When I first saw “Good Will Hunting,” I nearly walked out of the theater when Matt Damon’s character—a fiery, restless youth, if even there was one—got to the line about the apples. I’m not one for trite non-sequiturs, no matter how much that Harvard guy deserved to be knocked off his block.
Monterrey, Mexico, looks nothing like the Boston of “Good Will Hunting.” It’s a dry, dusty city due south of Texas. Its skyscrapers compete pathetically with the mountains behind them. A national park rises up on the city’s northwest edge. The poverty that afflicts much of Mexico was not nearly so evident as was pollution: from cement plants, steel mills, and traffic.
For better or worse, Monterrey is known as the "most American" of Mexican cities. It’s crisscrossed with freeways and sprawls out into nowhere. There are plenty of strip malls, populated with restaurants like TGI Friday’s and the Olive Garden.
Mexico's Students Look Towards a U.S. Education
Monterrey has an excellent university, ITSEM, known particularly for its engineering program; ITSEM sponsors some of the city’s best high schools. Even so, Monterrey’s students often look northward for their education, just as they do for their cuisine.
A good deal of the credit for rising international application rates, from Mexico and nearly everywhere else, belongs to Education USA. A nonprofit organization with loose backing from the State Department, Education USA acts as an educational diplomatic corps, promoting American education and offering resources that make our baffling application system a little more clear.
Education USA outposts can be found in almost every major city in the world, often staffed by a lone advisor. I did the math: the cost of maintaining an office for a year is about equal to that of maintaining a single nuclear warhead for a week. Some approaches to geopolitics are cheaper than others.
My visit to Education USA in Monterrey coincided with a meeting of its Competitive College Club. CCC serves as a support group and de facto college counseling session for local students who don’t have U.S.-oriented counselors at their high schools. The club meets regularly to do all the things that American kids do: study for SAT’s and ACT’s, conduct research on colleges, write application essays, and define their hopes, dreams, and fears.
A Special Group of Students
CCC is free and voluntary. No one is forced to attend meetings, and no one gets a grade. And yet, week in and week-out, anywhere from 10 to 20 students show up.
I've made presentations to groups of students about SAT’s and college applications, and – despite my efforts to dispense reasonable, engaging advice about a crucial turning point in their lives – sometimes been met with unalloyed apathy. These students will be paying tuition and flying thousands of miles – all for reasons that they often can’t articulate and sometimes don’t even know themselves. Sometimes, audiences pose not a single question. These silences are, I fear, signs of limp ambition or, even worse, paralyzing indifference.
The students in Monterrey were different.
They were outgoing. They were friendly. They were funny. They answered my questions eagerly and they asked questions of me. They knew why they were applying to college and why the United States was right place for them. One student wanted to study architecture. Another, marine biology.
They had applied to some of the most selective schools in the world while also hedging their bets on more obscure, but no less worthwhile, schools that fit their needs. Any college counselor in the world would love to work with them.
No one forced them to seek help from Education USA. And certainly no one forced them to sign up for the nerdiest series of meetings ever. What was amazing about this meeting is that it took place in mid-January—a full two weeks after the application deadlines of most colleges.
These kids were my favorite group of students I met all year. I had a feeling that they would do all right. I only wish all of their counterparts had the same spirit.
The Power of Self-Motivation
Most applicants assume that colleges focus on grades, activities, essays, and standardized test scores. That’s true, as far as it goes. But there's something else equally important—something intangible, ineffable, and crucial—that colleges cry out for.
Meanwhile, colleges accept that applications will reveal who's motivated and who's not. Eliminating the students who aren’t self-motivated, or who are motivated only by exogenous forces (such as hypertensive parents) is a great way to cull unwieldy applicant pools. (In my experience, applications, paired with recommendation letters, do a pretty good job of it.)
Selective colleges know that a student who wants to learn will learn. Professors don’t want to waste energy exhorting students to do their work. Colleges don’t want to be seen only as career preparation or, worse, as four-years of daycare for adolescents.
As important as self-motivation is, colleges make scant mention of it. Usually it’s implied in the saccharine guise of “passion.” I think that's because self-motivation is nearly impossible to teach. If someone isn't motivated in the first place, then they're not going to respond to someone who tells them "get motivated!"
Helping Kids Get Motivated
Developing self-motivation is a long-term prospect. But it's not impossible. Learning to write or to do algebra is a long-term prospect too. Self-motivation starts with what we—teachers, tutors, parents, and fellow students—choose to value. Do we, for instance, value grades, or do we value the motivation behind the grades? Selective colleges value both. Kids who aren’t encouraged to develop their own curiosity from a young age are exactly the ones who give me blank stares when I tell them to get excited about crushing the SAT.
We should tell students to be on the lookout for academic fields that they love. We should encourage them to talk about their interests and share their feelings. The more kids talk, the more they'll develop their own ideas and, ultimately, act on those ideas. If all goes well, they turn into the type of students who bound enthusiastically from class to class, and not students who skip out in favor of another bong rip or round of World of Warcraft. When you’re from a country with a per capita GDP of $10,000, this difference becomes crucial.
On that particular day in January, those students came to Education USA to watch Good Will Hunting, of all things. The advisor showed it not as an example of snappy dialog but rather as an illustration of American college life. As you may recall, Matt Damon plays brilliant student who struggles with—what else?—motivation.
By now, those students in Monterrey would have received their acceptances and are probably anticipating their departures for college. No matter what kind of poverty they come from or what kind of culture shock they encounter, I have no doubt that all of them are going to do fantastically well.
How do you like those manzanas?
