Mindy Kaling joins AB for its 100th episode as the multi-talented Hollywood star and Dartmouth alumna remembers her own college admissions process in which "I wasn't thinking about the correct things." A high-achieving "comedy nerd" who had been weaned on "mountains of flashcards,” Mindy ponders her journey from home to college as she battled procrastination and a lack of confidence and faced her immigrant family’s high expectations for admissions “success.” Mindy candidly muses about "striving to feel special" as she "chased the feeling of acceptance" as a Latin-loving, theater-focused high school student. She shares the salient lessons of disappointment after her initial college ambitions did not materialize as well as her serendipitous "pivot" towards new opportunities as she moved forward. Whether auditioning for a role, creating a script, or penning a college essay, Mindy underscores the value of "authenticity and freshness" in one's storytelling as she advises future applicants to "be unafraid to be yourself."
Mindy Kaling joins AB for its 100th episode as the multi-talented Hollywood star and Dartmouth alumna remembers her own college admissions process in which "I wasn't thinking about the correct things." A high-achieving "comedy nerd" who had been weaned on "mountains of flashcards,” Mindy ponders her journey from home to college as she battled procrastination and a lack of confidence and faced her immigrant family’s high expectations for admissions “success.” Mindy candidly muses about "striving to feel special" as she "chased the feeling of acceptance" as a Latin-loving, theater-focused high school student. She shares the salient lessons of disappointment after her initial college ambitions did not materialize as well as her serendipitous "pivot" towards new opportunities as she moved forward. Whether auditioning for a role, creating a script, or penning a college essay, Mindy underscores the value of "authenticity and freshness" in one's storytelling as she advises future applicants to "be unafraid to be yourself."
Lee Coffin:
From Hanover, New Hampshire, I'm Lee Coffin, Dartmouth's vice president and dean of admission and financial aid. And this is the 100th episode of Admissions Beat.
Boom, we're 100. When we started five years ago as a pandemic communications platform of necessity, I never imagined we would continue for this long and that we would reach 100 episodes. I was thinking about anniversaries and how 50 is golden and how 25 is silver. I thought, what's 100? Purple is the color of 100 anniversaries. So 100 episodes, a little bit of purple. I'm excited.
To celebrate this 100th episode, we have a special guest. So joining me on Admissions Beat this week is the one and only Mindy Kaling. So when we come back, we will say hi to Mindy and hear about her journey from high school to college, her career in comedy, how storytelling is a talent we all can learn from her, and we'll have a quick chat about how the liberal arts prepared her for a career in Hollywood. We'll be right back with Mindy.
(music)
I am really excited to welcome Mindy Kaling as our special guest for this 100th episode. Hello, Mindy.
Mindy Kaling:
Thank you for having me.
Lee Coffin:
I'm excited to have you. I thought it would be fun to have a little bling on the 100th episode and someone like you who is so recognizable to kids in high school. I'm honored that you are taking some time out of your Saturday morning to talk about college admissions with me.
For listeners, I'm guessing Mindy Kaling needs no introduction, but let me do a really quick bio on her so that we're all on the same page. Mindy is a Dartmouth alumna class of 2001, so I had a little inside track in booking her for this gig. But you know her work from The Office and The Mindy Project on television where she's received six Emmy nominations. She has a Tony Award for Best Musical as a producer for the musical, A Strange Loop. She has produced the Sex Lives of College Girls, Never Have I Ever, Running Point. She's the producer of the current movie, A Nice Indian Boy, which is out in theaters right now. So Mindy, you are a busy person. I was reading this off of Wikipedia, and I thought, what's it like to have a Wikipedia page?
Mindy Kaling:
Dreadful because you don't have any control over it, and I'm a control freak. People may have guessed about me, I'm really a type A personality. I'm not someone who I think takes a lot of pains to kind of control my image, but the Wikipedia page really makes me doubt that because I hate the photo, I hate the information about me. I don't like it. But what can you do? It's very democratic, I think.
Lee Coffin:
But unlike when you apply to college, you do control your narrative very directly in the way you introduce yourself through your application. But in this Wikipedia sense, you do not.
I wanted to talk to you about three things. The first thing being your journey from high school to college and how you navigated that. You write about it a lot in your first memoir, "Is Everyone Hanging Out Without Me?" I'm going to ask you some questions about that.
But just as another starting point, I typed your name into Google again, and I said, "Mindy Kaling admissions." What popped up was this AI generated assessment of your admission probability as a high school senior. It's actually very flattering. I didn't know such a thing could happen, but AI mode says, "It appears you're asking about Mindy Kaling's chances of getting into college." But then it went on to say, "Perhaps you're interested in her chances of admission at the time she applied." Then it goes on to say, "Dartmouth was a highly selective school even when Mindy applied. "While the specific acceptance rate from the late 1990s is difficult to find," it's actually not that difficult to find. But it said, "Dartmouth was and continues to be a highly selective Ivy League situation. She was a strong applicant. She attended a prestigious high school and had an impressive extracurricular background in high school, including being very involved as a theater kid according to a podcast she did." You, "likely had strong grades and standardized test scores. We suspect she had a compelling essay showcasing her personality and that likely made her stand out."
Mindy Kaling:
I hate to give the robots a win, but I think in this instance that that's probably contributed to why I got in.
Lee Coffin:
Well, let's talk about that. So you attended Buckingham Browne and Nichols School in Cambridge, Massachusetts. What were you like as a high school student?
Mindy Kaling:
As a high school student, I think things came naturally pretty easily to me, but I was also a procrastinator and a little lazy. I needed help, if I'm being kinder to my younger self. I was a procrastinator, and I was the sort of quintessential kid with the incredibly messy room that didn't know how to dig myself out of a messy room, messy workspace. Maybe this is just a kind way of me being like, "I was a lazy slob," and this is my new talk-speaky way of being like, "No, no, no. It wasn't lazy slob, I had trouble with executive functioning." I understand that I could also be rationalizing it, but whatever it was, that was me.
Lee Coffin:
Well, I think people will relate to that. Last week we did a live episode at the admitted student open house, and procrastination came up as a topic. It lasted for much longer than I would've guessed, as the parents said it first and then the kids jumped in and said, "Mm-hmm." So I think procrastination is not an atypical characteristic even of high-achieving kids.
Mindy Kaling:
Ultimately being in TV is perfect for procrastinators because when I was with The Office we would do 22, 24 episodes a year so you kind of can't procrastinate. It's like from the time you come up with the idea for an episode until the time it's supposed to air is like six weeks.
If you're a perfectionist, procrastinator, you just kind of can't be, and it kind of beats it out of you, which is nice. I think that's why I like TV. I've written movies a couple of times, but honestly it becomes this sort of torturous Sisyphean endeavor where I'm like, "Oh my God, when will it end," because there's no time when a movie needs to come out. I've worked on movie scripts for years and that's not such a great feeling because conversely, I'm a procrastinator who's incredibly impatient.
As a kid, again, very impatient, procrastinator, but also I think interested in things that I think an Indian kid in the late '90s was not necessarily interested in. So that was really good for me because I was always striving and I mean, I still am striving to feel special. I think being an Indian kid at that age and being really drawn to theater arts and Latin was stuff that made me feel kind of original back then.
I was very good at Latin, and I did well in the national Latin exam, and I thought of Latin as this really fun riddle and puzzle in translating. I loved the theatricality of the classic stories like the Odyssey and the Aeneid, and they're so dramatic and violent and sort of sexy, and I loved it. I loved going to Rome and from that sort of archeological standpoint, that was really fun. I loved Italy, so for me, Latin was so fun. Of course being good at Latin and getting good grades and good test scores made my parents proud, and I loved that feeling, and I wanted to chase the feeling of acceptance. So Latin I think also really helped me, I think.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah. In your memoir, you talk about growing up in a house with mountains of flashcards.
Mindy Kaling:
Yes.
Lee Coffin:
What was on the flashcards? Latin?
Mindy Kaling:
Latin. I remember I had a tutor for PSATs. That was when we started, we would go to a tutor, and I'd have a tutor for PSATs and it was just vocabulary. I thought of it as such a thankless task, but it's as a writer, invaluable. But I obviously dreaded standardized tests, testing. I hated writing essays for college. I hated the admissions packet because we had it as a hard copy. It would arrive, and it was like a book that I knew I needed to fill out, and I had to do it 10 times because I was applying to 10 different schools and the Common App was only for a couple schools back then. But I remember just thinking to test all of this stuff, but now I would kill to do college applications again because I'm a writer and now it's like, "Oh, I wish I could go back and concisely write about things in 600 words or less." That would be really fun for me to do.
Lee Coffin:
Do you remember your essay to college?
Mindy Kaling:
I don't, and I don't want you to remind me.
Lee Coffin:
No, I don't know what it is either.
Mindy Kaling:
Okay. I don't know. That's one of those things too where I'm often asked on panels or in interviews, "If you could give advice to your younger self." I think when I was a junior, I didn't really hear enough, don't try to write the thing that you think they want. Don't try to conform into something. I think my parents, having come to this country and had to play the game of conformity in order to be successful, they were like, "Okay, don't write about anything like kooky or strange. Just write about something normal and generic, and that'll be good." I think fighting my urge to be funny and write about things that are funny, that just felt like too much of a gamble in 1998 for me and my parents. We didn't really have access to what successful essays looked like and talking to people like you being like, "No, no, no, please don't write about," I don't know what the generic thing is to write about now.
Lee Coffin:
Well, generic things are not good. So whoever's writing a generic essay, that's a ticket to a no. But when you talk about being funny and holding back, that's interesting because you wrote about how comedy was addictive for you as a high school student, even a middle school student it sounded like. You were writing plays, and you were performing them. Doesn't sound like you let funny be part of your story when you applied.
Mindy Kaling:
No. No. I don't think I did because I think, well, comedy is subjective, right-
Lee Coffin:
Right.
Mindy Kaling:
And I think that is scary as a kid. That what I thought was funny, "Will a college admissions officer think this is funny?" To be honest, even if I did think it was funny and my parents did, I could see a world where 80% of college admissions are like, "This isn't funny to me." Obviously I'm a lot more funny and successful at figuring that out now than I was at 17.
Lee Coffin:
It's tricky. For people who have a comedic impulse and whether it comes through writing or performance, performance is a little easier if you're on a stage and you make someone laugh ... When I've done drama, I know when I'm being funny because it gets the reaction I'm looking for. When you write, it's a bit more of a risk. I've seen essays over the years where I'll read something and say, This is falling flat. I wonder if someone's trying to be funny and I'm not getting the joke because I don't know the person who's telling me this." But then there are other times I read something and it's hilarious, and it's a big payoff because the humor comes through, and it's a really important part of a student's story. That's why it's interesting to me that your own college application leaned away from funny, even though it was and remains such an important part of Mindy's identity.
Mindy Kaling:
No, I think that it's also confidence, right? Now I have enough. You, and I'm very grateful for this, listed a lot of my accomplishments at the beginning and awards I've gotten. So now I feel really confident as an employer of people on shows of how to be funny and what will resonate. But at that age, I didn't have the experience, and I think it was like, "Okay, just let's do the other essay about how my volunteer work moved me to tears." Maybe that seems like good and generic, but I know that tends to be the kind of thing that helps.
Lee Coffin:
The storytelling part is the heart of college admission, and I think people get distracted by all the stats that swirl around this conversation, whether it's a GPA or testing. They lose the thread that in the most selective spaces, it's the story that moves you forward and being authentic in that storytelling is the goal.
Mindy Kaling:
This is so funny. The similarities between what your job is and when I'm casting a show are so similar.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, what are you thinking as I say that?
Mindy Kaling:
Yeah. Well, we had this show called Never Have I Ever, which was about an Indian American family in Southern California. When we were trying to find the girl, I think this is one similarity, who was supposed to be a 16-year-old girl. We did auditions in New York, in Chicago and Los Angeles and with professional actors who had their SAG cards.
First of all, they were all older, and the pool is just not that big of young women in their early 20s and late teens that whose parents have encouraged them into go and into acting. So we were just finding a lot of 29-year-old women who were completely fine, but it just wasn't what we were looking for, that sort of freshness and authenticity. So I decided to do an open casting call, and we found this Canadian teenage girl named Maitreyi Ramakrishnan who was not in the Screen Actors Guild, was a junior at her Toronto high school and she auditioned, and there was a freshness there. She really made me laugh. She didn't have training, but there was something very authentic about her. When I met her in person, we brought her out to LA, she talked about how much she loved video games, and then she'd be like, "Oh my god, you probably don't want to hear about this." But she was just unafraid to be herself, and that was so much more appealing than a polished product given to us by somebody else.
The other thing that really strikes me as similar is I think when people audition or frankly when I audition for things because I don't do it that much anymore, but when I do is you get this feeling that you're like, oh, "Admissions is my enemy," or, "This casting director is my enemy, and you're like, no, everyone just wants you to be amazing."
Lee Coffin:
Right.
Mindy Kaling:
"All I want you to do is to be so good," very quickly by the way. "I want you to in the first 30 seconds of your audition, be so amazing that I'm like, wonderful. I actually don't have to watch anymore. I know you're going to move on to the next pass." I bet you feel that same. Although I'd love to hear you talk about that.
Lee Coffin:
I have that same impulse as I'm reading an application hoping to say yes. I say over and over on this podcast, "My title is dean of admission, not dean of denial." So I'm looking for an opportunity to ... I'll lean into your space ... "I want to cast you in my class." I want to be able to take the story of the person and react and say, "Yep, I see a role for you in this group of 1,185 people we're pulling together to create an incoming class at the college where I work."
There are times, just like you've described, where I'm reading and it pops immediately, I'm like, "Here we go." That's the news you could use listeners is trust us to meet you and react to you, not the persona you think we're looking for. I think you just said the same thing in the auditions where you had a lot of people who were professional and polished, and it didn't work. That happens in applications too, where you've got the Common App, you're reading through it, and the kid has been scrubbed out of the file.
Mindy Kaling:
Wow.
Lee Coffin:
They're accomplished, but the flavor's gone, and they end up homogenizing back into this long line of very strong people that are harder to differentiate. It opens the door for the people who are unafraid of being themselves to wink at you and say, "Hello, here I am."
Mindy Kaling:
Well, and I think the hard thing too is that I didn't really like myself as a 17-year-old, and I didn't know who myself was. I was reading lots of books and taking in a lot of culture, noticing the people around me and just wanting to be something else, wanting to be somewhere else. A lot of young people feel that way. So it was terrible. The advice that I give my children, it's the advice that I give writers when I go on podcasts talking about writers who want to work on TV shows, which is to be themselves. It's just tough advice because I remember if someone had told me that, and I'm sure many people told me to be myself as 17, I'd be like, "Ugh, I hate myself." So I really understand that problem. Also, I don't think I was particularly good at self-reflection at that time.
Lee Coffin:
Mm-hmm. Mm-hmm. What teenager is? Some, but as a group, high school, you're trying things on and sometimes it fits and sometimes it doesn't. And then college admission we're saying, Be reflective, represent yourself in this way that we could see and respond." I think that gives me a career to help explain to students how to do what we just said.
Mindy Kaling:
Yeah, and especially now. I came up, thankfully, I think I'm exactly the last generation perhaps that didn't have phones in high school. It wasn't until I graduated and moved to New York when I was 21 where I got a cell phone. Some people that were from cities, there'd be kids that were from LA or New York or Dallas would have a cell phone senior year. But I was like, "Oh, they're rich. That's like a rich person thing."
Lee Coffin:
All right, so let's go back to BB&N. So to listeners, BB&N is the shorthand for her school, Buckingham Browne & Nichols, which is an old school. The name sounds intimidating. That's why BB&N emerged. So you're at BB&N and you're applying to 10 places. Do you remember how many you got into?
Mindy Kaling:
I got into maybe 40% of them. I was excited to go to Dartmouth, but I think it might be the one college that I didn't visit. I was dying to go to Yale. Dying. I thought Yale would be the answers to all my problems. I would find a really great boyfriend there. People would see me for who I was. I would sort of move up the ranks as a playwright and find other like-minded people who wanted to do that. BB&N is a pretty artsy school, but even there it was finding the people that were ... There's a lot of people interested in creative writing, but I could not find a single other person who was interested in writing for the stage or writing for the screen, which is such a specific other thing, finding somebody who's interested in writing dialogue. When I visited Yale, I remember thinking, to be honest, "I don't know about being in the city."
I do love that there'd be just so many people who would be interested, and I really wanted to find my people, and I thought Yale was it. When I didn't get in, it was so devastating to me. I really had pictured myself there, and I had a real vivid imagination as a kid. I lived in these fantasy worlds, and Yale was part of it. I got into Dartmouth, and I remember being so excited, but it was such a mystery to me because again, I hadn't visited.
When I got there and I was like, "Okay, Columbia was cool," but the city environment felt not totally me. But I was like, "This is such an amazing institution. Who am I to be even having an opinion? This is an incredible college. If it was good for John Jay, of course it can be good for me." But when I went to Dartmouth, I remember feeling, and I didn't say it as articulately back then, but the feeling was like, "Oh, this is what college is supposed to be."
Lee Coffin:
Mm-hmm.
Mindy Kaling:
I absolutely loved it. I think so many people that come from Dartmouth say the same thing. I write about this in all my books, but just the drama department and creative writing, they weren't the biggest in the world, but I felt like I could shine. I got to take a class with August Wilson, and I got to be a star. I don't know that I would've been a star at NYU or Columbia or Yale or any of these performing, Emerson, or any of these other schools. I did find my people. I didn't find 100 people, but I found my 10 people. Really, all my dreams came true coming to Dartmouth, which is why I love it so much.
Lee Coffin:
How would you compare the act of getting into college and hearing, seeing a congratulations versus your sitting in the audience and they call your name to win a Tony?
Mindy Kaling:
About 10 times more exciting. I'm very proud of my Tony, and I have gone to so many award shows. College admissions, I don't know why, maybe this is because I'm Indian, but there is something about it that is just feels ... Getting a Tony or Screen Actors Guild Award, Emmy is great because you feel like, "Oh, great recognition from my peers," but it's fleeting. College admissions is the security and promise of your future.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah.
Mindy Kaling:
To me it is ... I think getting into Dartmouth was one of the best days of my life.
Lee Coffin:
I love that. You also talk in your memoirs about high school is not the pinnacle of your life. I think one of the chapters in your memoir is, Don't Peak in High School.
Mindy Kaling:
Well you know, when I say stuff like that, of course the person who was not that popular in high school is going to be like, "It's not that important."
Lee Coffin:
I think it's important though because I think people put ... So I'm going to tell a personal story that's a little embarrassing. But the last time I went to a high school reunion, one of the former cheerleaders came up to me, and I didn't know her then, but she came up and she said, "Can I say something?" I said, "Yeah." She said, You know, I've been watching tonight, and I've heard what you do," and she said, "You look great and you've got this great job." She said, "That wasn't you in high school." I'm thinking, "This is Revenge of the Nerds, isn't it?" It was kind a backhanded compliment, but I said, "Yeah, I was the skinny smart boy in high school. I was the drama club newspaper kid, and thank you for noticing that all these years later I bloomed into something new."
But I think the peaking in high school piece, I think a lot of people put a lot of pressure on themselves. Those four years have to be the epicenter of excellence. I would say to juniors in high school, "You're still growing, and there's excellence in the way you're growing. But we're looking at potential, and if you all peak when you're 17, 18, what a sad life to not have more growth ahead of you." So talk a little bit about that because you gave advice to readers that high school is not it.
Mindy Kaling:
Well you know, I think it was to comfort people that were like me in high school, which was wanting things so badly and feeling powerless when you didn't get them. Whether it was romantically or getting on a team or auditioning for ... We had an a cappella group at BB&N, and it took me two tries to get in, and it was just excruciating to watch the year that I wasn't on, to watch them sing and just this feelings of longing. I don't know if it's even about regulation. I don't think I had, as a teenager, I didn't know how to regulate those emotions as well as I do now.
Of course I have even now so many disappointments and jealousies and anxieties, but I know how to deal with it better now, but I didn't then. It's such a painful time. So what I said in my book, and what I like to say when I talk to young people is this idea that almost no one that I know who is successful, that I long to work with or admire was cool and hot in high school with the exception I would say of ... I'm working with the Lakers right now, and Jeanie Buss on a show, maybe Rob Pelinka and JJ Redick, the coach of the Lakers, I would say, and former NBA player, maybe he was.
But in general, it's not the case. When I look at the people that I love the most, Tina Fey, Dartmouth's own Shonda Rhimes, these people that I really look up to and love their lives, and they're so happy. They're artists, and they have ups and downs, but they feel like really fulfilled happy people. I don't think that they were killing it in high school. I don't think they would say they were.
I just like to say it's okay to have those feelings of jealousy, and, "I'm disappointing myself. I'm disappointing my parents. When are things going to happen to me?" I had this feeling of wanting to fast-forward from ages 14 through 23 until I started working on The Office. I was like, "When am I gonna fast-forward to when people can see what I'm capable of." Even at Dartmouth, and I loved Dartmouth, and I got a lot of acclaim at Dartmouth in my little pocket for playwriting and things like that, I was like, "When will I fast-forward to when people can really see me?"
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Well, you just said the word longing, and I think that's part of it. We all have this vision of our future, this ambition, and often people are in a hurry to get there. As I've moved through my middle age, I now look back and say, "Hey, slow down everybody." You get there quickly enough. If I could magically become 21 again, wouldn't that be delicious? But not gonna happen. So you have to be as high school students not looking so far forward that you miss high school and then you get to college, and you're looking so far forward that you miss college and then poof, you've taken this really wonderful moment of life and hurried by it.
Mindy Kaling:
What a sentiment. I think that's so smart.
Lee Coffin:
I try and say that to high school kids, especially high-achieving high school kids, just who I work with just to slow down and it's okay to be disappointed. I mean, you told a story about not making the acapella group a couple times at your high school. That might sound incredible to listeners who think it's Mindy Kaling. Yeah, Mindy Kaling didn't get a part in the acapella group as a high school student. I mean, we had a pod a couple weeks ago where I interviewed the drama directors from my high school, and we talked about disappointment. They told this story I didn't know about when I was up for the lead in Bye Bye Birdie, and it was a dead heat between me and the other guy, and the other guy got it. I remember being really bruised by that, but you move on, and you learn how to not always get what you want.
That doesn't mean I failed, just means somebody else was better for that part in that moment, and here we go. But I think college admission kind of wrapped around all of what we're talking about, Mindy, is there's this pressure to achieve. You talked about Yale, and that seemed like the idyllic destination for you. Didn't happen. Something else wonderful happened that you could not have anticipated. I think that's good advice for juniors as they're starting to ... Well, both juniors and seniors because the seniors are still making decisions this week about where to go by May 1st, and the juniors are exploring. I think as they explore, everybody, you've got Mindy telling you sometimes things bounce in directions you can't anticipate.
Mindy Kaling:
I feel incredibly lucky to have gone to Dartmouth because I wasn't thinking about the correct things. I think I was thinking about, well, I guess at Yale I was like, "Oh, it's so good for drama and dramatic writing," and so that was good as a kid to be looking at that. But it's like a small miracle that I went to Dartmouth, a school I hadn't even visited. I don't think I knew any alumni. I kind of picked it because I liked the sound of it, and it ended up being such a great choice for me. That was just pure luck. I think kids now, they shouldn't luck into things like that.
Lee Coffin:
Well, sometimes it's luck, or the other word I love to think about is serendipity. It's one of my favorite words. It sort of sounds playful and exotic, but serendipity sometimes pops up, and you end up where you're supposed to be. As somebody who went to a liberal arts college and you studied playwriting and then playwriting led you to work with Conan O'Brien and then a career in Hollywood. There are families that might resist the major you chose as not practical.
Mindy Kaling:
Mm-hm.
Lee Coffin:
It served you really well, I think. So to seniors, juniors in high school or anybody listening, what thoughts do you have about what you studied as a college student and how it prepared you for the work? You're an actor, you're a singer, you're a producer, you're a director, you're a writer, I mean, you're doing everything.
Mindy Kaling:
I liked that I was a playwriting major, and you could not have deterred me from that major. It was the closest thing to TV writing. I'm sure a lot of alums say this but I wish I could go back and do Dartmouth again. I was so singularly focused on this thing of like, "Okay, how do I become a playwright/TV writer," that those are the only courses I cared about.
Whereas now, if I could go back and take courses and learn things, there's so many other things I would've taken. I would've taken a single economics class, a single history class. I didn't do any of that. I'm so interested in history, and I think I could have benefited a lot, but I just thought, "No, no, no." I turned Dartmouth into almost a vocational school for me. I took oceanography and barely went to class. The teacher was very kind, and I think gave me ... I did a very creative last project for them, and I think she was amused by that, my professor. I think she gave me a C+ or B-. That's the thing, and I feel like you must hear this all the time.
Lee Coffin:
My interpretation would be the liberal arts has served you really well. I think people get really caught on, "I must major in something practical-
Mindy Kaling:
Yes.
Lee Coffin:
Because I will be that when I'm done."
Mindy Kaling:
Yes.
Lee Coffin:
Sometimes that's true, but I had ... Someone asked me recently what was my major. It was history, and it made me a very informed person in a really historical context. But I'm not a historian right now. But I am well-educated, and I think that was the benefit of my experience as a liberal arts student.
Mindy Kaling:
I will say, just thinking about it as you said it, I am kind of amazed that my parents who were paying for my college education were kind of okay with that. My mom, I know would've wanted me to be a doctor like her, and they were paying this kind of expensive tuition for me to do something that would lead to ... I don't know, it definitely wasn't the pre-med track.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. Yeah. But it was authentic to you. I mean, maybe your parents saw the comedy nerd that had lived in their house all those years and said, "We have to let this bird fly."
Mindy Kaling:
I know. It's funny because so many young Indian girls, Indian boys will talk to me about, "How did you convince your parents," and all this? I think really as I'm getting older, I have to give my parents credit where I think they were kind of ahead of their time and they really ... I don't remember truly, truly don't remember a time when they really gave me a hard time about this and, "Is this practical?" I never got this sense that I was going against their wishes. They didn't totally understand it, but they rolled with it. But that's, again, I think it helped that when I was at Dartmouth, I think I won a one act playwriting prize, and I did some other stuff that made them be like, "Okay, I think she's objectively succeeding by some metric that we can," this is not profound, but believing in your children and letting them do what they want and pursue their passions is very helpful as it turns out.
Lee Coffin:
No, I think that's right. Well, it leads me, I have two last questions.
As a storyteller, you draw fictional characters, and we feel like we know them by the way they're written, by the way actors bring them to life. A high school junior who's about to write an essay has a similar task. I mean, they have to write a 650-word statement that brings them to life. What tip do you have for the high school class of '26? So they're next up in the admission rotation to lean into storytelling.
Mindy Kaling:
Yeah. For me, my advice to them would be that an essay is a kind of living, evolving document if you're writing an essay for college. I think my tip for them is if it was my own daughter applying for college, I would say, "Well, write about something that you really love when you think about the things. If I came in the middle of the night and said, "You have five seconds to tell me the thing that you love the most," and she was like, "I love Legos," or something, write about that. Write about why you love it or write about the thing that you're like, it really feels when people are like, "Oh, be yourself. Be authentic to yourself." I don't mean the version of you that's necessarily palatable to other people, which is what you might think. I mean, really the thing that is in your core that you feel maybe even embarrassed about that is really yourself.
It might turn out to be nothing, but if you had to go write a paragraph or four sentences about that, if my daughter wrote about Legos, "Why do you like Legos?" And you'd say, "Well, I really like Legos because life is stressful because my younger brother is always in my stuff, and I feel like I have control over it, and I love the colors." Something will come from that that feels like it is an interesting story. So that would be my advice. If I was a SAT or college admissions tutor or helping people with essays, that's what I would do to find that authentic kernel in some ... It's something that you're like, "Oh, this is ugly," or, "This is," I don't know, "not that amazing." I'm like, "I think it could become amazing if you really talk about the truthiness of it."
Lee Coffin:
Yeah, I think that's it. The authentic kernel and the truthiness is the key to successful storytelling everywhere because we smell it if it's not. It goes back to the auditions you were describing where a lot of polish didn't land the role, and an authentic kernel from Toronto was the one you said, "There it is."
Mindy Kaling:
Yeah.
Lee Coffin:
Yeah. So you gave the commencement address at Dartmouth in 2018, and you said to the graduates, "Why not you? Ask why not me?" So I want to use that really elegant question and ask you to give a pep talk to high-achieving kids in high school who are looking at college admission and saying, "I'm doomed." Just because they see the admit rates and they see the headlines, and the drama of the work I do makes it seem like the door is closed. Let's lean into Mindy's, "Why not you?" So why not them? Empower them to tackle this topic.
Mindy Kaling:
So I get asked a lot advice about how to make it and how to differentiate yourself and get selected for things. There's things that I can give advice about and then things I can't. The thing I feel like I can't give advice about is figuring out what you want because that is just something that you have to look within. My advice to young people, there's a couple pieces that I think have been helpful, is spend time figuring out what you want. When I write shows and characters, they always know the best kind of characters are the ones that are comedically obsessive with what they want.
Never Have I Ever, she wanted to go to Princeton and she wanted a boyfriend. Mindy Lahiri wanted to get married and wanted to make a lot of money. They don't have to be noble things. Just figure out what you actually want and then go for it. That's the one thing that nobody in the world can tell you advice. You can go online and order the books and the courses and do whatever, but you have to just figure out what you want. To be the most interesting version of yourself that anybody wants to talk to is someone who knows what they want.
The other advice is, and I particularly feel for young people today because I had it so much easier than you, I'm just kind of not on the internet until I was about 25 years old. That is such a blessing for me that you don't have, and the advice that I have is one that I heard, this is a real name-drop. I'm about to name-drop, but Oprah gave me when we were shooting a movie, and we were in New Zealand. She's like, "You know," this is a double name-drop, she goes, "The best advice I ever got was from Maya Angelou in the instance I was asking for advice." She's like, "I'm going to give it to you," and now I'm going to give it to everybody on this podcast, which is this quote that Maya Angelou has, which is pretty famous, but I didn't know it when Oprah told me, which was, "Do the best you can until you know better, and then when you know better, do better."
I find it so profound and especially good for young people because I think when you're young and you're making mistakes, it's because you don't really know better, and forgiving yourself ... There's countless humiliations I remember experiencing when I was in high school, and I really didn't forgive myself for those very quickly. Especially when things can live online, and really being able to be doing the best you can until you know better. And this is the hard part, is when you know better, doing better. I think it's like, I love this saying because it's like give yourself grace for mistakes you may have made in the past, but then also really be hardworking and courageous to make the tough decision to like, "Okay, well now I have to do better."
Lee Coffin:
I think that's great advice. Knowing what you want might not just be the shiny college on the list. A better goal for you is to find the place where you fit and you're going to be happy. But I also love that you just handed advice from Maya Angelou to Oprah Winfrey to Mindy Kaling to the world. So thanks for that.
Mindy Kaling:
If I could say one more thing, this child of immigrants, and I really, I know how impossible it seems to get into college, and I know the relief that I described. I'm sure that resonated I think with a lot of these stressed out, high-achieving kids who are listening to this podcast. I still feel it.
As I'm just describing it now, I so vividly feel that. Again, I didn't get into the schools that I wanted. All I wanted to do is get into Harvard and Yale. Harvard, work for the Harvard Lampoon because that's where Conan O'Brien had done, had gone. And I felt like that was the only path to writing for TV and comedy. That didn't happen to me. I'm not sitting here being like, "Oh, boo hoo, I got into Dartmouth." But I will say the path wasn't as clear from there as a 17-year-old thinking like, okay, if I want to write for late night TV and work at Saturday Night Live. I will say, I'm one of the most successful comedy writers in Hollywood, and it went completely sideways. So it can still work out even if it's not the path you think it's going to be. Yes.
Lee Coffin:
Exactly. Exactly. It's been so much fun, Mindy, to have you on the pod and have this conversation with you. So thanks for spending your Saturday morning with me.
Mindy Kaling:
Thank you for having me.
(music)
Lee Coffin:
Well, that was fun, as I thought it would be, to have Mindy Kaling come on the pod and have a conversation with me about life. Over 100 episodes I have been surprised again and again by where the conversations go. I'm learning to just let my own curiosity rip and go where the guest goes, and you just heard me do that with Mindy.
I want to call into the pod, Charlotte Albright, my producer, who's been with me for every second of every recording, and she's edited them all. Charlotte, as we wrap episode 100, what are you thinking as we put a bow on this ongoing series?
Charlotte Albright:
I'm thinking of what Mindy Kaling just said, which is, "You're not interesting if you don't know what you want." I knew I wanted this podcast, and I also think it means something to you because this is what you wanted, and it turns out that some of our listeners want it too, which is the best thing of all.
Lee Coffin:
I agree. When you first pitched this in the spring of 2020, I thought, "Sure, let's try it." I have said to people, the early episodes when I listen to them make me giggle because it was like a test kitchen, and we were trying to figure out what worked, what didn't. Here we are, all these episodes later humming along and I wonder, two episodes ago we called it Lessons from the Stage. What would you say the lessons from the pod are as you've watched us do this?
Charlotte Albright:
I think the lessons from the pod actually extend beyond college admissions. The biggest lesson that we always I think end up with at the end is, "To thine own self be true," if you can quote Shakespeare. I think that's what comes out of every episode. I think it does help students see themselves clearly so that they do get into college, but once they get into college, that process of admission and application has taught them so much about themselves that then once they're in college, they can keep pursuing their own dreams. I think that's the lesson.
Lee Coffin:
I think that is the lesson too, and Mindy just touched it as well. While you're here with me, thank you for being my Yoda in all things journalism, teaching me how to be a radio person, which is really what podcasting is in so many ways and pulling the inner journalist out of me. It's been hiding there since high school, but you've revived him.
So listeners, thanks for joining us every Tuesday as we do this. Thank you, Charlotte, for producing and editing all 100 episodes as we look forward and start planning season eight for the fall. Thanks to Jack Steinberg, our co-editor and editorial wizard who helps me think about episodes as we move forward and bringing his New York Times brain behind the scenes. He's been my guest on 18 episodes of the 100.
Thanks to Peg Chase, my executive assistant who has set up the schedule for all 100 episodes and wrangled all of those people into this podcast. That's not easy. I thank you. Thanks to Sara Morin who helps load the pod into whatever magic space of technology, gets it to you, and then gives me the analytics.
It helps us know that we've had over 610,000 listens over the 100 episodes. I don't know how that compares to big pods, but I'm pretty impressed with that 610,000 listens. Thanks to all the guests we've had. I tried to count, I think it's 106 people, sometimes more than once, have joined us on one of the episodes including 20 current or former deans of admission from places all around the country, about 20 college counselors and guidance counselors, 20 students, a couple of journalists, financial aid, media-based organizations, some moms. The cast from episode to episode is drawn from my network and sometimes from people I've never met before, like Mindy Kaling. I'm really grateful to each of you for having joined us on the Admissions Beat and lent your wisdom to the story we're telling.
Thanks to my pals, Jess Viner and Ronnie Burnett, both of whom have been on the pod and continue to be moms out there listening and texting me with feedback on episodes. Jess and Ronnie, it's helpful. Keep doing it. To those of you who've emailed me and shared your thoughts on how this pod has helped you move forward, keep doing that too because it helps Charlotte and me make a better pod as we move forward.
Thanks to my partner, Steve, who listens to me prattle on about these episodes, sometimes listens to them get recorded, and then gives me feedback on each one. I really value that. You're hearing me get a little teary as I think anniversaries often do when something is meaningful. This has been meaningful for me. I hope it's been meaningful for you, and I am really grateful for your support and the stars. I peeked at iTunes recently, and we have 4.9 stars. That's nice. So thanks to all of you. We have a couple more episodes for season seven before we hit summer break, so keep listening. Thanks for being there. For now, this is Lee Coffin from Dartmouth College. Happy 100.