Trying to reach prospies

emily hainze

landlocked

Last week, I sat down at Microsoft Word to write an article and make some money. I needed to write about campus life with humorous insight. I needed to write about ups and downs, the ins and outs of my own personal experience as a Grinnell College student. But I did not need to write a column for the S&B—it was my week off. Instead, I had thrown myself out of the frying pan of student body scrutiny and into the fire of the outside world, which is cold, anonymous and has not yet bought a Nalgene from the bookstore. I was writing for prospective students.

Any English major worth her salt and a degree in reading novels knows that audience is an important thing to consider. She also knows that language is a way to affect another person, from its use in political discourse to its use on the professor who is reading her paper on political discourse. When you are a day over deadline and have two other papers due, however, these concerns turn into afterthoughts to write about in your next week’s S&B column.

How, then, are you supposed to go about exercising your right to word of mouth? What do prospective students get to know? How do you tell them? And why are their prospects at Grinnell really that great? Or, as my brutally honest, radically inclined friend asked me as I complained about my assignment, “Isn’t that like selling out?”

My nuanced answer to that question is, no, not really. Prospies are less easy to get to in print than they are, say, at Harris, or chatting at a table during their first dining hall experience, but just because you can’t really touch them doesn’t mean you shouldn’t try. If incoming freshmen belong to the “petting zoo” their first semester, prospies are an even more distant species, something that requires special lighting and a fiberglass wall. The Ins & Outs newsletter skips right past waiting for the prospie and parents to move their trays off the juice bar. You don’t have to answer any questions about class ratio, or how to score drugs, sex or good grades. If the world is Grinnell, then the world is also your soapbox. Say what you will—there is more space between tour guide and tourist than meets the eye. Just don’t make faces through the window; that is mean and they never react the way you want them to.

Regardless of my prospective publication moralizing, as the weather warms up, an influx of high school seniors will also brighten the campus landscape. The student body might think that the future lies in spring break, but the administration knows it lies in Accepted Students Weekend. My future includes a paycheck for an article about the writing on the Burling bathroom walls. Maybe this is where college recruitment and college reality overlap: like any good prospective student, I still have my eyes open for opportunity.