In the season seven finale, Dartmouth's Kathryn Bezella discusses lessons gleaned from her first year as an admissions dean with Lee Coffin, who just completed his 30th year in such a role. In a candid conversation about what they each bring to the conference table where decisions are made, the Dartmouth duo muse about the "roller coaster dynamic" of leading a very selective admissions process, mastering its invisible gears, overcoming nerves, and juggling various priorities while preserving and respecting each student's voice in an increasingly high volume of applications.
In the season seven finale, Dartmouth's Kathryn Bezella discusses lessons gleaned from her first year as an admissions dean with Lee Coffin, who just completed his 30th year in such a role. In a candid conversation about what they each bring to the conference table where decisions are made, the Dartmouth duo muse about the "roller coaster dynamic" of leading a very selective admissions process, mastering its invisible gears, overcoming nerves, and juggling various priorities while preserving and respecting each student's voice in an increasingly high volume of applications.
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire. I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admissions and financial aid, and this is the season finale of Admissions Beat.
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I have an unusual job. It's one of those roles that always gets a raised eyebrow when someone meets me for the first time, leans in a little closer, claps their hand and says, "Oh my God, I've never met one of you before." And it always makes me laugh because when I step back and think about the work I've done for the past 30 years, it's my job. It's what I do every day. I've loved it. I don't think of it as unusual in any way, but for everybody out there, it's rare to come in contact with a dean of admission in a way that it's not unusual to come across a lawyer, an accountant, a teacher, et cetera. So I'll own that.
This job I've got is atypical and high profile in a way that always surprises me that people are interested in what we do in these roles and the outcomes they have. And so as we wrap season seven, I thought, this is a good moment to ask a rookie dean how it feels to be a dean. How has this first year in the big chair played out? And her first year is my 30th, and so we'll have a chat together about this interesting role and how we see the work we do at the moment, sharing the same chair. As we come back, we will meet Kathryn Bezella, the assistant vice president and dean of undergraduate admissions at Dartmouth.
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Hello, Kathryn.
Kathryn Bezella:
Hi.
Lee Coffin:
Hi. Long time no see.
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah. How many meetings did we have today?
Lee Coffin:
Just three. So for people listening, Kathryn and I are dean of admissions and financial aid and dean of undergraduate admissions at Dartmouth. So I've said to folks who say, "That's interesting. You both have the title “Dean." I said, "Yeah, I'm sort of like King Charles and Kathryn's the prime minister. She gets the power to chair committee and really lead the staff." But it's a role that we rearranged things over the past year so that I had more capacity to do some more macro things. And Kathryn can be the day-to-day leader in admissions. It gives me this interesting moment though to have watched you go through this role literally day by day since October. For those of you meeting Kathryn for the first time, she joined us last fall after many years at Penn, most recently as vice dean in the admission office at Penn and has worked at Wharton and at the Curtis School of Music. So Kathryn, welcome back.
Kathryn Bezella:
Thank you. I was thinking about the last time we met when it was fall. The leaves were orange and falling and the climate of beautiful New England. My first September, October here and now here we are and it's spring and we walk through some mud puddles and think of all the things that have happened between then and now.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, that's what we're going to talk about. And so for those of you who will remember, Kathryn appeared on the episode last season talking about essays, literally her first day. And here we are on, we're recording this first week of May. Let's start there, Kathryn, you have just navigated your first year in a role that's like a rollercoaster. You go up, you go down, you go, "I think we're done." And then we're not. How does it feel? You're a few days past the national candidates reply date. How are you feeling?
Kathryn Bezella:
Very proud, enormously proud. And not, I mean, sure I feel proud of myself, but I feel as though I have a new vantage point for just many of the micro decisions and the energy of the team. And I didn't have a region specifically, which is an unusual feature. Usually you have a point of focus sort of in the selection process. And this year more than any other in my career everyone was my point of focus. And you and I read every single file of every student who was ultimately admitted and many, many of those who ultimately weren't. So I think I've always had a sense of the grandfather clock and a respect for the grandfather clock, but now I've opened the back and I've seen so many of the gears. I've watched just the mechanisms in such a different way and felt personally responsible for them in a very different way.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I like that metaphor of the grandfather clock and opening up the back and seeing the gears because most people look at the face-
Kathryn Bezella:
They're like, "It's a beautiful clock. What time is it?"
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, "What time is it? Oh, it's chiming. It's pretty." But that has to happen with a certain synchronized plan that is behind the clock. Yeah. As you get to the point where your first class is finished and looking back, what surprised you the most?
Kathryn Bezella:
I really ended up being so charmed by and excited about the quality of the applications that we read. And I was not so lost in the management of the process or in the details of the days to not be able to stop and fully appreciate the voices of the students. And Dartmouth does read in a way that is more related to how I was trained to read in the earlier part of my career than how I have read over the course of time. So returning to this place of taking in the essays, all of them, really taking in the student voice, thinking about what complements were coming through in the file. I enjoyed the liberal arts nature of what I was reading, and I really enjoyed the sort of Dartmouth flavor of that. The way that students talked about the outdoors or the way that they talked about just desiring to be with a specific professor, it just felt very personal to me, even though the size of it, the selectivity of it is huge, but the meeting kids one at a time still felt really, really personal.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Talk a little bit about the shift in seats. So you were at Penn for a long time and now you're at Dartmouth. You went from a larger-
Kathryn Bezella:
Pre-professional.
Lee Coffin:
Pre-professional, very selective place to a smaller, more liberal arts oriented campus. But as a dean and more broadly as an admission officer, what I kept noticing is you saw a difference between those two places that I think would surprise a lot of listeners that you think, "Oh, they're both Ivys." Yes, but each place in this league we share is a very distinct campus. And not to make this a Dartmouth versus Penn question, but just what were the ways in which you started to turn a corner and say, "This campus has distinct elements that are not better than, but different than where I was."?
Kathryn Bezella:
We don't have tools to understand in an applicant things like introversion or extroversion, but you and I've talked a lot as we read files sometimes we'll read someone and it'll be like someone who's a long distance runner or someone who's really a contemplative sort of poet or someone who writes about art history and the way that they like to go to a museum and sort of sit in a room and absorb the environment. And I don't know, maybe some of those folks are incredibly extroverted and that just isn't what came through. But there is a sense of introspection and again, a sense of place or of longing to be in a place, like the physicality of Dartmouth that I think came through in the applications. And that's just a different energy and a different sense of place than what I was reading in my prior institution.
There they were wanting to be in the thrum of a big city and exploring all the institutions and the professional opportunities in Philadelphia or in New York because it's so close. And again, one is not better, one is not worse, but they are distinct. And I think also the desire to go into a more pre-professional kind of training. Though again, at my prior institution there was a liberal arts foundation, but still there was also a desire to be thinking about the application of what you were learning in the next step. And that plan was in place for many of the applicants as they were thinking of entering that university.
Whereas here, other than maybe some references to the desire to be involved with policy or the desire to be involved with research, I can't really recall an essay that I read or the way that an applicant was revealing a particular professional goal. Certainly that wasn't a pattern or a theme. It was more, "These are directions that interest me. These are topics that I'm curious about. These are ways that I have different interests that I hope to find to weave together." And so that came out in a way that I think at my prior institution was more, there was an end goal that was desired in some more specific way.
Lee Coffin:
I think that's a really important perspective to have and for students finishing 11th grade and about to become that, my favorite phrase, you're a rising senior, you're in between 11th grade and 12th grade. You're rising like bread and you're exploring this summer and refining a list. And I think what Kathryn just shared is one of the vibes that comes through your campus and one will not be better, worse for each of you, but you have to suss it out and feel it. And I think when you're the dean sitting in a seat at one of these institutions, you do own it because as you shape, you're looking for students who have that same instinct.
Kathryn Bezella:
And it's funny, because I haven't heard it often pointed out, but I do remember in my own hometown growing up, people had a sense of my high school's vibe versus the neighboring high school's vibe. They're the athletes or that's the school where everyone does theater. It's like a big theater school because they have this amazing auditorium. Even in the high school level, if you ask yourself about the high schools you've experienced just even in your sports circuit or whatever it might be, you have a sense of there being a slight difference in some of them, though the curriculum is largely the same. That's true at the college level and maximized at the college level.
There's even more nuance and more differentiation to it. But I think that's a helpful realization for students sometimes when they think, "I don't really know what you mean by fit." Or, "I don't really understand why there would be a difference." But when they can sort of center it in their own, "Yeah, you know what, in my forensics league when I was doing speech and debate, yeah, I knew that that high school was known for this. That was different than my high school." And I think that's a useful paradigm for students to start to be curious about.
Lee Coffin:
You get a sense of a place and the people who make that place up and that's where the applications ping. So people call you Dean Bezella now. So you have a new prefix.
Kathryn Bezella:
Still weird.
Lee Coffin:
It's still weird, I know. Now that you are the dean, how is that different than how you imagined it might be?
Kathryn Bezella:
It is definitely different. I've had the privilege of being in a very right hand close seat to a lot of great deans in my career. And so I kind of thought, "How different could it be?" Because I've been very lucky to be included in a lot of their decision making and preparation for big things and even in some cases to help them think about how they were going to confront something that was going on. And yet, even though I had that court side seat, and now with the basketball in my hand, it does feel different.
Lee Coffin:
Why?
Kathryn Bezella:
In part because I think it is a signifier. I had my deans when I was an undergrad, and there was something about going to see the dean. I mean, I've dealt with student reporters as an example my whole career. And now that I'm the dean, it still feels different and they still approach me differently than they did when I was providing just talking points for something. And also, it's an unusual role even within academia because I don't teach anything. I mean, maybe I will someday, but I'm not here as a faculty member exploring a subject. I mean, I'm here to think about and create and amplify something about the place and what it offers and to explain that and make that meaningful and clear to people. And also to work on all those gears in the clock to help us do all of the actual execution that it takes to read so carefully 28,000 plus applications.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, talk about the nerves that come with the role.
Kathryn Bezella:
Dartmouth has a practice of committee that I am unused to. I'm used to running very, I mean, I've run all sorts of committees, but committees with faculty, committees without, but most of them, the largest committee I think I've ever run had maybe six or seven people in part of the discussion. And so in our early decision process, we bring the whole team together to really discuss and celebrate and hear about the parts of the applicant pool that they didn't directly see. In part, we do it because it's enjoyable. We're excited about the people that we're meeting and their level of excitement about Dartmouth, but we also do it in a little bit of a training capacity so that we get ready for regular decision. And especially the newer colleagues can listen to the narratives that are being discussed and hear people's reactions to, "Oh, that's definitely a strength." Or, "I see the connection to what's happening here."
So I'm sharing, what do we have a staff of probably 20, 20 people in the room plus, and you're in the room. I'm two weeks in or three weeks into reading my first Dartmouth application. By no means do I consider myself the be all, end all expert of every region in every high school in the country as it relates to Dartmouth. And yet my voice has to guide the conversation, create conversation, disagree vocally when I do, and in some cases take control of the situation. In some cases, let the conversation sort of percolate. You're thinking about the content that you're seeing, you're thinking about how that needs to be taken into account as you're actually deciding about should the student yes or no be part of the class. And then you're also simultaneously trying to make learning happen in the room and you're trying to control the room because you do have 20 people who've been sitting there all day eating Cheetos, looking at kid after kid after kid, and you also can't look dumb. So it was like the-
Lee Coffin:
Juggling.
Kathryn Bezella:
Terrible layer cake of stress. And I went home and we did it for what, three or four days in a row. And I went home, I'm sure after the first day and probably after the second and third and was like, just laid on my sofa with my five-year-old putting butterfly clips in my hair just as a total zombie, because it really was watching seven movies at a time.
Lee Coffin:
I love that. Well, because it's the part of the work that is the gears of the grandfather clock, to go back to your metaphor, that people see the tour and the application and then the decisions and the open house. But what is invisible to almost everybody is the juggling of all those tasks that the dean must do. And I've often thought about it like this, I'm in this tango between the romantic, poetic, idealist part of the work and the pragmatic, logical, analytical part of the work. And you have to hold both of those pieces together at the same time.
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah. And you have to teach others how to do it. I mean, particularly our staff last year had three newcomers, all of whom were Dartmouth students. That's also another layer that they have a different level of investment both in who they invite to join the community that they're part of. They're also new professionals and they are grappling with, "But I loved this kid." Or, "I actually, I didn't see the fit of the file we just looked at in the same way that the two people next to me are just the moon about this person. And I'm grappling like, am I not good at this?" So you also have to coach and bring everyone along into helping them sort of move between the, you can fall in love with the individual, but at the end of the day, there's only 1,175 seats.
Lee Coffin:
And then you go from early when you're still newish to March when we're in committee and trying to figure out how do we shape the rest of this class? And you and I were in endless meetings thinking about the strategy and the volume that was moving through. We both had some sleepless nights, you more than me this year, because I watched you go through it wide-eyed and say to me the next day, "I was up at 3:00 in the morning."
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah, yeah.
Lee Coffin:
What were you thinking about?
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah, so many things. I mean, you've ridden the roller coaster so you sort of know when the twist is coming and that the nausea is going to be fun. I did not know when we were going upside down and when the next loop was coming. So part of it was just my own reflections on the day. Did I make the right decisions? Did I make the right calls? Did I not tee up something? Did I not help someone see the thing that I was trying to convey? I think it has a lot of reflection into what the applicants must experience too. So when we welcomed admitted students and you did the podcast live from our admitted student event, we heard from some of those students. "Yes, my essay was only 250 words, but the document that I created it on was 54 pages." And that's why I'm up at three in the morning as well, so that was something that I felt acutely at times this year.
Lee Coffin:
Over my tenure I would come to this moment of sleeplessness because I would be pondering the magic of April where you release decisions and you can't control how they're going to bounce sometimes into your court and sometimes way out of bounds. You're like, "Bye-bye." And I've joked that success swings on the fickleness of 18 year olds, which is not an insult. It's just you don't know how someone's individual decision-making is going to play out. And you as dean have to anticipate the law of averages and figure out some of this will go as planned, some of it will misfire. How do I get the place where I work towards the best outcome? I smiled a lot just watching you navigate that unknown. Outwardly, there's that metaphor of the duck seemingly placid on the water, but the feet are moving really fast. I would not have said, "Oh, she's going home at night and guzzling a case of mineral water." Which is her favorite beverage.
Kathryn Bezella:
Yes.
Lee Coffin:
Or I would come into her office and see her gnawing on a meat stick. What I love about the conversation we're having is I think for anyone listening, parent, guidance counselor, potential applicant, aspiring dean, you're seeing this really human part of this role. I have often joked I said, "I don't have a cape. I'm not Superman who can just kind of do things. I have to think about it and plan it and manage it and own it." I think is the thing that I have always worried about the most is how do I represent the class, the outcome, when it works, when it doesn't to the president, to the faculty, to the trustees, to the student body, to the New York Times, to whomever, because your name is on the letter.
Kathryn Bezella:
I told you once about a search I had been part of where they had everyone, instead of doing individual small meetings, they had everybody in the room together. So it was like the athletic director sitting next to the dean of the faculty sitting next to the fundraising folks sitting next to the, and they were all 12 or 13 of them in this panel and asking me all questions. And the challenge was, how do I say when the athletic director describes to me how much support I'm willing to give the great athlete that they're going to argue for, and then the dean of the faculty says, "How are you going to upload the standards of the academics so that increasingly we're getting more and more students who are great at research and great at all of these things?" I had to figure out how to say the right thing to the faculty person that also wouldn't tick off the athletic director and vice versa. And I was describing the situation to you and you just said, "That's the job."
And this is true of families and students as well. It's like, how do you figure out how to speak a student and family's language as quickly as possible to help them see the possibility for this process? And their formula is going to probably be slightly different than the two families standing behind them and their priorities and their questions and their concerns. Much of it is being thoughtful, being aware, being sensitive to what each family and student and then also internally stakeholders, what it is that they're looking for and how do you help them feel satisfied.
Lee Coffin:
And balancing priorities that aren't always aligned. Every year I've done this, the most challenging part of the job is trying to figure out when can I say yes? When must I say no? When do the priorities overlap? And you're managing a scarce resource, which is a seat in the class versus a very qualified pool. And I'm reminded of the very last day of the selection process where we realized we had just admitted the very last person we could admit because the model was saying, "This number of people fills your class on May 1st." And there were still a lot of people we really wanted to take.
Kathryn Bezella:
We loved, yeah.
Lee Coffin:
The waitlist was their destination at that point. And I remember saying, "You got to make peace with that too. We have a finite capacity to say yes." And you learn how to do that without losing track of your grip on your job.
Kathryn Bezella:
It doesn't feel too, I mean, I think probably many people, and understandably, when they receive a decision, that's a disappointment. I think many people envision us as sort of more of the Darth Vader, heartless kind of slash and burn capacity, but I can't remember whether I shared this with you in the cycle. I know I shared it with the team that I still have a sort of well-wish that give candidates often when I'm saying, when I know that they're not going to make it into the class or when they are not a fit for the institution. But when I just think they're a great kid and I have a sort of silent well-wish mantra that I wish them, I imagine where they will land and my no will become a yes for them in another way.
But I mean, I've done that now in my entire career sort of thinking through thousands of applications, and it's very genuine. I had my own heartbreak in the college application process, so I know it feels devastating to get that no from the place that you just envisioned was going to be your perfect haven. I'm so glad I didn't end up at any of those places in retrospect because the place that I landed was what ended up being perfect for the path that put me on, but I didn't know that when I was 17.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, no, that's right. There's a lot of things we don't know when we're in high school, which is the whole point of going to high school. Talk a little bit about this idea that as a dean, you're the gatekeeper. I don't know if I fully own that term myself, but it's one people use to describe the dean.
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah, there are a lot of higher ed terms that I am not comfortable with, and that would definitely be one of them.
Lee Coffin:
Why?
Kathryn Bezella:
Because it implies that on the one side of the gate there's nothing else that's good. Why do you want to get through the gates so much? Because you're seeing something through the bars that looks better than where you are. My statement that I just made is relevant here. It's like, there were many places that I could have landed that I think would've satisfied some part of who I was and maybe some more than others. And who knows who I would've been had I gone to the conservatory at Oberlin, probably a different person. I don't look back and now and think that, "Oh, woe is me. Nothing has come of my life." So I think, yeah, gatekeeping to me implies that there's an uneven level of opportunity on one side of the gate versus the other. I mean, you think of gates as iron and they're sort of violent, and that's so the opposite what we do.
I mean, I think our work is about appropriate honesty. I mean, certainly not every institution is for everybody, and that's okay, but when you are 94% likely to say no to somebody and only 6% likely to say yes, you owe the 94% who received the no to have at least felt supported and bettered and satisfied in some way by the quality of the interaction. The gatekeeping idea is so severe, and I think the opposite should be the case now that everyone, even those who don't receive the yes that they're hoping for, have felt respected and have felt in some way helped by the interaction that they had with our team.
Lee Coffin:
So recast the metaphor. So if you're not a gatekeeper, the dean is?
Kathryn Bezella:
I do think there's a teacher whose goal is to help people acquire knowledge. I mean, this podcast is very much part of that. You're not keeping information, you're disseminating it, you're sharing it.
Lee Coffin:
I mean, I've come to think of the role as one where I am curating a community.
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah, planning a fabulous dinner party.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, like times where-
Kathryn Bezella:
A huge community picnic.
Lee Coffin:
Or in other episodes we've talked about casting a play. Mindy Kaling made that comment to me in a couple episodes ago, and I've been pondering like, yeah, you've got this big pool and you've got a finite number of spots and you're curating the best combination of people to create the place that thrives in the program. But I've also caught myself saying many times to trustees especially, part of my unwritten job description is to be the steward of the institution's reputation in the high schools of the world. As you hear me say that, does that make sense?
Kathryn Bezella:
It does. Increasingly, it's so interesting as the pool grows and as Dartmouth becomes more and more global, it's also not even stewarding the reputation, it's introducing the idea that Dartmouth even exists and sort of welcoming people to the concept of this place one by one by one, school by school.
Lee Coffin:
That reminds me of a conversation we've had many times about the landscape moving away from places that know private liberal arts colleges quite well and towards parts of the United States and around the world where there's less familiarity and your poetic way of saying it, there's believers and there's skeptics. Talk a little bit about that.
Kathryn Bezella:
I think Dartmouth and many institutions like ours have traditionally gone out the world and the families and the students and the communities that we're interacting with are those that are already open and imagining being part of a liberal arts conversation and have come to terms because their mom might've been a Russian literature major and their dad was an econ person, and now they have jobs that are not related to those things directly. They've already come to terms with the concept of what liberal arts might be and how that might lead them indirectly to many different kinds of careers. A believer is someone for whom the concept of the Ivy League is desirous, is attractive and aspirational. A believer is someone who is not only understanding the value of college as a path to a job, but also very clear on social opportunities and the other ways that they might be growing in that process.
So it's not a transaction necessarily like, "I get this and then I get this certificate and then I get a job." They're open to the concept of the other ways of growth that might be part of their college experience. And so in the believer model, it's very easy for us to find the right conversation that sort of meets the family or student right where they are and it doesn't take a lot of explanation or convincing. But increasingly as we think about these other geographies, as we think about going outside of the United States where there are so many educational systems that are much more tactical in the steps that they bring you towards an engineering career for example, or that are much more rote and about memorization. So they're very different kind of educational models. So in that case, liberal arts is, it seems like a very sort of funny concept when you think about someone for whom an Ivy League institution represents a very elitist place or a place that is not for them or historically has not been for them.
And so not only is it not something that they might aspire to, but it might actively be something that they feel a sort of distaste for or a sort of uncertainty about or a suspicion about. And so as we think about more and more students in our path being skeptics and coming from families that are skeptical, so this is an active stance of sort of disbelief, that takes a very different kind of conversation and a very different kind of interaction to overcome than just a handshake and here's a pamphlet at a college fair and come to visit campus.
There's so much more interesting work for us to think about how do we actually explore persuading someone and informing them or interacting with them multiple times to sort of build an understanding or an argument, and also how do we really find personal ways that are meaningful for people to understand really specifically what a liberal arts degree might include that isn't just memorizing information in a textbook. So that to me is one of the most interesting creative challenges we all have ahead of us is navigating from that sort of traditional believer to this sort of skeptic and thinking about how to make our office helpful with the skeptics and bring them into the conversation in a different way.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. I'm pondering back to my question around the gatekeeping, and gatekeeping implies a gate and you're letting someone through one by one or a few at a time, versus what you've just described is really persuasive storytelling. You have to introduce a type of campus, a type of experience, a type of curriculum in a way that helps someone appreciate it, own it in a way. And that's a really different job than we had 25 years ago where the landscape was more concentrated. I think the story you just told about skeptics and believers is going to be more true, not less true. It's like there's this premium on storytelling and reassuring too, I mean, that this is the right path for you.
Kathryn Bezella:
You asked me before what surprised me and this is the first year that I think I really did see the whole class and read and touch every file in the class. And one of the things that I think I hope would be very reassuring to the students is as I was reflecting on the thousands of applications, the pieces that stayed with me were not, "Oh, this student did this amazing research that particularly looked at the Golgi complex of a particular kind of bird cell." It wasn't like a highly technical, erudite, intellectual endeavor. It was, I really remember that student that we read whose mother made those pancakes and the way that he described how she poured the milk and how she set out the ingredients. And it was such a clear, loving, meaningful visual for him. And I mean, I haven't met him yet, but when I do, I'm going to tell him that that was just such good writing and it wasn't good writing because it was overly intellectual or bragging about a particular accomplishment. It was good writing because it was firmly situated in his lived experience.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I think for juniors, rising seniors, it's remembering that qualitative counts as much as quantitative.
Kathryn Bezella:
Absolutely, yeah.
Lee Coffin:
It's not stats over story, they're simpatico. They have a connection with one another, and the pancake example is very human, and you're building a community of humans, and you want there to be people that animate the community in a way that makes others feel welcome and included. And yeah, it's kind of the hidden part of the job. I've always been struck by how few people really appreciate the shaping that happens, that we've got this volume that we're managing efficiently on time, deliver this outcome. That's not what got me out of bed every morning. And I had to do all those things, I had to deliver a class, hit the budget, spend the right amount of financial aid when that was a factor. So those are all part of the toolkit of being the dean.
But the more interesting, elegant part is what you're describing is how do you sprinkle the class with the stories of people who rise into the process in a way that is lovely to see and you want to respond. My last question, Kathryn, is for you to give advice to two groups. So I'll start with the rising seniors who are going to head into summer vacation, hopefully visit some campuses, ponder what's feeling right, and then they're going to come back to school in September when season eight will greet them in the fall to take them from that moment through the application deadline. But what advice do you have to those rising seniors and their parents about how to spend this summer?
Kathryn Bezella:
My first thing I think comes just in my role of being a mom to a very young daughter who's five. And then also simultaneously, I have older stepchildren in my life. And so it's sort of a funny paradigm because I'm constantly confronted with both ends of the spectrum at the same time. And I parent in the shadow of knowing that right now she thinks I'm the best thing since sliced bread, and she tells me, "You're the best mommy ever." The other day she said, said, "Mommy, I love you like I love a dog." And I said, "Why?" And she said, "Owners love their dogs."
Lee Coffin:
So she owns you.
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah, so thank you. But the time, I mean, what do they say? The days are long, but the years are short. I mean, this is the summer before a senior year. I was just talking to a mom in our office who's getting ready for prom, and then they're doing a family trip and graduation. And before you know it's like we're packing up and taking you to school and moving you into your dorm and then our life and our relationship fundamentally shifts. And so I do think there's as much as possible, and I know because there's scheduling and there's the plans and the things, and I know it's easier said than done, but I do think taking some time to recognize that as a family unit, this summer is a moment in your family's picture book. The pages after this are going to look very different.
And so I think appreciating that as much as one can would be something that I would really hope people could find just a couple of moments to stay present to, but then also be open to surprises. I just think visiting a couple of campuses that maybe seem like a long shot or you feel like you're absolutely decided on something, then you feel like, "I'm 1,000% certain this is the path." And just counter that if you can and say, "Just for fun, I'm going to do, even if it's just a virtual tour." Because I think we can get onto an image for ourselves and our future that feels just overly certain. And so I think it's still a great time. Nothing has been decided. Applications are still possible. So I think it's a great time to still be curious and just give yourself a little window of like, "Well, maybe. What if I did move to the middle of nowhere? Or what if I tried NYU?"
Lee Coffin:
Let's see what happens. I think that's right. I think that's been a recurring theme this season from a bunch of guests that the plan they had got disrupted sometimes by a decline and sometimes by serendipity and the new place was often a wonderful place. And I think for, I'll tag onto what you just said, as the summer unfolds, being open to discovery is really important, and you don't need to make decisions in June, July and August or even in September. You've got time still to sort and shift. Okay, so the second part of this question is advice to aspiring deans. So you were an aspiring dean for a while.
Kathryn Bezella:
I was.
Lee Coffin:
And so there's a lot of our colleagues who listen to the pod who will be in searches soon. What advice do you have to them as they think about the role you are now in?
Kathryn Bezella:
Yeah. It's so funny because I've reflected a lot on this. A colleague who you know as well, who is still a great mentor to me, who was the interim dean at Penn during a time of great transition. I remember he gave me a performance review the year that he was interim. And it was such, I was in my mid to late 20s and the dean thing happened where I was sitting down across from this person who had this big title. And at the time, he and I were not yet friends. He was still someone I had just looked up to. And in his performance review, I still have it, he said, "Kathryn has the makings of a future dean." I walked out and was like, "I don't even... Is that true?" I often think about that now in retrospect, because I think, "Why? What on earth?"
And what would be my advice? And I think when I think about part of the why and I think about what I learned from him, you've been someone who's also taught me this, my first dean of admissions that I ever worked for, so part of it is that you have to be attentive in some way. You have to remain attentive to the human. You can't be wanting this because you imagine that the money's great or there's power and glamour. I mean, there ain't, but you have to maintain and care about and be attentive to the human and the story. And if that isn't something that on some level deeply interests you, then this isn't the right path. On top of that, when you think about the gears, I feel incredibly privileged and incredibly fortunate to have gone over to work at a place like Wharton where I was exposed to a lot of industries and how they solve problems and research about things like management and people analytics and strategy.
I knew I loved the human piece, and I knew that naturally as an English major, I had a large capacity for language and for story. But what I needed also in the mix was how does one design work and think about strategy and think about the function of people and team and all of those much more tactical, truly the gears, and being open to not only learning that within higher ed, but learning it from looking beyond over the gate, looking beyond it like how do other industries and people think about these problems? And are there lessons I can take from those learnings that I could apply, even though they may not look exactly the same? Finding that balance. You can't just be a good reader of applications. That certainly is something that's critically important. And if you don't like it, you'll hate the job because that's a huge part of what you do all winter. But the other pieces of it are absolutely critical. And I think in my path have also been part of what makes me distinct. I did have one other revelation or story that I wanted to share.
Lee Coffin:
Go ahead.
Kathryn Bezella:
This was a big one for me, and then I do think has made me more empathetic with our applicants, which is for most of the career that I just described, I was the person who was always writing the speech for the dean. So I've written convocation speeches and welcome speeches and all sorts of speeches for my bosses over the years, and that's just always been part of my job no matter where I was in the org chart and I had a much harder time being myself and thinking about what I had to say as my individual self than I ever did when I was like, "Oh, what would I write for Lee?"
And I am sure that there's some part of that that mimics the applicants that it's like, "Who does the admissions office want me to be? Who does the audience, what do they expect to hear from a quote, unquote, "dean"?" And I was very tempted to sort of go fall into stats about the class and, "Did you know that we have one person from every blah, blah, blah?" And what I had to finally ask myself is, "What do I, Kathryn have to say that is not different than anyone ever written before?" And that's where I sort of landed on what I ended up saying. And I felt very touched because I know what I shared with the audience had a lot to do with my role as a mom and as a mom of a very young person, and my role as a stepmom to some young grownups, telling them as a parent what we kind of learned about their kids through the process.
And I think that resonated with them in a way that was far different than had I just stood up and sort of recited some statistics about who we had welcomed. And so it's a reminder to myself, but also a reminder to the applicants that you have something of value to say that is different than the generic, "What does an Ivy League applicant to Dartmouth say?" And the more you can move aside those voices in your head that are like, "That's not good enough." Or, "Why would anyone care?" The more you can lean into, "What is my story?" Let your life speak.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, speak your truth. Yeah, no, I love that because the advice you gave yourself is the advice we give applicants. Write the essay that shows us you. You as dean have to say what's in your heart. It's been my privilege to have shared this first year with you as a dean, and you do it beautifully. And to our listeners, I hope this conversation with Kathryn has been an aha, that the Dean of Admission is not the Wicked Witch. She has played the Wicked Witch.
Kathryn Bezella:
I was the witch for Halloween this year.
Lee Coffin:
You were. No, but congrats as you finish your first class.
Kathryn Bezella:
Thank you. I couldn't ask for a better guide.
Lee Coffin:
Well, thanks. And congrats to us on finishing season seven. Thanks to all of the listeners for joining us every Tuesday morning for another conversation about college admission. Thanks to my producer, Charlotte Albright and my editor Jack Steinberg, and the technical support from Sara Morin and the scheduling support from Peg Chase, and to all of you who download us every week. It is my favorite part of the job. Being able to have this conversation with you is a highlight of the work I do here at Dartmouth. And like any good teacher, I am ready for summer vacation, and we will take four months off, barring some important moment that brings us back for a special episode. But we'll be back in September for season eight. Until then, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Have a fun summer and we'll see you in the fall.