It’s possible, in fact, that during our short meeting the college counselor said things to me that might have been positive and helpful, but I recall none of it. Because rightly or wrongly, I got stuck on one single sentence the woman uttered.
“I’m not sure,” she said, giving me a perfunctory, patronizing smile, “that you’re Princeton material.”
Her judgment was as swift as it was dismissive, probably based on a quick-glance calculus involving my grades and test scores. It was some version, I imagine, of what this woman did all day long and with practiced efficiency, telling seniors where they did and didn’t belong. I’m sure she figured she was only being realistic. I doubt that she gave our conversation another thought.
But as I’ve said, failure is a feeling long before it’s an actual result. And for me, it felt like that’s exactly what she was planting—a suggestion of failure long before I’d even tried to succeed. She was telling me to lower my sights, which was the absolute reverse of every last thing my parents had ever told me.
Had I decided to believe her, her pronouncement would have toppled my confidence all over again, reviving the old thrum of not enough, not enough.
But three years of keeping up with the ambitious kids at Whitney Young had taught me that I was something more. I wasn’t going to let one person’s opinion dislodge everything I thought I knew about myself. Instead, I switched my method without changing my goal. I would apply to Princeton and a scattershot selection of other schools, but without any more input from the college counselor. Instead, I sought help from someone who actually knew me. Mr. Smith, my assistant principal and neighbor, had seen my strengths as a student and furthermore trusted me with his own kids. He agreed to write me a recommendation letter.
I’ve been lucky enough now in my life to meet all sorts of extraordinary and accomplished people—world leaders, inventors, musicians, astronauts, athletes, professors, entrepreneurs, artists and writers, pioneering doctors and researchers. Some （though not enough） of them are women. Some （though not enough） are black or of color. Some were born poor or have lived lives that to many of us would appear to have been unfairly heaped with adversity, and yet still they seem to operate as if they’ve had every advantage in the world. What I’ve learned is this: All of them have had doubters. Some continue to have roaring, stadium-sized collections of critics and naysayers who will shout I told you so at every little misstep or mistake. The noise doesn’t go away, but the most successful people I know have figured out how to live with it, to lean on the people who believe in them, and to push onward with their goals.
That day I left the college counselor’s office at Whitney Young, I was fuming, my ego bruised more than anything. My only thought, in the moment, was I’ll show you.
But then I settled down and got back to work. I never thought getting into college would be easy, but I was learning to focus and have faith in my own story. I tried to tell the whole thing in my college essay. Rather than pretending that I was madly intellectual and thought I’d fit right in inside the ivy-strewn walls of Princeton, I wrote about my father’s MS and my family’s lack of experience with higher education. I owned the fact that I was reaching. Given my background, reaching was really all I could do.
And ultimately, I suppose that I did show that college counselor, because six or seven months later, a letter arrived in our mailbox on Euclid Avenue, offering me admission to Princeton. My parents and I celebrated that night by having pizza delivered from Italian Fiesta. I called Craig and shouted the good news. The next day I knocked on Mr. Smith’s door to tell him about my acceptance, thanking him for his help. I never did stop in on the college counselor to tell her she’d been wrong—that I was Princeton material after all. It would have done nothing for either of us. And in the end, I hadn’t needed to show her anything. I was only showing myself.
6
My dad drove me to Princeton in the summer of 1981, across the flat highways connecting Illinois to New Jersey. But it was more than a simple father-daughter road trip. My boyfriend, David, came along for the ride. I’d been invited to attend a special three-week summer orientation program, meant to close a “preparation gap,” giving certain incoming freshmen extra time and help settling into college. It was unclear exactly how we were identified—what part of our admissions applications had tipped the university off to the idea that we might benefit from lessons on how to read a syllabus or advance practice navigating the pathways between campus buildings—but Craig had done it two years earlier, and it seemed like an opportunity. So I packed up my stuff, said good-bye to my mom—neither of us teary or sentimental—and climbed into the car.
My eagerness to leave town was fueled in part by the fact I’d spent the last couple of months working an assembly-line job, operating what was basically an industrial-sized glue gun at a small bookbinding factory in downtown Chicago—a soul-killing routine that went on for eight hours a day, five days a week, and served as possibly the single most reinforcing reminder that going to college was a good idea. David’s mom worked at the bookbindery and had helped get the two of us jobs there. We’d worked shoulder to shoulder all summer, which made the whole endeavor more palatable. David was smart and gentle, a tall, good-looking guy who was two years older than I was. He’d first befriended Craig on the neighborhood basketball court in Rosenblum Park a few years earlier, joining pickup games when he came to visit relatives who lived on Euclid Parkway. Eventually, he started hanging around with me. During the school year, David went away to college out of state, which conveniently kept him from being any sort of distraction from my studies. During holiday breaks and over the summer, though, he came home to stay with his mom on the far southwest side of the city and drove over almost every day to pick me up in his car.
David was easygoing and also more of an adult than any boyfriend I’d had. He sat on the couch and watched ball games with my father. He joked around with Craig and made polite conversation with my mom. We went on real dates, going for what we considered upscale dinners at Red Lobster and to the movies. We fooled around and smoked pot in his car. By day at the bookbindery, we glue gunned our way into a companionable oblivion, wisecracking until there was nothing left to say. Neither of us was particularly invested in the job, beyond trying to save up money for school. I’d be leaving town soon anyway, and had little intention of ever coming back to the bookbinding plant. In a sense, I was already half departed—my mind flown off in the direction of Princeton.
Which is to say that on the early August evening when our father-daughter-boyfriend trio finally pulled off Route 1 and turned onto the wide leafy avenue leading to campus, I was fully ready to get on with things. I was ready to cart my two suitcases into the summer-session dorm, ready to pump the hands of the other kids who’d come （minority and low-income students primarily, with a few athletes mixed in）。 I was ready to taste the dining-hall food, memorize the campus map, and conquer whatever syllabi they wanted to throw my way. I was there. I had landed. I was seventeen years old, and my life was under way.
There was only one problem, and that was David, who as soon as we crossed the state line from Pennsylvania had begun to look a little doleful. As we wrestled my luggage out of the back of my dad’s car, I could tell he was feeling lonely already. We’d been dating for over a year. We’d professed love, but it was love in the context of Euclid Avenue and Red Lobster and the basketball courts at Rosenblum Park. It was love in the context of the place I’d just left. While my father took his customary extra minute to get out of the driver’s seat and steady himself on his canes, David and I stood wordlessly in the dusk, surveying the immaculate diamond of green lawn outside my stone fortress of a dorm. It was hitting us both, I assumed, that there were perhaps important things we hadn’t discussed, that we had perhaps divergent views on whether this was a temporary farewell or an outright, geographically induced breakup. Were we going to visit? Write love letters? How hard were we going to work at this?