["Let Inga Tell You," La Jolla Light, published October 6, 2025] 2025
Watching my friends' grandchildren wrestle with the college application process, I am reminded of my own saga of applying to - and being rejected by - Brown University. It turns out the school requires you to be able to locate the state of Rhode Island.
My older granddaughter, a high school sophomore in Los Angeles, is already pondering colleges, and given that she has spent considerable time in the Northeast with the other grandparents, definitely has Brown on her radar. But she fears that I have sabotaged her chances. I have assured her that they don't keep application records that far back but she is not convinced.
If legacies were a guarantee of admission, I would have been a shoo-in at Brown. My father's family was from Rhode Island and Brown was almost like the local community college. You could go to Brown and still be home for Sunday dinner. It s a small state.
I should mention that Brown (all male) and its associated women's college, Pembroke, merged in 1971 making Brown a co-ed school. My parents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. My grandparents were a Brown-Pembroke marriage. All the aunts and uncles had gone to Brown or Pembroke. My brother, a year older, was already at Brown.
My mother's Ohio family, definitely not wealthy, were all educators. My great-grandmother graduated from college. My grandmother had a Ph.D. in zoology. My mother snagged a full scholarship to Pembroke where she met my father in an Honors Shakespeare class at Brown.
Everyone hoped I'd go there too. I frankly had no interest. Fortunately for me, I was a long shot anyway.
I've covered in previous columns my uncontested career as the family idiot. I was the blond sheep in a family of brown-eyed brunette geniuses. My younger son is fortunate to have inherited the lightning-fast mind of my siblings, and fortunately much better social skills.
Speaking with my brother (whom I love dearly) he has observed that if he were in elementary school now, he'd be diagnosed with Aspergers. No argument from me! (Only Aspergers?) I was more recently contemplating how many bottles of Tylenol my mother might have consumed during her pregnancy with him until I realized Tylenol hadn't been invented yet.
I was always deemed to "not test well." The illusion was that this poorly-designed IQ test simply failed to capture what was my obvious intellect. Looking back, I think that I was simply not very good at much of what it was testing and that my scores were an accurate reflection of that. In fact, when I was applying to graduate schools, I screened for any requirements for tests that required heavy abstract abilities. The GREs I could study for, but if a test gave me a series of numbers or geometric figures and asked what the next one in the series would be, my only answer was ever beats me!
Because I "didn't test well," I was by seventh grade in a track of kids headed for a less competitive state colleges or possibly vocational school. My siblings, of course, were in the top track, already headed for the Ivies.
I did have one superpower, which I have to this day. I am pathologically persistent. You will never outlast me. My grades were always better than my siblings'. I try harder.
I was also fortunate to have a mother who early on recognized my love of writing and encouraged it in every way. I still remember her advice: Write what you know. Write from your heart. Find your own voice. I feel so grateful to her to this day.
She always praised - never critiqued - anything I wrote. She wanted writing to be only joy. But in hopes of subtly encouraging the better stuff ("better" being very relative), she'd ask if she could buy her favorites for a nickel. (After she died, I found a folder of these early purchases. She was one optimistic woman.)
Writing has been a life-long coping mechanism for me. No matter how bad things ever get, I m always thinking, "how will I write about this?"
So by the time I was applying to colleges, including Brown, I was a legitimate candidate in many ways: top 10% of my class, editor of the school paper and president of the school's service group. Wrote a great essay. But my SATs in the high 500s were most definitely not Ivy League level.
One thing I've learned over the years is how many different types of intelligence there are. My first husband, for example, was born with homing pigeon instincts. He could find a place he'd only been to once twenty-five years ago.
Neither my second husband, Olof, nor I possess this skill. We are both directionally disabled. As my younger son, Henry, used to lament as we ferried him around to soccer games all over the county, "if there's a 50% chance of turning in the right direction, you guys will get it wrong 90% of the time." Sadly, he was correct.
Back when I was applying to colleges, a personal interview was required for the most competitive colleges. For reasons not clear to me now, my parents allowed me, a 16-year-old, to make the four-hour drive from Pleasantville, New York, to Providence, Rhode Island for my interview at Brown. Afterwards, I would spend the weekend visiting my grandparents in the area.
The only directional support at the time was a road map. Off I went, allowing plenty of time. I listened to the radio and sang along.
After I'd been driving for a while, I kept thinking I ought to be there by now so I pulled into a gas station in Seekonk, Massachusetts and explained to the nice guy at the pump that I was trying to get to Brown University in Providence and I seemed to be lost.
He inquired what direction I had come from. "The I-95 from New York," I replied.
"Sweetheart," he exclaimed, "you drove all the way through the state of Rhode Island and right through downtown Providence!"
He got me turned around and I did find Providence, and Brown, but I was two hours late for my interview. I regaled the admissions director with my hilarious story about not being able to find Rhode Island.
Brown rejected me. My grandmother, a substantial contributor, never gave them another dime. I was so relieved.
Had I subconsciously sabotaged my interview? Maybe. My directional disabilities probably didn't help. Or then, maybe they did. I ended up at the school I had really wanted to go to.
Still, my granddaughter is convinced they have records of this somewhere and that her own application will be doomed. That somewhere in their computer even after all these years, it will say, "grandmother couldn't find Rhode Island."
My mother outside her dorm
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