Page 26 - Alumni Horae: Vol. 94, No. 2 Winter 2014

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A large part of their role as
advisers is educating students
and their families about the
options available to them.
“You have to start with the fact
that our student population at
St. Paul’s looks very different than
it did 50, 30, 20 years ago,” says
Pratt, echoing Soule. “Why would
that group limit itself to a handful
of schools?”
Education comes early and often
for today’s SPS Sixth Formers and
their families. The 40-page College
Handbook is presented to each
student in his or her Fifth Form
winter, at which time students
begin meeting with their assigned
college advisers. The process in-
cludes college fairs, parent work-
shops, personalized attention to
crafting students’ college lists,
and a constant broadening of the
horizons for individual students,
who are encouraged to consider
colleges that present the “right fit”
for their particular needs. Initial
conversations involve students’
interests in terms of area of study
and urge them to consider in
which type of environment –
large or small, city or rural, liberal
arts college or research university,
and so on – they would thrive.
“We provide lots of education
about the landscape, the student’s
profile, and a range of great op-
tions, and try to get them to think
of building the search organically,”
says Pratt. “They can realize there
are a host of options across a
range of selectivity where they
would be happy and successful
and challenged. Our students continue to be remarkably
successful in this process – it is just a much broader list
of schools they consider and attend. We think of this
process as not just about getting into college, but one
of self-reflection. In the end they will emerge ready to
be independent thinkers and to make the very most of
their college education wherever they go.”
Hamlet Fort ’10 learned so much about himself
through his college process that, even though he had
strong options for matriculation, he decided to take
a gap year to regroup. He emerged with a college list
entirely different from the one he’d settled on as a Sixth
Former. Now a junior at Virginia’s Washington and Lee
– a school with a 19.4-percent
selectivity for the Class of 2016,
but one that has not always been
on the radar of SPS students –
Fort is thriving and is a perfect
example of the benefits of the
self-reflective process of which
Pratt speaks.
“I had more of an idea of who I
was personally and where I wanted
to make my mark,” says Fort, who
is currently enjoying a year abroad
in Ireland. “I decided I wanted a
smaller, more personal school, which
I definitely got at Washington and
Lee. My Sixth Form year at St. Paul’s
I was definitely approaching the
college process to reach some level
of prestige to almost validate my-
self and my existence at St. Paul’s.
I was thinking, ‘I just did four years
at St. Paul’s; I can’t go to a lesser
college. What will my teachers and
parents think?’ And that was wrong.
Students should do as much in-
ternal digging as they possibly can
to fully understand who they are
and not what the college is or what
their parents want. If students
have as defined a picture of who
they are as possible, the right fit
will come naturally.”
So many factors, says Pratt, go
into defining that fit. The matricu-
lation numbers for each SPS form
do not tell the full story. A student
might get into a highly selective
college and discover that school
does not offer a particular course
of study and opt for a larger insti-
tution with more resources. Or
financial aid may be a factor –
scholarship money offered at one
school that helps a student make a decision based on
affordability rather than prestige. Emily Scott ’12 turned
down an offer from Johns Hopkins to attend the Univer-
sity of Pittsburgh – another top research university
but one which she had deemed a “safety school” – on a
Chancellor’s Scholarship.
“I was a little caught up in the allure of a name school
at the time, so I didn’t actually see myself going to Pitt,”
says Scott, a double major in mathematical and molecu-
lar biology with a minor in chemistry, who is eying an
M.D./Ph.D. program. “The scholarship was a huge factor
in the decision. Knowing that I would go on to attend
either graduate school or medical school, I chose to go
“One of the myths
among the public
is that college
admission is
strictly about
academic
credentials. It is
a combination of
credentials and
other factors.”