My college admissions essay: Swarthmore, ’05

(I was talking with a mentee about her sister’s admissions essay for college and she asked if I would share mine. And so I’m doing that publicly, because the world is better with transparency; as a first-gen student, I didn’t have access to examples and might have done better if I did. For context, this was written for Swarthmore College, which I ultimately attended as class of ’05.)

I do not know why I find this significant but it is on my mind as I read the essay guidelines for Swarthmore.  And so I write…

I hate time zones.  Through the miracle of a sun that determines how we set our watches, it is 6:37 in the evening here in Hong Kong and 2:38 in the morning at my home in Oregon.  As I sit at my computer, struggling with a decision that is tearing my apart, my parents are asleep, unaware that I so desperately need their guidance.  As much as I need the air that whispers past my lips, in-out, in-out, I need to here my father’s voice reminding me that only I can choose.

Suddenly, forcefully, I am struck with memories of home.  I cannot imagine the day when my parents pass from this world; I’ve been living essentially on my own for the last two years of my life, making decisions from day to day in a country that is not yet mine to call home, yet still I turn to them in my times of deepest need.  My friends insist that I am the only person they have ever met that actually likes his parents.

I am a rare thing here at my school in Hong Kong as well.  Though I spent my life taking it completely for granted, I have discovered a special distinction that I never know was my own; I am of a rare species, an American-accented “native speaker.”  Besides getting me an illegal job as an English tutor (I rationalize the fact that I do not have a worker’s visa with the comfort that my job is that of a public service), it has also qualified me to be petitioned by literally dozens of classmates, wanting the stamp of approval from not only a native speaker, but an American, as if being from the US gives me the special power to discern exactly what colleges want in a prospective student.

Though I have never admitted it, the responsibility frightens me.  The essays I read are a tangible part of people’s futures, a bit of their hopes and dreams put down on paper.  I feel a bit guilty at my doubts about college as the next step in my life every time a foreign student tells me that they are basing their entire future on getting into a prestigious university.  Without the big name attached to their diploma, they will describe themselves as failures and worse, so will their family and friends.  A friend from Pakistan is not allowed to apply to any school that is not first tier.  “My father refuses to allow me to go anywhere else,” he said.  “Its either Ivy League or nothing.”

I cannot understand that kind of pressure.  When I told my parents recently that I was thinking of deferring college for a year or possibly not going at all, my father just laughed over the long-distance line.  “We trust you to do what you think is best,” said my mother.  “Just keep your options open.”  Everyone else I had shared my plans with looked at me like I had the plague, and started pointing out why I couldn’t get a 1590 on my SAT’s and not go to college; I could have kissed that brown plastic telephone as yet again, my parents reaffirmed my faith in humanity. 

But now, the brown plastic telephone sleeps in its cradle and so do my parents, so many miles away.  Now, when I so desperately need them to reassure me that I will get through this.  If only it had come a few days from now, when my parents will visit Asia for the first time in their lives and hold me once again.  With my brother in Africa and me in Asia, this was the first Christmas my family was not all together.  I tried not to notice.

Today, I notice.

Even with my own college applications gathering virtual in my computer, I spend much of my day wading through the essays e-mailed to me by my fellow students.  It sort of strange cosmic pattern, all the e-mail I get seems to begin with the words “Dear Matt- How was your Christmas?  I’m very sorry to give you more work but…” and have two or three essays attached for proofing.  All, that is, except for one girl who managed to send me six essays and a peer review, and another who just wanted to wish me a Merry Christmas.  She isn’t applying to college until next year.

One mainland PRC student was particularly polite and so I started on her essays almost as soon as I received them (if you don’t at least try to be courteous, your essay goes to the bottom of the stack; hey, I’m human.)  Her first piece told of her dedication to honesty above personal gain.  She told the eloquent story of how, in a local scholastic competition, she tied with another student for the highest score.  In order to break the tie, each student was offered their choice of a 10, 20, or 30-point question.  If answered correctly, the points would be added to their score; if incorrectly, the points would be subtracted.

Her opponent was forced to pick first and, after choosing a 20-point question, he answered incorrectly and was docked the points.  All this PRC girl had to do was choose a 10 point question and she would be the winner by default, a course of action that seemed so logical that the match judges were about to call the winner as she sat there, until she suddenly exclaimed she wanted a 30 point question.

“At that moment, I was wandering between honor and honesty. I was confused and unable to abandon either of them. Both seemed important to me but I could not own them at the same time.”

In true Hollywood style, she missed the question and first place, all because of her honesty and integrity.  I was touched, even to the point that I stopped reading and went into the next room to share her morality with a friend.  “This is why I like reading these essays,” I told him.  “Every time, I find out how truly beautiful people can be.”

And then I read her second essay.  Equally touching, it was the story of how she had struggled upwards from poverty, winning a scholarship to a prestigious school full of wealthy children who she was desperate to impress.  She was ashamed of her job selling newspapers on the street and was terrified that someone would discover her secret, until finally, a teacher learned of her struggle and took her for a life lesson at a luxurious hotel.

She said, “look at the receptionists in front of the gate. Every day, their job is to open the door for millionaires, show the way to them and carry the luggage for them. Their manners are neither overbearing nor servile, but polite, confident and appropriate. They may not necessarily admire those millionaires. They have their own satisfactory choice. That’s enough. Money is not everything. As soon as you know your choice is fit for you and accept everything in your life bravely, you will acquire self-esteem and confidence.”

I almost cried as my stomach constricted in my stomach and destroyed my former warmth.  It was another truly touching story.  Unfortunately, I’ve heard it before.  A year ago, another PRC student asked me to read this exact same application essay.  Not similar, not nearly alike, but identical.  So much for honesty and integrity and the hard road walked.  In order to compete for a single spot, a first prize, this girl is taking every 10-point question she can.  And now I’m involved.

I want to hate her for making me have to make this decision.  There is no moral guidebook for this, and I am completely lost.  You wanted to know about something that has changed me; here is my inner earthquake as it happens.  One essay and so many small wounds.  Can anything be trusted enough to inspire?  In the end, after all this, how can I ever convince you that this essay itself is truth, something to be honored and treated with importance?  Beyond that, I am left with a decision to make.  To do nothing is to condone a direct lie, to be a silent partner as she signs the line that says this essay is her original work.  Or I can tell her that I know and risk a confrontation that may do more harm than good.  Or I notify the university itself and deprive her of the opportunity that means so much to both her and her family.  Can I justify that, stealing away someone’s future because they deliberately lied?

More than anything, I am hurt.  Her lie is a betrayal and however irrational, I am angry with her for making me question every essay I read from now on.  There are some questions we shouldn’t have to ask.

9:04 pm.  Another hour and the sun will be up in Oregon, its 6am rays streaming in my parent’s window and lighting up their world.  Another three hours and it will be safe to wake up the brown plastic phone and seek reassurance in the humanity of family.  My father will advise me on a course of action, or more likely, remind me to trust myself.  Someday, I’ll figure out what that means.

White women find working with me polarizing. I know because I asked.

(This is a post primarily about the results of an experiment, but I did build a tool as part of it that you can use to gather behavioral feedback from former coworkers; you can go directly to WorkWithMeAgain.com to use it for free without reading about the journey or my data.)

It started, as so many of my projects do, with a conversation on Twitter. I proposed a public Glassdoor-like system with a single rating: would you be willing to work with this person again? Slice that by demographics and we might have a tool worth building to increase inclusion in the workplace.

After much healthy debate about the risks (it could be used as a harassment tool, for example), much of the value seemed to stem from the collection of feedback itself. Shifting away from the goal of a public system for discovering bad actors, it is worth asking: does the average person even know whether former coworkers would want to work with them again?  

I certainly don’t and especially not in any systematic way; despite being much-touted by thought leaders in the management space, organized feedback collection is relatively rare.  For years, I’ve had a link at the bottom of my email that allowed people to leave me anonymous feedback via Google Form and I’ve received plenty of responses, some helpful and some less so (apparently, someone doesn’t like my cowboy boots).  But I never collected demographic data or any concrete behavioral metrics, like willingness to work together again.

So I started building.  I iterated through several versions of both the survey questions and the analysis before arriving at the results I’ll talk about today.  The dominant behavioral measure is a simple 1-5 scale: “Given the opportunity, would you actively avoid or seek out working with me again?” With that, I asked gender and ethnic identity, age when we worked together, reporting relationship, and recency of the relationship.  

To avoid as much bias as possible, the final survey was sent out indiscriminately to ~800 people I’ve worked with over my ~15 year career.  The sampling wasn’t perfect, because people have moved between companies, I’m not connected to everyone I ever worked with, and many people who have worked with me don’t have LinkedIn profiles (due to socioeconomic skews of who is on LinkedIn).  But this whole project is a lesson in not letting the perfect be the enemy of the good; it is easy to find reasons that feedback will be incomplete, but that isn’t a reason to not get feedback at all.

In all, I received ~70 completed surveys, which seems extraordinarily high given what we know about average survey response rates.  Since I phrased the survey request as an experiment, the results of which I was committed to publishing, there may have been some increased promoting pressure but I’d like to believe that we might actually be on to something here; people want to give feedback, if we choose to hear it.

Before we get into the result that drove the title of this post, let’s start with resolving one important concern that came up in the Twitter discussion: that many people would choose not to add demographics for fear of being identified.  This didn’t appear to be the case, as only ~10% chose not to volunteer full demographics.  Assuming that response rates were high enough, it is thus likely that meaningful demographic filters can be applied.

Now the results at a high level, with the boring stuff first.  If you want the nitty gritty, I’ve linked to a copy of the report so you can see what you’ll actually get if you do this yourself using WorkWithMeAgain.com, although I have redacted the free entry portion to preserve the anonymity of respondents.  I also hadn’t yet added the recency question (which was the great suggestion of Leigh Honeywell) in the version of the survey I sent out, so there is no data for that section.

The basic finding is that statistically speaking, there were no significant differences in the averages within demographic groups.  Men/women/non-binary people and white/non-white people were equally likely to want to work with me.  And the averages were all above three on the scale, meaning generally all of those groups would seek out working with me again.

Does that mean I’m free of bias?  Of course not; as a white male, I absolutely have racist and sexist associations that express themselves as behaviors, despite my intentions.  What it does mean is that at least in this sample, these biases were not large enough to meaningfully affect any particular demographic subsegment, which is a good thing.

There are some interesting correlations that are neither good nor bad.  For example, the older someone was when they worked with me, the more likely they are to want to work with me again, which means I may need to change how I relate to younger people in the workplace.  I can come across as condescending, so this is a known problem that I actively work on, and that data backs it up.

Where the data starts to get interesting is when we look at standard deviations.  So rather than how much would people seek me out generally, how much disagreement was there within the group about that behavior.

I am, unsurprisingly, a fairly polarizing coworker.  I’m outspoken on social issues, have a distinctive personality and work style, and frequently clash with others who I perceive as acting against the group interest.  I’m not unaware of this, although I do vary at times in how much I see it as a strength, weakness, or simple fact.

This polarization, however, is not evenly distributed.  Even though men and women/non-binary people don’t differ in their average desire to work together again, they do differ in their polarization: women have much stronger feelings about avoiding or seeking me out, as do people I managed and people who worked with me across teams.  In my case, because I have enough data to cross gender and ethnicity, the finding is really around white women: men and non-white women consistently would seek out working with me, while white women are basically either 1s or 5s.

This is in someways rather puzzling. For example, I once lead a customer service team of ~100 people who were almost all non-white women and subsequently outsourced the function, resulting in a significant layoff. While I remain convinced that it was the right decision that was made in the best interest of our customers, all of those people would be entirely justified in avoiding working with me again. So I would have expected a potential main effect of ethnic identity or at least an interaction with gender.

I’ll confess, I don’t know what the varying feedback from white women means yet.  And that’s a fine thing: survey data like this rarely gives us a conclusive answer.  Instead, good quantitative analysis clues us in to where to do qualitative analysis; data tells us what, not why.  For me, the survey is a jumping off point to conversation that I can use to improve and I intend to seek out further conversation, particularly with white women who I’ve worked with before.

Feedback isn’t a silver bullet for changing our behavior.  But it can be a start.  Personally, I’ve committed to publishing this data and to following up with the 800 people in the initial sample, as well as periodically adding new co-workers with each new job.  As part of that, I’ll also resurface the link to the anonymous feedback form I already have setup; for any of the 10 people who would prefer not to work with me again, if you are willing, I’d deeply appreciate you using that to give me feedback on what I could have done differently to change your experience with me.  Finally, readers of the writeup can use the same form to give suggestions on actions I should take or email me at matt@mattwallaert.com if you don’t need anonymity.  I want to do better, I’m committed to doing better, and I hope when I one day rerun this experiment, the results will be different.

If you’re committed to doing the same kind of work, the tools I used are now publicly available at WorkWithMeAgain.com.  It will allow you to copy the Google Sheet that contains all the calculations, as well as instructions on how to launch the survey to your former coworkers.  I am absolutely convinced that putting in the effort to gather meaningful behavioral feedback can be a key component in how we change our individual behaviors, as the collective culture is simply made up of those individual behaviors; if enough of us do this, we can live in a substantially better world.

Side Note: As usual, this project required collaborators: frontend coding from Grayson Null and design by Patricio Hunterkhozner. Plus feedback from a WhatsApp group full of folks working toward inclusion and 70 people who were willing to share their thoughts about working with me again. It has been a good year for WorkWorthDoing projects (Mediocre White Men and Project 4255, with another on the way soon) but they don’t happen without a bunch of people willing to work at reduced rates and in suboptimal circumstances.

Posting my survey results, online and unfiltered, is making me nervous. And that’s a novel feeling, since I usually don’t really feel nervous in circumstances that don’t involve heights (I really don’t like heights). That makes this a rare brave moment, because if I don’t normally feel the feelings, I’m not actually being brave: it is easy to do something with low inhibiting pressure. There is no concrete outcome I am afraid of…but I’m certainly afraid.