Final Explanatory Piece

KAMSC Students Have the Resources to Garner The “Congratulations!”
By Jessica Maas

Anthony Spalvieri-Kruse opened his MacBook on the evening of March 26 to find his admission decision to NYU’s new Abu Dhabi program waiting. The tall, thin, Portage Northern senior, who is always brushing at the brown hair falling in his eyes, didn’t even have time to be anxious while he clicked on it.

The subject of the e-mail gave it away: “NYU Abu Dhabi—Congratulations.”

Thousands of other high school seniors around the country received their decisions to the country’s top schools within days of Spalvieri-Kruse. Most, though, were not as fortunate.

According to “The New York Times,” the number of applications submitted to many of the most selective colleges in the U.S. increased this year—by as much as 20 percent, in a few cases—and, as a result, the percentage of students accepted decreased.

But at the Kalamazoo Area Mathematics and Science Center (KAMSC), an accelerated school for some of the brightest students from 12 area high schools, including Spalvieri-Kruse, students continued to find acceptance letters in their mailboxes and e-mail inboxes.

Spalvieri-Kruse had actually already deposited to Cornell when he received his notice from NYU. He made the decision to revoke his acceptance there, though, for a full ride and the chance to be one of only 180 students to participate in the pilot program at NYU’s recently developed Honors College.

Another KAMSC student was accepted to Brown, whose admittance rate this year was only 9.3 percent after a 20.60 percent increase in applications. Spalvieri-Kruse and one other student were accepted at Cornell, one was accepted at the University of Pennsylvania, and one is turning down Stanford to attend Harvard; all of those schools experienced increases in the number of applications this year, and the latter two each accepted fewer than eight percent of those.

In total, the KAMSC graduating class of 68 received 213 offers of admission from 72 colleges or programs. And the Ivy Leagues were not the only elite schools offering—KAMSC students also had offers at other prestigious schools such as Emory University, George Washington University, Northwestern University, Oberlin College, University of Chicago, and Vanderbilt University.

According to Spalvieri-Kruse, it isn’t their intelligence that necessarily gets them in; it’s about the resources that KAMSC and its college counselor Jon Streeter afford to the students.

“It’s really interesting—through the application process you kind of see how much it has to do with packaging more so than actual aptitude,” he said. “Like, I can almost definitively say that smartest kids at KAMSC weren’t the ones who got into the Ivy League schools. Just, for example, there’s this kid at my school…he’s like a genius, he’s brilliant, but he only got into U of M, and, you know, that’s excellent for him, but his issue is just with packaging himself. He’s obviously way smarter than all of us, but he didn’t constantly see Mr. Streeter, he didn’t do all the paperwork, he didn’t foster all of these relationships with the teachers that you need on your side. You need a lot of people on your side to get into big name schools.”

And the seniors have someone on their side in Jon Streeter. The students describe him as an invaluable asset to their application process, walking them through the process step by step.

“Mr. Streeter is dealing with you one on one, and he only has about 60, 70 students at a time, so he has the ability to sit down with you one on one in his office and say, ‘This is where you are, this is where you need to be, this is what you need to do to get to where you’re going, and if you need help, call me,’” said Portage Northern senior Chelsea Angel, who plans to attend Cornell in the fall. “He’s so accessible—he has his phone on him, he gets his e-mails all the time; if you e-mail him at 2 a.m., he’ll get it. And he gives you his home phone, his cell phone. ‘If you have an emergency, call me on my cell.’ If he’s in service, he’ll pick it up. It doesn’t matter where or when or what he’s doing. He’s there to help you, and he lets you know that that is his sole purpose—to help you succeed and get you where you want to go.”

According to both Angel and Spalvieri-Kruse, the differences between their home school guidance counselors and Jon Streeter are vast.

“Instead of being an advocate for you on the front lines of your college experience, she’s more of a behind-the-scenes assistant, I guess,” said Angel of her guidance counselor at Portage Northern. “She’ll do the filing for you, and she’ll get the forms turned in that she needs to turn in and whatnot, but you really have to be on her about it because she has so many people to worry about that if she forgets about you and you don’t remind her, then it’s not going to happen.”

Jon Streeter, though, does act as the advocate for KAMSC students. The 66-year-old man with thin white hair and a matching mustache begins the college search process with the students during their first year as freshmen. Students are asked to research careers and colleges twice in their first two years, and beginning in the junior year they are required not only to narrow down their choices, but also embark on a certain number of college visits and participate in personal essay and resume writing. Then, during their senior years, he walks each one individually through their application processes and keeps them on track.

“My goal is, anyplace you say you want to be? I want you to have that as a choice,” said Streeter. “You don’t want to go to Duke? Turn ‘em down.”

His method is one that works, and the students know it.

“It’s a great system,” said Angel. “KAMSC has been really helpful. I don’t think that I would’ve gotten into the college that I wanted to go to if I was just at my home school.”

Spalvieri-Kruse noted that though it’s a common misperception, it’s not the name of KAMSC that gets their applications in admission counselors’ “Accepted” piles.

“Obviously, going to a separate math and science center is a little bit beneficial itself and engineering colleges like that, but really it’s the resources that KAMSC lends you,” he said.