Applying themselves

During his freshman year, Greg Ruiz would take his little brother, Tommy, to play for his Special Olympics basketball team and supervise to make sure everything went smoothly.

He watched the players — whose disabilities ranged from Down Syndrome (like his brother) to Cerebral Palsy — shoot around, run drills and erupt ecstatically if they made a single basket. After several sessions, he was asked by the head coach to become an official assistant. He agreed.

"It was a lot of fun," Ruiz said. "It was just cool because even with little kids, they do drills and even though it's low-key, they still want to win. But these kids, they didn't care. Every time they made a basket, they were just overjoyed."

But even though Ruiz coached for two years — stopping last year when his brother decided not to attend practices as regularly — he did not write down the experience on his Princeton application. He did not write about working in a veterans' hospital for a short time, or working with his class on a project to renovate decrepit schools in his northern California neighborhood.

"I know I could have put it on the list," said Ruiz, who is the student president of Jesuit High School, regarding his work with the Special Olympics team. "I had a quite a few things on there already. It kind of lessened the experience a little bit. I could have put it on. When I did it, I just fell into it. I wasn't thinking about putting it on anything in the future."

Ruiz did not want to cheapen the experience, or make it seem more significant than it was — even to get into Princeton.

Andrew Baldwin had a different problem.

Baldwin, who goes to Central Bucks East High School in Pennsylvania, made films with friends in his spare time, starting out with action movies and switching to comedy "as soon as we saw how funny those could be by accident." He played three instruments in two different bands — including his father's neighborhood band. But he did virtually no activities associated with the community or his school. And his parents began to worry.

"My mom and I would — and we still do — get into arguments," Baldwin said. "She thinks that I don't help out around the house, and that I need to do more work to get into college, whereas my dad sees me doing a lot of thinking and writing and learning on my own. He sees my interest in learning, and he wasn't that worried about it because he thought I was the type of person who should get into the Princeton."

But both parents agreed the situation was growing serious. They demanded that Baldwin begin a more tangible activity, and he agreed. So he began to volunteer at the local hospital last year, an experience he has ambivalent feelings toward.

When he walks with a patient down the halls, Baldwin feels helpless. He loves the people and the conversations they have about their lives, but his job is small and he sees their suffering.

"I feel like I'm somehow making their day worse because that's what they hate: being transported. Their day is [composed] of waiting and being pushed down halls. So I love the people and some of the patients I've enjoyed talking to and feeding, but I really started to not like the hospital as far as the organization goes because I watch the patients sitting in the halls in pain and no one's doing anything and I'm not allowed to do anything."

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Though he is glad he works there, without parental prodding he would likely have continued his more private pursuits instead of school activities. Either path is worthwhile. But only one is easily recorded on a college application.

"Had he been on the yearbook committee and been a class president, I would have felt more confident," said Baldwin's mother, Karin. "On the other hand, I felt that how he was using his time definitely made him an excellent candidate, but I wasn't so sure about his possibility for admission."

As Tarleton Cowen has also noticed, sometimes the strength of a student and her odds of admission are not necessarily the same thing.

Cowen, a student at Milton Academy in Milton, Mass., has seen people she looked up to intellectually rejected, and others, who were more concerned with grades than learning, accepted.

"I've tried not to let that influence my approach," she said.

But she wondered, after watching a senior she admired for his intellectual curiosity not be accepted into Yale while a girl who quietly grounded out her grades in the library was accepted to Harvard.

She questioned "what colleges were actually looking for," Cowen said. "Were they looking for someone who clearly had grades on the brain or students who were really interested in their studies and inspired?"

She saw a friend push his Harvard application back because he was focusing furiously on putting out the student newspaper. He was forced to cobble his essay together in a night.

"His dedication, sense of responsibility and obsession with the newspaper and determination to do the best possible job were the things that might potentially hurt his chances," she said. "So it seemed kind of ironic that somebody who was so obviously well qualified, the thing that made him most qualified could hurt him."

Even so, she said, "I've tried to be optimistic throughout the college process." Though it may not always be fair, she said, "it tries to be."

But the sheer magnitude of the process and daunting odds against acceptance discourage many from trying at all.

"I don't really get a lot of the kids here," Baldwin said. "They're very pessimistic. I have one friend who wants to be a film major and he wants to go to NYU but he's thinking he's not going to apply because it's tough, which I think is pretty ridiculous. Why not take a chance?"

When Thomas Cheung first picked up his application to Princeton, he kissed it.

"I was saying, 'This is my future.' The school was so perfect to me. It was like paradise," said Cheung, who lives on the Lower East Side in Manhattan and is a senior at Brooklyn Technical high school.

Then he panicked.

"It was intimidating just holding the application. It was just so intimidating," he said. "Then I looked inside and was like, 'This isn't bad.' They do it really neatly. And I looked at the part two, which the students fill out with essays. And I was like, 'Oh, God. I'm not special — national . . . this and state that.' "

Cheung had visited Princeton with two friends. But even though all three had loved their visit — which included a tour guide leading them through a "Mission Impossible"-style illegal dash through dorm rooms, where they ducked under windows and slithered along the floor — the application process was too much. His two friends both decided not to apply.

But Cheung was not deterred. And he spent months making his application as perfect as it could be.

He estimated he went through 500 pages of essay drafts, working on them every day during the summer and agonizing over the hodge-podge section.

"It said, 'Be honest. Don't lose any sleep over this.' And that just made it worse for me! Because what should I put, what should I put? What's the perfect answer?"

Since the first day of his senior year, Cheung arrived at school at 7:15 every morning for three weeks, meeting with his A.P. English teacher to work on his essays. He would write his application three separate times — the last on the day it was due.

When his guidance counselor found a small mistake on the day he was supposed to hand it in, Cheung went crazy.

"I was freaking out," he said. "Everyone is like, 'Calm down, Thomas! Calm down.' "

Frantically, he called his friends who had decided not to apply and used one of their applications to rewrite the whole thing.

His guidance counselor promised to mail it on her way home because she said the New Jersey postal system was more trustworthy than New York's. She took the application from him.

It was over. And Cheung could not have been more ready.

"I was like, 'This is it! I don't care anymore! I'm sick of this application,' " he said.

When Baldwin mailed in his application, he was fairly confident.

"When I sent it off, I seriously felt like I'm going to get in," Baldwin said. "I thought it was a great application."

Then he visited his college office to discuss another application and happened to glance at the back of one of his teacher's recommendations. It was from his physics teacher — a recommendation he had asked for in desperation, to provide some tangible evidence of his passion for physics. The checks all went down the middle of the page. Average. Baldwin stared at it in horror.

"I asked him and he was like, 'Great!' " Baldwin said. "But maybe he was like 'Great! I can ruin his life!' "

He could not concentrate in this classes for the rest of day. He thought maybe his other teachers hated him too. Maybe teachers didn't like him at all. Princeton would reject him. His chances were ruined.

Baldwin dashed home and snatched up a copy of the application. He saw that the columns were not ordered traditionally, meaning that his teacher had likely checked that he was in the top five percent.

Baldwin began to breathe.

Now his biggest concern is that the tape of two original songs he sent in will be scrutinized by the music department. But overall he feels fairly good about the state of his Princeton chances.

"I'm not saying that I'm going to get in, but I feel like it was a really strong application," he said. "So that would totally be a bummer if I didn't get in."