Letter To The Chancellor Of Any College Who Will Admit My High Maintenance Son: First Draft

By: Candy Schulman
candy@candyschulman.com

Dear Chancellor,

By the time you receive this, there is a 10% chance my son will have completed his essay. Depends on how the Knicks are doing. My daughter was never this way. She wrote her college admissions essay in second grade, graduated from high school at twelve, and was admitted to HYP before puberty.

My son has strengths other than time management. In any event, most universities request supplemental essays, so I thought I’d write my own. The way I crafted a parent statement when we applied him to that Park Avenue preschool, which promised to put him on the Ivy League fast track. We sure fell for that one.

Let’s get this on the application table: we are paying full freight. Fuck the FAFSA! I know how much cash flow means to an elite liberal arts college. Here is the password to our Chase account — feel free to stalk our copious balances online.

I suggested that my son choose the prompt, “Who Are You? Who who who who?” but all he came up with was: I ♥ Roger Daltrey. Believe it or not, he writes well. He never relies on auto-correct. In box #1, please find a portfolio of his texts over the past six months (the sober ones). He doesn’t have time to write this essay, incapacitated with acute senioritis, for which there is no known cure. I wonder if you’d consider this a true disability for your quotas.

The Common App can’t illuminate everything about this unique human being. It began on a January morning after 63.2 hours of labor — a hospital record. My son’s first of many awards. Before third grade, his room was full of those tacky soccer medals (you’ll find them enclosed in box #2). Sure, everyone on the team got medals for just showing up, but my son showed up more often than most. As did I, his chauffeur. Have you ever driven a car full of stinky post-practice pre-pubescent boys? That’s an accomplishment. But this supplement is not about me.

My son has always taken the initiative. Like the time he drove our car to the mall when he still had only a learner’s permit. My husband used political connections to cover up the arrest record.

In terms of his assets, he’s strikingly handsome if I must say so myself, he doesn’t use heroin, he’s from a mixed marriage (lapsed Catholic/secular Jew), and no one in our family has been arrested for sexting. Not yet.

I am confident/convinced/c#$@sure (note to self: look up alternatives in thesaurus.com) that my son will look debonair on your college brochures, locked arm in arm with his African American and Latino BFFLs. On his community service trip to Belgium last summer, he was introduced to the world of artisanal beers, making him an asset to fraternities. But this is not about my son. It’s about the genes that spawned him.

I swabbed my cheek and sent my DNA sample to the Genographic Project, which informed me that my people started in Ethiopia, migrating to South Asia. We are .00004% African. I’ve always regarded our heritage as multi-cultural. German, Polish, Austrian, Czech, Russian — the whole mishpocheh. Think how many minorities you can check off!

In box #3, you’ll find our unedited home videos of my son’s first year. Watch how he achieved developmental milestones like starting his terrible twos at just eight months. Please ignore footage of him rolling off our bed at six weeks. The neurologist assures us that his brain is just fine.

I am not a helicopter mom, but I’ll bring his lucky roommates gluten-free cookies with NoDoz chips, ideal for all-nighters, my own recipe I’m patenting. Just call me Big Mom On Campus.

I hope you’ll take all this into consideration in the event that you mistakenly reject my son for legacies with perfect board scores fueled by Adderall and nepotistic summer internships. Did I mention we celebrate both Chanukah and Christmas? Love decorating that cute tree. (Note to self: remove this for Brandeis.)

Finally, let’s peek into the future. My son plans to invent an app nobody yet knows we need or want, and take it public. Picture a faux colonial building he’ll surely donate to campus, enshrined with his name.

In box #4, you’ll find letters from my shrink, personal trainer and meditation leader, documenting how my stress level would be reduced if I could get my high-maintenance son out of the house for four years. This would also give me privacy for lazy afternoons with the gardener I’ve had a crush on. Who knows? I might even be able to fill my empty nest with a satisfying new career. I hear ghostwriting college application essays is quite lucrative.

 

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2 thoughts on “Letter To The Chancellor Of Any College Who Will Admit My High Maintenance Son: First Draft

  1. Not only is this essay clever, it’s very funny. I appreciate the smart humor in the era of much that is unfunny.

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