{"id":34429,"date":"2010-08-27T14:00:25","date_gmt":"2010-08-27T18:00:25","guid":{"rendered":"http:\/\/home.bates.edu\/?p=34429"},"modified":"2016-02-04T15:55:17","modified_gmt":"2016-02-04T20:55:17","slug":"chacko-10-impressions","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/2010\/08\/27\/chacko-10-impressions\/","title":{"rendered":"Revisiting her first impressions of ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½"},"content":{"rendered":"

About to graduate, a student circles back<\/h3>\n

By Becca Chacko ’10<\/em><\/p>\n

I played with the hair bands looped around my wrists and found myself saying \u201cum\u201d and \u201clike\u201d just as I did when I was 17 and being interviewed for admission to ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½.<\/p>\n

\"chakko-farrar-7041\"<\/a>But this time it was just three weeks before I would graduate from ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½, and I was on the Olin concert hall stage playing the role of a high school senior.
\n<\/p>\n

The occasion was Maine Day, when counselors and college-hunting students from high schools around the state visit ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ \u2014 this year, more than 100 attendees from about two-thirds of Maine high schools.<\/p>\n

The program focused on searching for and applying to colleges. ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ admissions staff proffered essay-writing tips and a roadmap for the process, and staged a mock reading of applications. Current ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ students from Maine, sharing the benefits of hindsight, recalled their own searches.<\/p>\n

As for me, a senior admissions fellow, I helped assistant dean Johie Farrar \u201903 lead a college-interview workshop. I had interviewed more than 50 prospective applicants last fall, and got quite used to talking about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½: Why I love it, what needs improvement, how a prospective student could succeed here.<\/p>\n

The resume that began \u201cI am a responsible and friendly individual\u201d seemed distant and unimpressive.<\/p>\n

So now here I was in the mock interview that unexpectedly reawakened my 17-year-old self, once again being asked to explain not only which classes and activities I undertook in high school, but why I chose them and what they meant to me.<\/p>\n

It felt strange to revisit my resume from Palo Alto High. The resume that began \u201cI am a responsible and friendly individual\u201d and offered my neatly bulleted accomplishments now seemed distant and unimpressive. Why did I once feel so strongly about Prop 77? What did I really accomplish as president of the Second Harvest food drive? There on the Olin stage, I couldn\u2019t even remember things as basic as the high school subject I\u2019d struggled with the most.<\/p>\n

But Johie\u2019s questions did help me clarify for the Maine high school students what I love most about ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½. When she asked what I was seeking in a college, I said I wanted a place where students could collaborate without cutthroat competition, integrate into a small community where they felt like names and not numbers, and become broadly educated, well-rounded scholars.<\/p>\n

\"Anticipation\"<\/a>And then I remembered why I volunteered to help Johie in the first place \u2014 my own real interview as a prospective ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ student. It cemented my decision to attend. The relaxed atmosphere of Lindholm House, the senior interviewer who put her feet up on her chair, contributed to my seeing ÀÖ²¥´«Ã½ as a collaborative and comfortable environment. It was a place where my interviewer was trying to get to know me, not to trip me up. \u2014 Now at the Boston-area consulting firm Circadian, Becca Chacko will enter the Harvard Business School\u2019s 2+2 Program in 2012.<\/em><\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

About to graduate, a student circles back By Becca Chacko ’10 I…<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":221,"featured_media":0,"comment_status":"open","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"_hide_ai_chatbot":false,"_ai_chatbot_style":"","associated_faculty":[],"_Page_Specific_Css":"","_bates_restrict_mod":false,"bates_author_byline_override":"","_estimated-read-time":"","_post-template":"","_header-color":"","_photo-credit":"","_header-effect":"","override_related_with_tag":"","_table_of_contents_display":false,"_table_of_contents_location":"","_table_of_contents_disableSticky":false,"_is_featured":false,"footnotes":"","_bates_seo_meta_description":"","_bates_seo_block_robots":false,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_id":0,"_bates_seo_sharing_image_twitter_id":0,"_bates_seo_share_title":"","_bates_seo_canonical_overwrite":"","_bates_seo_twitter_template":""},"categories":[11009],"tags":[11048,10043,10856,2327],"class_list":["post-34429","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","hentry","category-the-college","tag-accessibility","tag-admission","tag-bates-magazine","tag-class-of-2010"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34429","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/221"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=34429"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34429\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":87696,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/34429\/revisions\/87696"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=34429"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=34429"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.bates.edu\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=34429"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}