What I Didn’t Learn in Geology 101

Geoffrey Feiss, the College’s Provost, recently told me that creating a college community is similar to creating an ecosystem: there are vital components that need to come together in order to create a flourishing environment (as a geologist, he put it much more scientifically and eloquently but you get the point).  To scale the metaphor down a bit, building a class is also like building an ecosystem; the class cannot thrive as a whole without certain essential components.

An entering class needs intellectuals and brainiacs, artists and athletes, the creative and the logical, the rich and the poor, the liberal and the conservative.  It needs those who serve and those who have been served, the goody-two-shoes and the rebel rousers.  Those with straight As and those with less than perfect records are welcome.  It requires parts of the majority and parts of the minority (how do we learn sufficiently without both?).  The privileged and the underprivileged need to learn together, side-by-side, in order to teach each other.  An entering class needs realists and dreamers, foreign and domestic, songbirds and scientists.  We require jacks of all trades and one-trick ponies, the comedians and the serious-minded, the mature and the immature.  An entering class would be incomplete without men and women, in-state and out-of-state residents, the super smart, and the super talented.  The world champion yo-yoer, the varsity athlete, the published author, the accomplished pianist, and the lion tamer all have something to contribute.  We search for those who walk the line and those who cross it, those who fit the mold and those who break it, those who respect boundaries and those who surpass them.

The job of an admission office (and admission officers) is to ascertain which piece of the puzzle a particular applicant can fulfill.  We must see the applicant in his/her entirety and then try to discern how that person will contribute, add to, subtract from, or change William & Mary.  Once we’ve established the essential components and identified them, it is then our job to bring them together into a whole that is greater than the sum of its fantastic parts.  Only then will our ecosystem thrive.

– Wendy Livingston