How to Be Interesting

Quickwit may be fictitious, but similar applications are flooding colleges across the country. The problem is how to cull the lucky few from the overqualified many. Forced to refine their criteria, admissions directors now seek "highenergy" students (basal metabolism readings may be next) and especially "interesting people." How to seem interesting is every applicant's new nightmare. As one New York headmaster recently told anxious parents: "The only solution is to make sure that your boy builds a submarine in the basement."

Hundreds of Quickwits are responding with a cynicism beyond their years. The game, of course, has rules. This year's rage is backyard rocket building, but only fools mention the rockets that blew up, assuming they ever got built. Another gaffe is to boast of having organized a local chapter of the International Flat Earth Society. Stanford rejected one such pre-Columbian after having second thoughts about his intellect. On the other hand, the Stanford authorities suggested the right tone to take when they beamed at a budding scholar who claimed that he had collected and counted 50,000 ants.

Searing the Streets. For some years colleges have regarded summer loafing as downright sinful. Now they tend to take a dim view of jobs like stacking canned hash in the local supermarket. To achieve that pervasive cliche, a "meaningful summer," the applicant must raise his sights--help an archaeologist dig up Mayan tombs, perhaps, or watch some surgeon transplant hearts.

Actually, the possibilities are endless. One girl applying to a West Coast college claimed a blue belt in Aikido. Equally imaginative bids for seeming extra-curricularly exotic have deluged the colleges with alleged harpsichord builders, guinea-pig breeders, inventors of electronic nutcrackers, boy falconers, girls with pet iguanas, adolescent TV producers and fund-raisers for Biafra. One boy wrote starkly, "I have seared the streets," a sign of the new fad for ghetto toil, which is edging out mental-hospital work as an earnest of social conscience. On the other hand, artistic achievement still earns points. To that end, one Emory applicant used a particularly impressive approach: he sent an anthology of his poetry, urgently requesting its return because the only other copy was in the hands of a publisher. "I doubt that it was," says an Emory admissions man, "but it made a good story."

Premature Phonies. Some skeptics insist that the real lure for colleges is ethnic eccentricity. "This is the year for Chinese violinists," declares a jaded Harvard freshman, who just happens to be a Chinese violinist. "Next year it will be Jewish bagpipers." Others argue that the unbeatable applicant is a "Negro hockey player." Indeed, black has never been more beautiful. One Negro girl applying to Mills College simply stated: "I feel my becoming a Mills girl would greatly benefit the college." She got in.

In theory, the colleges are absolutely right to seek students with some consuming interest. But the search for the new I.Q. (interest quotient) is clearly turning too many adolescents into premature phonies. Senior Paul Taylor of Newton (Mass.) South High School has a point in wishing that colleges would simply choose qualified applicants by lottery. As it is, he says, "one is almost ashamed of getting into a good college" because of the salesmanship involved. Whether or not a lottery makes sense, there is a way to rise above the college race. For those with steady nerves, the solution is to do something spectacular--scale Mount McKinley in a wheelchair, perhaps--and then refuse to mention it to the colleges.

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