Food For Thought

JHS
Fri, 07 Mar 2008 17:41:05 +0000

I don’t know that either of my kids loved “Life of the Mind” – it’s a little too slick and too eager to please. The postcards were somewhat important to my daughter, though. For whatever reason, they hit her just right, and reinforced the notion (that she was getting from lots of directions) that Chicago would be a good community for her.

The school’s marketing materials were pretty much beside the point for her brother, since he had a ton of information and had spent several days there, gone to classes, etc. But there were two pieces of material that really sealed the deal for him: (1) The poster that shows the entire university shot south-to-north from the air, with the perspective foreshortened so that it looks like the Loop is right behind it. Damn, that’s an exciting picture if you want to go to a cool university in a cool city. (2) The 2006 Scav Hunt list, which he carried around with him for weeks, showed to all his friends, studied . . . It was exactly his sense of humor, his frame of reference. He wanted to do (or try) everything on it, and to figure out all the weird things he didn’t understand. He might have chosen Yale if he’d had the chance, but before he made his decision he would have looked at that Scav Hunt list one more time . . . .

The other thing that is effective is Dean O’Neill’s letters. They are really good, and quite different from everybody else’s. Substantive. That was true with my older child. And just last week, we had dinner with friends including an 11th grader who had just gotten the form letter and was absolutely enthralled by it. She had never showed any interest in Chicago previously (despite having two very good, lifelong friends there), but that letter had put it on her list.