But you can't write that in your college application

After last year's cuffuffle I'm back with BigCorporate, helping their highflyers apply for places and funding at highly selective US colleges.  We kicked it all off with a three day whistlestop tour workshop - from Who am I (and how do I describe myself), through College Choice and what matters to me, Sounding Credible, Effective Communication, Analysing Essay Questions, Brainstorming Essay Topics, and Critiquing Anonymised Excerpts from the group's essays and applications to the scheme.

It's the third applications round I've worked on the programme, the second time I've run the workshop. I feel I've got more idea where the students are coming from, and the likely mismatch in tone and topic with the US-based system. Yes I see a key bit of my role as encouraging students to reflect on who they are and what matters to them.  In particular, in encouraging highly disadvantaged students in this very stratified society to believe that their work experience hauling 20 jerrycans of water 5 kilometres to their village by hand to sell, shows them in as positive a light as their more favoured peers describing their experiences in business to business roles. That the measures they've taken to earn their school fees to keep themselves in school are so laudable - keeping twenty chickens for four years and selling the eggs daily at market after school, so piles of pennies may be hoarded and produced at the start of term. How moved I was reading about the initiation ceremony - six weeks in the arid bush with his same-age peers without food or water - for the Maasai student whose family had rated booklearning over teaching him basis survival skills. By the time his more-skilled peers taught him how to trap animals and to find water, he had got weak and dizzyheaded. But how great his sense of achievement at the end of the period, equipped with the skills - and the deep-rooted friendships - for manhood.

But as I get more confident in the culture I also seem to be taking on an assertive tone as with my own children - 'No, you can't go out dressed like that!' 
'No, that isn't a suitable essay topic for college applications.'  Or, as I've been trying to say it,
'I realise thats an important experience and it isn't a difficulty in Kenya, but there is issue x, y or z if you write that for a US audience.'

It's something you do as a careers advisor in your own culture too.  In extremis, you're meant to be the friendly intermediary, the one who takes a deep breath and tells the candidate for a mock interview that chances of success might be higher if they remove the baseball cap and stash the gum before the interview.  Who reflects back that the hawklike fierce look in the eye and the directive stabbing finger illicited by the last question might need to be toned down a little if you're to get the dream job as Father Christmas.  But it is easier at home.

One of the potential essay prompts is Evaluate a significant ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.  One student wrote about the rampant cheating at examtime at her school, and her eleventh hour decision not to participate.  I know from another Kenyan friend, a medical student, how extensive cheating is in university exams in her college. 
'You write my answer on this topic in the exam, and I'll write yours on this second one, and then we'll swap papers, so we only need to learn half the topics' explained her friend. 
Not exactly what you want in a doctor, someone who is strong on the bones of the foot but lacks specifics on any organ from the waist up.  But highlighting quite how widespread and value-neutral cheating is in some schools here - at least when its not the high school leaving exams - doesn't help the case of our applicant or of her peers.
'No, you can't write about cheating, that's an expulsion offence in the rest of the world. They want to be clear that you report academic facts as you understand them. That you are 100% ethicial on this. What if you'd done 20 years scientific research that turned out to be fruitless? They need to be clear that you'd write it up accurately, despite your disappointment, the failure and blind alleys, so that others could learn from your experience.'

Or an essay on climbing high trees to steal birds eggs.  Definitely value-neutral, even perceived as a laudable way to get protein in Kenya.  But a whiff of reckless lack of concern for feathered species in the well-fed UK/US setting I fear.  I explain about protection of rare birds, of criminal offences, of the existence of bird wardens camping out to protect certain rare nesting birds.  Reader, the class howled at me in laughter. 
'That is a job?' they said in disbelief.  For the gulf is wide.

Evaluate a significant experience and its impact on you.  No, you can't write about your religious conversion experience in this setting - though of course that would be an interesting essay to read at another time outside this process, I hasten to add.  Unless possibly if you are applying to an evangelical college.

'I'm a loner and like to hang out with people who are more successful than me so I can learn from them.' Top marks for self awareness but how do we think this comes over to the reader?  How can we focus on what you think you'd contribute to the class?

Describe yourself.  Hmmm. I understand that rhyming poems are really popular in Kenya, but Literature is an academic discipline too.  Unless you've read really widely from poets of the 20th and 21st century in English, - you understand how rhythm impacts on meaning - leave that to one side.  You know regular rhyming poems are largely confined to birthday cards now in English?  That's not really a branding you want for yourself.

Many of the students don't have a single book in their houses. There aren't public libraries. Many attended high schools with a maximum of 100 (text) books on the shelves for a thousand students.  They - their families - have never been able to afford newspapers until the start of their internships.  So they haven't had a chance to read widely in the classical canon. Possessing even one secondhand book is quite a source of pride.  'I love reading' they write. 'I love Danielle Steele and J K Rowling.'  Or they quote from John Grisham or from Jeffrey Archer as a source of wisdom in their college essay. 
'It's fine to say to me,' I say, 'but you are trying to show you are the top students and thinkers in your country.  These authors that we all enjoy reading for relaxation, they aren't respected in an academic context.' 
Better not to say anything at all here too I caution - because many of the US readers just won't understand the context here.

In Kenyan classes - as in large lecture theatres in UK inner city new universities - it's quite ok to show your utter boredom with the topic and facilitator before you.  But again, I want them to know how that comes over to the person dancing around, giving her all seeking to spark engagement with learning. I want them to understand this is a competitive process and the depth of enthusiasm you demonstrate is one of the assessment criteria.

'If you want to show yourself as engaged with learning, as academically curious, how you behave matters.'  Of a workshop of 50 highflyers only 5 brought pen and paper to a three day workshop covering complex new ground, - and because paper, pens and handouts are expensive we don't provide them either.  
'How you sit shows me alot.  So please, pick yourself up, don't lie with your head on the table. If you hold your head in your hands it suggests a lack of interest and engagement. When someone is talking you please need to listen, not to read your book, as that suggests you think you have nothing to learn from them.  All this is really going to matter if you get to interview stage.'
'Learning is an active process not a passive one. To be selected you have to be willing to express yourself, to articulate who you are, to speak up. And this is meant to be a safe place for you to practice doing that.'

Yes we came together as a group. Yes I got more accepting.  Yes though the facial expressions of many were still impassive - even fairly glum - by the end of day three, the written feedback was very positive. But for me the bit I relished was sitting as a sole non-Kenyan fly on the wall when our returning freshmen, our applicants of the initial year, now our student mentors who have finished their first years at Harvard, UPenn, Williams, and the like, spoke of what had struck them in US culture.
'There no one carries a cloth handkerchief.  We here are told it is the polite, sophisticated, thing to do. But there they all use tissues. Really!'
'I've learned different ways of behaving there. When someone tells a really lame joke, if it were here I'd give a mocking laugh. We all would.  But you can't do that there. You have to say: 'That's really funny!' Even if it isn't.  Quite, quite different.'
'The language people use. You often hear people say 'Fucking this.' 'Fuck you.' It doesn't seem to mean much. You need to get used to that.  To let it wash over you, but not use it yourself I'd say.'

'It's just amazing the opportunities.  What you can choose to do.  Having a choice, being able to pick your modules for yourself.  I could have been studying Spanish in Argentina this summer, but I decided I really wanted to come home instead.  Being surrounded by people from all kinds of backgrounds. The libraries. The resources, the books, the newspapers just lying around in the student centres.  They even have pianos in the dining halls at my college, - often people just sit down and play while we're eating.  They're really really sharp.  There's a feeling so many things are possible.'

That's what I wish them all, choices. That they may experience that many things are possible, whether they study in Kenya or abroad.  And that maybe, by learning how others outside Kenya are so impressed by the simplest details of the resilience needed to succeed in this harsh environment, that they may come to value themselves for it too.