504: How I Got Into College

Ira Glass

All across the country this month college freshmen are starting their new lives at their new schools. And it is so hard to get into so many schools these days. At Columbia University in New York City, 33,000 people applied. 31,000 were rejected. That is fewer than 7% getting in.

And the students who did get in, the students who made it here, they still wonder how they did it. You know, it was so hard to get here, what was it that worked? And they have their theories.

Ira Glass

These Columbia students talked to reporter Phia Bennin. On their very first day on campus, it was obvious who is a freshman because they all had to wear neon bracelets, like they were at a waterpark.

Ira Glass

But you do not have to talk to many kids or scratch the surface very far at all before you get this response to the question, what got you into this school?

Ira Glass

I totally relate to that. I remember I was completely clueless when it came to applying to college-- what to do to get in, what to say on the essays to convince them that I was worthy of their schools. And even more basic than that, I really had no idea what would possibly make one school better than another, how to figure out what schools I should apply to. It was overwhelming.

And today on our show-- it's September, it's back to school-- we have stories of some of the most boneheaded things people try to do to get into college, plus the truly incredible story of how one man made it into college. That story from writer, Michael Lewis. From WBEZ Chicago, it's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Stay with us.

Ira Glass

Act one, "The Old College Try." So here at our radio show, we went looking for a college admissions officer who would tell us the most misguided things that people do when they're applying to schools. And we found Rick Clark, who's director of undergraduate admissions at the Georgia Institute of Technology, better known as Georgia Tech. And he said that he and his team are regularly getting emails and phone calls from parents who are pretending to be their own kids. And he sent me some of these emails with the names redacted.

Ira Glass

Act two, "My Ames is True." So Michael Lewis is a pretty well-known writer and reporter. His books, Moneyball, The Blind Side, and The Big Short were made into movies. His bestsellers about Wall Street include Liar's Poker and Flash Boys. But this particular story happens long before he was writing books. He was in seventh grade in New Orleans, trying to avoid reading them.

Ira Glass

Mr. Downer does not agree, and the middle school principal decides to expel Michael.

Ira Glass

Michael Lewis says, by the way, if you are a seventh grader hearing us talk about this right now and you want to try this with one of his books in your classroom, you totally have his blessing. He wishes you the best, though he is pretty sure you're going to get the same results that he did. Anyway, ultimately, his parents get involved. Seventh grade Michael Lewis is not expelled from school.

Ira Glass

This has become one of the stories that Michael has found himself telling now and then over the years.

Ira Glass

You know, we all have certain stories from our childhoods that we trot out from time to time, out of all the thousands of things that ever happened to us. And usually, it's not many stories that we'll actually trot out, right? And the choices that we make, you know, the selection that we make of which incidents we find ourselves telling people, it says so much about us and how we see the world, which ones we pick.

And I bring all this up because the actual real story that Michael Lewis is here on the radio show today to report is a very good example of that. Of course, this is our "How I Got Into College" show, so this is the story of how one guy, named Emir Kamenica, got into college, but it's also an illustration of this other thing. Anyway, here's Michael.

Michael Lewis

I think if I were telling you Emir's story, I'd probably just start at the very beginning, how he was born in Bosnia in 1978, how he grew up in Sarajevo with loving parents and a happy family. But it's his story, so let's let him tell it the way he tells it.

Michael Lewis

So the Serb troops hadn't gotten to his neighborhood yet. And one Sunday, his mother took Emir and his sister across the river to visit his great aunt. The walk was about a mile.

Michael Lewis

They managed to get to the other side of the bridge without getting shot, but they couldn't go back. And his dad was trapped back where they lived. The Serb troops ended up killing a lot of the men in Emir's old neighborhood and raping the women. But when Emir tells the story, he stresses just how lucky they were to get out, for example, how lucky they were to hitch a ride from two women, complete strangers, and to join a convoy of 5,000 Bosnian refugees, all of them women and children fleeing for the Croatian coast, how lucky it was that they owned a camper near the beach where they spent the summers, how lucky it was that it was May, when the weather was warm, how lucky they were even after the weather turned cold and their camper became uninhabitable.

Michael Lewis

This woman happened to be moving to London and needed someone to watch her apartment, more good luck. Clearly, there was some bad luck too, but Emir doesn't mention it. I have to prod him to fill in the piece of the story he most obviously leaves out.

Michael Lewis

Anyway, Emir and his mom and his sister moved into this apartment in a city crawling with hostile Croat nationalists. His mother wasn't allowed to work. And before long, Emir and his sister weren't allowed to go to school.

When he went outside, Emir would be chased by these thugs who wanted to beat him up just because he was Muslim. His family wasn't even faintly religious, so he thought this was especially bizarre. He was stuck inside this apartment. In his telling, he did almost nothing but read books.

Michael Lewis

I've never actually read The Fortress. But according to the description on the back of the book, it's about a young man who, quote, "overcomes the psychological anguish of war, only to find that he has emerged a reflective and contemplative man in a society that does not value the subversive implications of these qualities." Emir loved the book. He read it over and over.

One day, his mother announces that they'd had another lucky break. Out of a million Bosnian refugees, they are among the first few thousand being handed tickets to the United States. They packed to leave, but all Emir has is some T-shirts, blue jeans, and this library book.

Michael Lewis

The UN dropped Emir and his mom and his sister in Atlanta, which was as good as any other place since they didn't know a soul in the entire country. They were picked up at the Atlanta airport along with an older Bosnian couple they don't know at all and taken to their new home.

Michael Lewis

So far as he could tell, there weren't any other white people in the neighborhood. And to Emir, this whole black people, white people thing was an entirely new experience. But the first thing that struck him was that the black people didn't really seem to like the white people very much.

Michael Lewis

Once again, he couldn't leave his home without feeling a little bit scared, even when he went to school, which was called Clarkston High. Sitting in his literature class one day, Emir heard a kid get shot right outside the classroom.

Michael Lewis

In those first few months, Emir made just a single friend, another Bosnian refugee named Emil. Emir and Emil were inseparable, but they were joined mainly by their fear of everyone else.

Michael Lewis

That was another problem. He says he couldn't really talk to the other kids or his teachers, and so he sort of walked around the school in silence, like a mute. To improve his English, he returned to The Fortress, the novel he'd stolen from the Croatian library. At night, he'd sit down with a dictionary and translate The Fortress from Bosnian to English.

Michael Lewis

So he was back to sitting alone in his room with his novel. But as Emir tells it, all of this really just set the stage for his biggest stroke of luck, the one that would not only get him into college, but would change his entire life. It came in the form of a teacher who descended for maybe two weeks upon his English classroom. Emir remembers only her last name, Ames, Miss Ames. Or maybe it was Mrs. Ames.

He thinks she was an intern training to be a teacher. Anyway, she wasn't around for very long. Unlike his regular teacher, she was full of energy. She tried all these new tricks to engage their interest.

One day, she handed out these photographs to the kids. The one she gave to Emir was of a boy with a haunted look on his face, looking over his shoulder. Then she told them all to write an essay about the pictures.

Michael Lewis

And since The Fortress had never been translated into English, there was exactly zero chance she'd ever catch him.

Michael Lewis

This new place is called The Paideia School. He's never heard of it.

Michael Lewis

It's always hard to say how your life would have turned out differently if something hadn't happened to you. But in Emir's case, there's at least one useful reference point, his Bosnian friend, Emil. Emil hadn't been airlifted out of Clarkston into some fancy private school. Instead, he dropped out of Clarkston, done some bad things, and actually spent some time in jail. Eventually, he went back to Bosnia-- no Miss Ames, no rescue.

Over the years, Emir's told this story a lot. It might be his favorite story that he tells about himself. It rhymes with his view of the world, that there's just this huge, accidental component to life's outcomes, that everyone owes at least some of their success not just to chance, but to other people being nice for no reason at all.

Michael Lewis

At some point, the fact that Emir had no idea what had happened to this woman who'd changed his entire life started to bother him. It's as if the more he told the story, the more grateful he became. And the more grateful he became, the more he wanted to find her, to thank her, but also just to show her the life he had because of her.

He Googled around for her, but then realized he didn't have any idea how to spell her name. He pestered both of his old schools, but neither of them had any record of her. No one even remembered her. His investigations, such as they were, were sort of half-assed, but what was he going to do? Hire a private eye?

Michael Lewis

Irving's a private detective who serves lots of court papers. Since Emir wasn't going to hire one, This American Life did it for him.

Michael Lewis

Emir went on to explain in great detail that he knew basically nothing about her-- height, weight, eye color, all a mystery. When Irving asked him what she looked like, he said, quote, "She was neither particularly skinny, nor fat. Not particularly short, nor tall. She looked normal," he said. About the only thing he remembers about her is what she'd done for him. Irving thought the full-time English teacher would be a good place to start, but Emir didn't remember her name either.

Michael Lewis

Somehow, Irving seemed to find what Emir was saying useful. He wrote little notes to himself about what I do not know. But at the top of the page, he wrote Miss Ames. Then he wrote a big question mark. Then he asked Emir to go away and write down everything he could remember from that period of his life. But before he lifted a finger to find Miss Ames he said, he needed to do a character check on Emir.

Michael Lewis

The end of February came and went. March came and went too, without the slightest trace of Miss Ames. It wasn't for lack of trying. Irving had put his best agent on the case, a woman named Gabriela Galindo. The first thing Gabriela did was to try the public school, but only two teachers who had been there in 1993 were still around.

Michael Lewis

She hired a local detective to go to Clarkston to get the yearbook, but they wouldn't give him one. She learned that the Georgia Department of Education keeps a list of all the teachers ever certified in the state, but she couldn't get access to the list. She called nearby colleges to search lists of graduates from the 1990s, still no sign of Miss Ames. Out of desperation, she hunted down all the old phone books from the region from the 1990s.

Michael Lewis

They called every Ames on the list, all these hundreds of names. Still didn't find her. And it was starting to feel just a little bit weird. A lot of the people Irving goes hunting for don't want to be found, but he finds them anyway. Here was someone with no obvious reason not to want to be found, and she'd vanished without a trace.

After a couple of months of this, you couldn't help but wonder, why was this woman the most difficult person on Earth to find? Was it because she wasn't an earthly creature? Not once, but twice this boy had found himself in a world more intent on destroying him than in building him up. Maybe he needed evidence that people weren't all bad. Maybe that's where angels always come from.

Michael Lewis

It's just the two of us talking. Emir isn't in the conversation yet.

Michael Lewis

Here's how they found her. Gabriela finally got her hands on that list of all the teachers certified in the state of Georgia. She noticed one of the women named Ames had allowed her certification to lapse. This one Ames, she tracked down in West Virginia and left messages for her saying only that she was looking for an English teacher on behalf of a former student.

Michael Lewis

The basic plan was to fly Miss Ames to Chicago to meet Emir, but I wanted to ask her what she remembered before Emir had a chance to tell her what she should remember. She told me that she was 36 years old when she arrived at Clarkston High as a student teacher. She'd recently married a man named Chris Ames, and they decided they wouldn't have children of their own. She thinks that maybe the faint regrets of that decision made her want to go out of her way to help some kid.

Anyway, she noticed this extremely talented boy in her class and watched him, not for two weeks as an intern, as Emir had told me, but for many months, an entire semester in which she was put in charge of his class, she says, as his full-time English teacher. And how was Emir's English at the time?

Michael Lewis

There were other differences in their stories. For example, Emir said the public school was terrifying and useless. Miss Ames didn't agree.

Michael Lewis

By that, she means from all over the world-- Kenya, Somalia, Bosnia, Vietnam, Korea. The place was like a teenage UN, in her telling. But the most glaring gap between their two stories was a central plot point, the key moment, the plagiarized essay. In Emir's version, it's what saves him. But Miss Ames doesn't even remember it. She recalls the moment she decided to move him to private school this way.

Michael Lewis

Still, no essay. I give her a little nudge.

Michael Lewis

Huh. It sounds like a different essay, but at least it's an essay. But as soon as she brings up the essay, she drops it.

Michael Lewis

The essay on which Emir has based his entire life story had nothing to do with her decision to help him. That much was clear. It was also clear that Miss Ames hadn't grabbed him on some mistaken whim, but only after observing his rare combination of genius and kindness for months. And then she'd gone and created a battle plan to move him out of public school and into private. She didn't ever have any job interview at the private school. She thinks maybe she told him that just to avoid getting his hopes up.

Michael Lewis

It isn't just the details that conflict here, it's the whole moral of the story. Miss Ames doesn't believe for a minute that she made all that much of a difference to Emir. She thinks he was so ridiculously gifted that he would've gone on to greater things, even if he'd stayed at Clarkston.

Michael Lewis

What happens when the story a person is telling about his life gets fact checked? I don't mean what happens when you say you graduated from college when you actually didn't. And your employer finds out, and you get fired. I mean, what happens when you really want to believe your life story was this. And then you get told by someone who knows better, nope, actually it wasn't this, it was that?

A few weeks later, Miss Ames and I meet up in Chicago. We're visiting Emir at his job at the University of Chicago Business School. Up until the time she got our call, the only way Miss Ames has even tried to keep track of Emir is by checking the list of Nobel Prize winners each year to see if his name is on it. And oddly enough, it's not a totally crazy way to try to keep track of him. He hasn't gotten the Nobel Prize yet, but he's the sort of person who might. His colleagues say he's brilliant, and half of them already have gotten the Nobel Prize.

Michael Lewis

The Chicago Business School feels less like a school than the headquarters of a highly successful corporation or maybe a Swiss resort.

Ira Glass

OK. And at that point, we have to take a break. What happens when Emir and Miss Ames sit down and compare notes about his past? Michael Lewis will be back with that in just one minute, from Chicago Public Radio, when our program continues.

Ira Glass

It's This American Life. I'm Ira Glass. Each week on our program, of course, we choose a theme, bring you different kinds of stories on that theme. Today's show, "How I Got Into College." We first aired this show a few years back.

Michael Lewis, if you heard before the break, he's telling the story of two people who are seeing each other again for the very first time in two decades. And let's just pick up right where we left off before the break.

Michael Lewis

Emir and Miss Ames make awkward chit chat for a few minutes, and then we all go into his office to talk. There's a giant, vaguely familiar painting on one of the walls. Emir explains that it's a forgery by some guy in China who specializes in them. Miss Ames is more interested in his coffee table.

Michael Lewis

It's a plagiarized piece of furniture?

Michael Lewis

We eventually settle into Emir's office and turn our attention to Emir's memories, which, thanks to Miss Ames, are suddenly a little problematic themselves. He tells his story all over again until he gets to what he sees as its biggest turning point.

Michael Lewis

He doesn't change any of the facts, but his tone is just a tiny bit less certain, maybe because he sees Miss Ames writhing in her chair.

Michael Lewis

Here's the safest way to plagiarize-- do it in the distant past. The teacher is no longer capable of getting angry about it, and the plagiarist is no longer even faintly embarrassed. Emir finishes his story with the same punchline, in that brief moment, Miss Ames mistakes him for a genius and gets him into a school that gets him into Harvard. But Miss Ames is now shaking her head.

Michael Lewis

It's about now that Emir begins to see that Miss Ames is screwing up his life story. The plagiarized essay is the key to the thing. Without it, his story and his life isn't about luck and chance and the guiding hand of a guardian angel he didn't deserve, it's about something else. And he doesn't want it to be about something else.

Michael Lewis

But not really. There's a bunch of stuff, she says, which he can't bring himself to accept. For instance, that the school she pulled him out of wasn't an educational dead end, but an interesting and diverse place in which he could have gotten a great education.

Michael Lewis

Here it is, a single objective fact that they disagree about that can be checked, a fact that might shed light on whose version of this story is more strictly true. So later, we checked it. The school district couldn't give us statistics for the year Emir was there, but they have them for the following year.

Emir's estimate that he was one of a dozen white kids in the school leaves out, oh, roughly 200 other white kids. They made up 17% of the school, pretty close to Miss Ames' estimate. Emir listens politely to Miss Ames' account of how and why she helped him and how and why it didn't actually matter all that much, as he was clearly destined for great things.

Michael Lewis

If Emir cares what Miss Ames thinks, he's doing a pretty good job of hiding his interest. It isn't until she describes what happened after she helped him out that he becomes truly excited.

Michael Lewis

For helping Emir to move from the public school to the private school, Miss Ames was more or less driven out of teaching. She quit, changed careers, and eventually moved with her husband to West Virginia, where she's now an interior designer.

Michael Lewis

That night, Emir invited Miss Ames to his house for dinner and to meet his wife and 18-month-old daughter. He wanted to show her the life that he never would have had if not for her.

[BABY CRYING]

Michael Lewis

Much, much later, after dinner and drinks, and more drinks, and after he's passed out some stiff cocktail from the old country, I ask Emir how it'll change his life story, now that he's heard what actually happened. He said he'd incorporate the fact that Miss Ames got punished for helping him, which of course only makes the story better. She's now not only an angel, but a martyr. But what about the plagiarized essay from the stolen library book on which the whole story turns?

Michael Lewis

Wait. We don't have to do that thought experiment. That's what really happened. Miss Ames actually didn't remember the essay. Emir's already forgotten that fact.

Michael Lewis

I didn't really see the point of torturing Emir any further. He needed his story to be what it was, and so he was sticking to it. The question was, why? What did it do for him? Why does a man who makes his career as a scientist cling to his story, in spite of evidence that it isn't true? And that's when it dawns on me, Emir Kamenica is just an unusually happy human being. He exudes the emotion from every pore.

Michael Lewis

Now, there's no obvious connection between a person's happiness and the way he tells stories about himself, but I think there's a not so obvious one. When you insist the way that Emir does that you're both lucky and indebted to other people, well, you're sort of prepared to see life as a happy accident, aren't you? It's just very different than if you tell yourself that you simply deserve all the good stuff that happens to you because you happen to be born a genius, or suffered so much, or worked so hard. That way of telling the story-- well, that's what you hear from every miserable bond trader at Goldman Sachs, or for that matter, every other A-hole who ever walked the earth.

It's at this exact moment when the subject of happiness comes up that Emir's wife, Yelena, becomes very interested.

Michael Lewis

The reason her husband's so happy, she thinks, has to do with the way he filters the world around him, the way he decides not just what to think about, but how to think about it. She says she sees him do this all the time.

Michael Lewis

These stories we tell about ourselves, they're almost like our infrastructure, like railroads or highways. We can build them almost any way we want to. But once they're in place, this whole inner landscape grows up around them.

So maybe the point here is that you should be careful about how you tell your story, or at least conscious of it. Because once you've told it, once you've built the highway, it's just very hard to move it. Even if your story is about an angel who came out of nowhere and saved your life, even then, not even the angel herself can change it.

Ira Glass

Michael Lewis. His newest book is called The Coming Storm. It is only available as an audio book. Is this the future, friends? It's available exclusively on audible.com. Emir and his wife, Yelena, now have two little kids. They're still in Chicago.

[MUSIC - THE QUEERS, "I WANNA BE HAPPY"]

(SINGING) I wanna be happy. I don't wanna be sad. I wanna be a good boy. I don't wanna be bad. I wanna be happy, yeah, I wanna be happy so bad. I wanna be happy, yeah, I really do, but everybody's saying I'm no good for you. They know I'm a cretin and I know it's true, but I don't care.

Our program was produced today by Nancy Updike and myself, with Alex Blumberg, Ben Calhoun, Sarah Koenig, Miki Meek, Jonathan Menjivar, Lisa Pollak, Brian Reed, Robyn Semien, and Alissa Shipp. Our senior producer for today's show is Julie Snyder. Production help from Anna Martin. Our technical director is Matt Tierney. Mixing help today from Catherine Raimondo. Research help from Michelle Harris. Music help from Damian Graef from Rob Geddis.

Special thanks today to Sarah Craig, Jim Richards, Claire Vaye Watkins, Joe Jennings, Rachel [? Colwell, ?] and Serving by Irving. Our website, thisamericanlife.org, where you can hear any of our old episodes for absolutely free, or download as many as you like using the This American Life app. This American Life is distributed by PRX, the Public Radio Exchange.

Thanks, as always, to our program's co-founder, Mr. Torey Malatia. I beat him at backgammon last night. I don't know. He took it hard.

Ira Glass

I'm Ira Glass. Back next week with more stories of This American Life.

[MUSIC - THE QUEERS, "I WANNA BE HAPPY"]

(SINGING) It's all I wanna do. I wanna be happy with you. It's all I wanna do. I wanna be happy with you. It's all I wanna do. I wanna be happy with you. It's all I wanna do. I wanna be happy with you.