Book #19
I Was Told It Would Get Easier
By Abbi Waxman
The Problem With Measuring People With Metrics
Books with cartoon covers always throw me off. I expect them to be simple and childish and they will sometimes be deeply thoughtful. This book follows a fictional mother and daughter as they tour college campuses on the East Coast of the U.S.
I am very fortunate to have two college degrees but I grew quite disenchanted with the whole admissions and grading process. A weird thing happens when metrics are used to measure topics like a person’s character. Oh! You started a charity? Amazing! That will look great on a college application! Or just because someone gets amazing grades in biology and chemistry does not mean they will make an incredible doctor.
I understand the need for using metrics to rank and categorize students. There needs to be some level of organization. It’s just, I think sometimes the tail can wag the dog on this subject. It can be jarring when the resume or transcript doesn’t match the person in front of you.
When Achievement Becomes Social Currency
One example of this incongruence was a big topic in the news in 2019: the college admissions scandal in the U.S. where parents used bribes and altered achievements to secure their child a spot at a good university. It is a crime to do so and is ultimately not in the best interest of the child. But the names of universities can open a lot of doors later in life. There is a lot of value in having a college degree.
I am not sure if the parents genuinely thought they were helping their child or they just wanted their kids to seem academically or athletically successful for the social benefits of it. Perhaps both. Either way, it was clearly a bad way to go about it. It undermines the entire process.
The Morality Treadmill
However, for people who actually do the work, intentions can still get blurred. The system pushes you to immediately package your academic and philanthropic work into something self-serving for applications. If you don’t do that, you will be compared unfavourably to those who do.
I grew up believing that “if you do something nice for someone and then brag about it, it doesn’t count”. But you can’t have that mindset with applications.
So it becomes a sort of “morality treadmill”. The amount of skill and virtue required to succeed escalates- but this risks becoming competitive, unsustainable, or turning into a performance. It muddies the waters of a person’s actual value system by flattening their (potentially genuine) intentions to appeal to others.
Two Skill Sets: Goodness & Selling Yourself
Besides, being a good person and being able to sell yourself as a good person are two different skill sets and they are not mutually exclusive. If you are a good person but can’t (or don’t) present yourself as such then you will go unappreciated and overlooked for opportunities that you would be a good fit for. If you can sell yourself really well then you will receive countless opportunities, regardless of your actual intentions. The ideal sweet spot for you and society is for you to genuinely be a good person and be able to sell yourself well.
Why Intention Still Matters
But why does this discrepancy matter? Because intention matters. It affects our choices. I have met a number of people at this point who are amazing at applications. They can get into any program and ace any test. Truly brilliant people.
But then when you meet them, you get really uneasy about their values and behaviour. Think of a person with an amazing application who gets on campus and immediately starts sexually harassing their peers or someone who seems amazing on paper but uses ChatGPT for everything.
This gives a false sense that we know people, when in reality we don’t know what they are really about.
Stay Away From My Vagina, Doc
One example from my own life is this: a peer of mine had just gotten into medical school. He is one of the smartest people I know. When he was working with a female manikin during his early years of med school, he posted a video to Snapchat of him rapidly shoving several fingers in and out of the manikin’s vagina.
People do dumb things. But I’m pretty sure a video like that was never included in his impeccable university entrance application. I have not seen him in years but know he is now very successful. Hopefully he has become a kind and caring doctor, but would I ever go see him? Not for any issues involving my vagina, anyway.
Messy Bun Book Lover
(Originally posted on June 12, 2025)
Read I Was Told It Would Get Easier by Abbi Waxman → https://amzn.to/3KU5nks
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