have happened to me!”</p>
<p>However, just as some drivers turn into the equivalent of the incredible hulk behind the wheel, some College Confidential posters take their anonymity as a license to argue:</p>
<p>[Alice:] “Oh do let me help to undo it!”
“I shall do nothing of the sort,” said the Mouse, getting up and
walking away. “You insult me by talking such nonsense!”
“I didn’t mean it!” pleaded poor Alice. “But you’re so easily
offended, you know!”</p>
<p>The overall effect is that of attending an enormous costume party. Who are these other people? Can I be anyone I want? Just as Alice grows when she eats the little cakes, posters may be doing some “growing”, too. One suspects that some student posters are inflating their credentials. Is this dishonesty, or just an opportunity to ‘try on their better selves’? Alice ponders what she would do if she were called to come up from Wonderland:</p>
<p>It’ll be no use their putting their heads down and saying,
“Come up again, dear!” I shall only look up and say, “Who am
I then?” Tell me that first, and then, if I like being that person,
I’ll come up. If not, I’ll stay down here till I’m somebody else"</p>
<p>Lewis, amazingly, also manages to capture the frustration about the difficulty of college admissions and the seemingly ever-shifting messages of admissions officers. Preparing for college seems to be as challenging as playing croquet with hedgehog balls and aiming for soldier wickets:</p>
<p>“Besides all this, there was generally a ridge or furrow in the
way wherever she wanted to send the hedgehog to, and, as
the doubled-up soldiers were always getting up and walking
off to other parts of the ground, Alice soon came to the
conclusion that it was a very difficult game indeed.”</p>
<p>Students looking for advice on College Confidential on how to manage this difficult game are exhorted to “follow their passion”. That is, to try out new things, but excel; to take risks, but show a sustained interest. And, when all else fails, to remember that with 3000 colleges in this country there IS a college for them, and all works out for the best. Or, as the Duchess so clearly explains:</p>
<p>“I quite agree with you,” said the Duchess, “and the moral of
that is: ‘Be what you seem to be’ or if you’d like it put more
simply: ‘Never imagine yourself not to be otherwise than what
it might appear to others that what you were or might have
been was not otherwise than what you had been would have
appeared to them to be otherwise.’”</p>
<p>Fortunately, we parents know that we are giving our children a solid foundation in the basics, and that wherever they go to college, they will blossom. What are these basics?</p>
<p>“Reeling and Writhing, of course, to begin with,” the Mock Turtle
replied, " and the the different branches of arithmetic Ambition,
Distraction, Uglification, and Derision."</p>