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This is really Alfie's story

This is really Alfie's story, but I'll rant about it for a while and she can blog her own thoughts on the subject if she wants (or if she has any):

My sister is a number.

She got her acceptance letter from the University of Michigan yesterday. She wants to go to a small school and the only reason I pushed her to apply to U-M in the first place was to avoid the looks that I got (or imagined I got) when I was choosing a college. People tended to look at me like 'Oh, you're going to Albion? You used to be so smart, but you must not have gotten in anywhere better.' They didn't understand that I hadn't applied in the first place because I had already rejected U-M myself (which is why I pushed Becky to apply and reject them officially).

Really, folks, the decision was mine. I didn't want to go to a big, big-name school. I didn't see Albion as a "back-up school" - it was my first choice. I didn't want to be a number - I wanted people to know me. I didn't want to sit with 100 other people in a lecture hall - I wanted to sit around a table with ten other students or have dinner at my professor's house. I wanted to be a French major, but also wanted to be free to take classes in Anthropology, Religion, Computer Science, History, English, Spanish, Chinese, Film, Art History, Psychology, Science, and Philosophy (as I have done over the past four years). I wanted to be free to study abroad. I wanted to be at a school that sends freshmen to France, Vietnam, Africa or Prague as class trips. I wanted to be taught by professors and not by TAs.

Becky has now been accepted to all of the schools she applied to. At Albion, Kalamazoo, and maybe even Mount Union, they treated her as an individual. Her acceptance letter made reference to things she had mentioned in her application essay and to her particular background as an athletic trainer. U-M, on the other hand, was quite predictable. The gist of the letter was

Dear [your name here].
Congratulations on being one of the Chosen Ones. We are great and you have been accorded the great honor of spending five or more years with us. Please send us your money by suchandsuchdate. If you want to communicate with us in the future, please include your student number, *******, as you are no longer human to us. Not that you were in the first place.
Sincerely,
The University of Michigan

It may be prestigious to go to Cornell or U-M, but what are you really going to get out of it? Wouldn't you rather be somewhere that cared about you, and not about Student 09849374? Support small colleges.

srah - Sunday, 13 January 2002 - 1:27 PM
Tags: university of michigan

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