1. Decision Day When I walked up out of the subway on that cold spring afternoon, Shannen Torres was nowhere to be seen. We had arranged to meet at 4:15 p.m. in St. Nicholas Park in West Harlem, just down the hill from A. Philip Randolph Campus High School, where she was a senior, a few months away from graduation. But when I got to the park, I couldn't see her anywhere. My phone buzzed. It was a text from Shannen: "I'm to your left." I looked up the path and spotted her, sitting huddled over her phone on a bench about fifty yards away. She was dressed in layers against the chill, a beige barn jacket over two dark hoodies. Everything else she wore was black: black sweatpants, big black high-top sneakers, black chunky glasses, and a black backward Nike baseball cap, into which she'd stuffed her long, thick dark hair. I walked over and sat down next to her. "Hi," she said. "I'm hiding here because I don't want anyone to see me." I had met Shannen only a couple of times before, so it was hard for me to say for sure if this constituted strange behavior for her. But it definitely seemed a little odd. Then she explained the situation. It was March 30. At exactly 5:00 p.m. that afternoon, every college in the Ivy League would simultaneously release their acceptance and rejection letters for next year's freshman class. I had dimly understood that the decisions were going out at some point that week, but I hadn't realized they would be arriving at the very moment Shannen and I had planned to meet. Shannen had applied to two Ivy League colleges: Princeton and the University of Pennsylvania. She wanted to get into Princeton, but she really, really wanted to get into the University of Pennsylvania. It had been her "dream school," she told me, since seventh grade. And in less than an hour, either her dream would come true, or it wouldn't. That fact was overwhelming her. When I'd interviewed her before, she had always seemed pretty cool--a Bronx girl, a streetwise Dominicana--but here on this bench in St. Nicholas Park, she was coming undone right before my eyes. "I'm the nervousest I've ever been," she said. Her hands were trembling. She looked like she was about to cry. "I think it's just, like, I've been working my entire life for this one thing," she explained. "It feels like everything is depending on this. Which sounds dramatic, I know. But it's true." Shannen was born in New York City in 1999 to parents who had emigrated from the Dominican Republic. When she was two, with her parents' relationship crumbling, her mother took her and her older brother to New Bedford, Massachusetts. They stayed with some relatives at first, but that arrangement soon crumbled, too, and they moved next into a shelter run by Catholic nuns, and then, after a few months, into an apartment of their own in the projects. Shannen started elementary school in Massachusetts, and she was a good student from the beginning. School wasn't stressful in those early years, but once her mother moved the family back to New York, to the Bronx, the pressure started to build. In sixth grade Shannen entered Junior High School 22, a struggling school in a hulking building on 167th Street. There were fights in the hallway every day, and she was bullied by new arrivals from the Dominican Republic who made fun of her for not being Dominican enough. Shannen was proud of her roots and her race, but there were elements of other cultures she was coming to appreciate as well: Coldplay, pasta, Harry Potter novels. She retreated into her schoolwork, studying harder, doing more. And when she got to high school, she worked harder still. In the entrance hall of Randolph High, on a bright yellow bulletin board on the wall, the administration posts, each semester, the honor roll for each grade, all the top scholars from a school of almost fifteen hundred students, listed in order of their grade point average. In the first semester of her freshman year, Shannen's name appeared at the very top of the list, and her name had stayed at the top ever since. Now, as graduation approached, her academic average was 97.7 percent, which would almost certainly make her valedictorian. In three and a half years, she had not missed a single day of high school. But remaining number one took an enormous effort. Each night, Shannen stayed up until her homework was done perfectly, sometimes till four or five in the morning, ignoring her mother's admonitions to close the books and go to bed. The previous year, her junior year, was the most grueling. Excerpted from The Years That Matter Most: How College Makes or Breaks Us by Paul Tough All rights reserved by the original copyright owners. Excerpts are provided for display purposes only and may not be reproduced, reprinted or distributed without the written permission of the publisher.
