Hall monitors: Student narcs selected by dorm faculty to help ensure that dormitory living runs smoothly. Grades: Behavioral demerits that could be assigned by faculty for infractions ranging from skipping class or trying to hatch a goose egg under a desk lamp in your dorm room, to leaving a flat iron plugged in for hours after you’ve left for class or wearing the same skirt as your classmate while having a larger ass, thus somehow making it inappropriate. It probably tasted better than I remember, as my palate was less refined than the sugar in the Nerds Ropes I used to eat by the dozens, but who’s to say, really? Read ExcerptĬlosed weekend: A weekend (usually during a campus event like Parents’ Weekend or Hotchkiss Day, or final exams) in which students couldn’t sign out to leave campus the reason I didn’t get to see Hitch on opening day.įaculty brat (fac brat): A student whose parents teach at the school they attend.įLIK: The company used by many independent schools to provide three square meals a day.

With its combination of incisive social critique and uproarious depictions of elite nonsense, ADMISSIONS will resonate with anyone who has ever been The Only One in a room, dealt with racial microaggressions, or even just suffered from an extreme case of homesickness. Through these stories, some troubling, others hilarious, she deconstructs the lies and half-truths she herself would later tell as an admissions professional, in addition to the myths about boarding schools perpetuated by popular culture. In ADMISSIONS, Kendra looks back at the three years she spent at Taft, chronicling clashes with her lily-white roommate, how she had to unlearn the respectability politics she'd been raised with, and the fall-out from a horrifying article in the student newspaper that accused Black and Latinx students of being responsible for segregation of campus. Her new job forced her to reflect on her own elite education experience, and to realize how disillusioned she had become with America’s inequitable system. As an admissions officer specializing in diversity recruitment for independent prep schools, she persuaded students and families to embark on the same perilous journey she herself had made-to attend cutthroat and largely white schools similar to The Taft School, where she had been the first African-American legacy student only a few years earlier. Pop Sugar Įarly on in Kendra James’ professional life, she began to feel like she was selling a lie.The best depiction of elite whiteness I’ve read.”- New York Times The work of Admissions is laying down, with wit and care, the burden James assumed at 15, that she - or any Black student, or all Black students - would manage the failures of a racially illiterate community. NAMED A BEST NONFICTION BOOK OF 2022 BY ESQUIRE

Admissions book kendra