Toward the Saving of Sweatshirts

Name: Hannah Reade Joo

Year: Class of 2012

Hometown: Seattle, WA

Majors: Neuroscience

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I’m on a plane flying back to Hopkins from Seattle, which is a pain because there isn’t a single airline that believes, during non-summer months, that there is a need for a direct flight between Seattle and Baltimore.  AirTran believes it only seasonally and every summer they offer a direct flight.  In four hours, after a plane change in Philadelphia, I’ll land in Baltimore.  I’ll see it out the window before we touch down, and just like every other time, no matter how tired I am, I’ll feel this little thrill.

Two years ago today, I was probably on the Stanford University website ogling pictures of Hoover Tower. I had wanted to go there for college since I was fifteen—I had wanted desperately to go there—and my obsession peaked shortly after I turned in my early application in the Fall of my senior year.  By that time, it had been years since I had started wearing my homemade tank top with ironed-on felt letters that read, “IWGITS,” for “I will get into Stanford,” every night to bed.  I refused to tell anyone what the letters stood for, preferring to keep my obsession secret. I truly believed that if only I wore that tank top enough, if I kept learning and working hard and becoming my best self, everything would work out exactly the way I had planned it. If that girl from two years ago, preserved true to emotional form, could see me now, she would wonder at the fact of my existence.  How could it be that I did not simply cease to exist the moment it became clear I was not going to my first-choice school? 

It was my father’s idea that I apply to Hopkins, and even by my senior year in high school I wasn’t convinced I’d want to actually attend.  I missed the interview date and I neglected to send any of my columns from the city paper, which I painstakingly cut out to send to Stanford; given the relative amount of effort I put in, it’s a small miracle I was accepted.

During my junior year in high school, I applied to the Stanford Summer College program and waited for a group of nameless, faceless St. Peters, steeped frustratingly in the subjective stuff of humanity, to make an objective decision about whether to open their gates to me for the summer.  Meanwhile, my mother took me to the East Coast to look at other schools. I was subtly unkind about all but one of them.  U Penn smelled, Yale failed to resonate with me, I was “saving” Boston for graduate school, the Princeton tour bored me and its thick booklet on its diversity made me suspicious.  The only school we visited that that I liked, and that I have any photographic record of being at, is Hopkins. The night we first drove through campus, I saw people exercising three floors up in Charles Commons and was thrilled at the thought of living there.  The next morning, I heard a student at admissions speak about being a philosophy and neuroscience double major, and since that was what I wanted to do at the time, I secretly considered it a Sign. The classes I attended excited me, and the neuroscience program looked fabulous.  It was the only school at which I could really envision myself; but still, there was Stanford, and I was reluctant to admit I might ever like another school more.  Before we left campus, I bought a sweatshirt and a pair of shorts. 

At Hopkins junior year of high school

At the end of our East Coast College Tour, my dad called to tell me Stanford had sent a letter and accepted me to their summer program, which sent me into a month-long fit of general ecstasy. I was obnoxiously overjoyed once I got there, too, which prompted even my truest friend to write requesting, jokingly, that I “please, for the rest of our sakes, tone it down.”  It wasn’t an unreasonable request.  I still can’t comfortably cite San Francisco, the undergraduate neuroscience program, or the people I met there as reasons I wanted to go there and feel like I’m giving a complete explanation of feelings at the time.  For anyone who has ever been truly, madly, unsaveably in love for the first time, that is what it felt like.  My reasons were beyond the realm of reason, and perhaps that made it idiotic—but whether it was or was utterly irrelevant, because it could not be helped. 

At the top of Hoover Tower, Stanford University, summer after junior year

For the most part, I forgot about Hopkins completely.

In December of my senior year, Stanford deferred my application to the pool of regular applicants and in April they rejected me.  I spent an afternoon clipping the letters off the sweatshirt I had bought at the Stanford bookstore the previous summer, until it read not “Stanford,” but “Stand.” Last summer I went at it with the scissors again and clipped away the rest of the letters.  It had finally started looking silly to me.

This year, I live on the ninth floor of Charles Commons.  Some evenings I like walking by outside so I can look up at it from street level the way I did the first time I visited Hopkins. I live in a suite with three other girls, just down the hall from where my boyfriend and some of my closest friends live.  Our suite is always stocked with fat-free frozen yogurt and the best vegetables Charles St. Market had to offer that day, and because we mysteriously have free cable, there are almost always people in our living room.  Down the hall, they’re usually playing competitive Uno with rules they’re always modifying.  They spend evenings doing things like learning Morse code off cereal boxes so they can try, in vain, to communicate with people in nearby apartment buildings via flashlight.  I often walk in to find them the throwing across the room the molecular models we all got for organic chemistry. Cyclohexane is a favorite.   

 My room in Charles Commons

In just three semesters, Hopkins has left me a more concentrated and distilled version of who I was two years ago. I’ve had many truly excellent writing, math, and science classes, and they have made my thought process both cleaner and more creative. I work in two labs, a vision lab in Seattle and a learning and memory lab in Baltimore, and I love both of them. I’ve presented a poster at two meetings, and I’ve discovered that this is one of my favorite things to do. Because Johns Hopkins has been able to forgive me for not recognizing its greatness from the beginning, it has awarded me Woodrow Wilson Fellowship, the money from which I plan to use on independent projects in the two labs.  I am also toying with the idea of also using some of my money to travel and work on a fiction-writing project.  Just the thought of any of these projects has me grinning like an overambitious lunatic hovering some 30,000 feet up in the air between Seattle and Philadelphia. Thank you, Johns Hopkins.

 Getting ready to present my poster from the Dacey lab at the Fall Vision Meeting for the Optical Society of America; next to me is the graduate student, Jo, who works in my lab. She is charming, brilliant, Australian, and my hero.

Lest I sound too much like those suspicious people who have terrible things happen to them (loss of spouses, jobs, limbs, etc.) and then claim these were the Best Experiences of Their Lives and they feel no sadness when they think about it now, let me acknowledge that when, last week, I had to sign in on the Stanford website and order an official copy of my transcript from the summer I spent there, I was not exactly filled with joy. When I’m reminded, it still upsets me that I failed so thoroughly to meet one of my longest-standing goals, but I’m also coming to understand how arrogant it was of me to think that I alone could ever ensure they let me in.  As in romantic relationships (of which I had one that paralleled my experience with Stanford and, curiously, taught me some of the same lessons), you’re never completely in control, and, by definition, it all works out.

As I told my academic advisor a month ago, I feel that by ending up at Hopkins and not Stanford, I dodged a very large, very attractive bullet. That is not to say it would be for everyone, but for me it was, because I would have been missing out on Hopkins.  Given the stochasticity and the subjectivity of admissions committees and of all the other forces at work in the universe, I consider myself extremely lucky. 

I guess there are two goals I have in writing this, the first of which is that I can convince people who are unsure that Hopkins could be an amazing place for them and that they should do their very best not to miss the interview deadline.  The second goal is more targeted, directed at anyone out there who, like my past self, has ever looked at a picture of Hoover tower or any correlate and felt that particularly powerful hybrid emotion that results when hope, ambition, wistfulness, and the insecurity of being seventeen are allowed to steep for too long in a very young heart. I very sincerely hope that if things don’t turn out the way you expect or want them to be, you don’t take it out on any of your sweatshirts. If you do, it will be the only remaining scar in a few years, and you’ll regret that whenever you’re looking for a sweatshirt, the first one available makes you look like a hobo because of all the holes.

Comments

[JHU Dominique]

This has got to be the most entertaining and unique guest blog I have ever read..I can see that you're a writer! This was great and I hope that all prospective stuents get a chance to look at this!

[JHU Obsessed]

For me, Hopkins is what Standford was for you during your application process. I can relate... a lot. (I actually haven't bought anything with a JHU logo because of that superstition where if you own something with a school's name on it, you won't get it...)