No Surprises as Robert Day Scholars Program Enters Second Year

By Wyatt MacKenzie | February 6, 2009 at 5:57 pm | News | 3 comments | |

 

Editor’s Note: Wyatt is one of our three new Forum Fellows this semester. A former writer for both the Port Side and the Independent, Wyatt plans to provide more campus news analysis to our site.

With application season in full swing, there’s plenty of buzz about the Robert Day Scholars program: ‘a finance program in the liberal arts tradition.’ If you’re not sure what that means, it’s a big old twenty thousand dollar scholarship endowed alongside the Robert Day School of Economics and Finance. Last year Day’s monstrous two hundred million dollar gift shook things up on campus, bringing furor from some quarters and glee from others. Likewise, the Scholars program has proven controversial, drawing criticism from one kind of student in particular. The kind who didn’t get in.

With students as competitive and driven as CMC’s, the exceptionally rigorous application process for the Day scholarship naturally brought out the kind of tensions that even prestigious internships don’t. Applicants offer up the typical resumes and essays for a process culminating in a boardroom interview. In between however is a ‘leadership assessment.’ This activity is something of a psychological experiment, where applicants are teamed up and observed as they work through a project to see who emerges as a leader and who settles into followership. To many of the program’s critics this embodies their issues with the process, which one described as “pitting top students against each other,” poisoning a normally inclusive environment with a hypercompetitive process and an every man for himself ethos.

If this is just a case of sour grapes, it’s an all too persistent one, and one which seems something of a self-fulfilling prophesy. Whether or not it’s inherently harmful to make tough choices amongst a pool of extremely similar, extremely qualified candidates, the fact that we’re still hearing about it a year later speaks to how it’s worked out.

On the other side of things, the Day Scholars themselves could hardly be happier. Those I spoke to expressed no regrets about the program, and only peripheral awareness of the bitterness some have shown. And what don’t they have to be happy about? The program offers a pile of co-curricular activities, a ton of money, and a personal career services employee. That last one came up right behind the application process in many critics’ complaints, and, unlike the rest of them, seemed to resonate with the average student, although it was emphasized less heavily than the co-curricular activities by those inside the program.

The program and application process are both unchanged for this second year, besides the sort of incremental revisions expected for new scholarship. When asked what, if anything, could or should be changed, critics and Scholars alike had few ideas. The fact of the matter is that a program like the Day scholarship has to draw the line somewhere and, with a relatively opaque application process, seemingly outsized benefits, and few slots, it can’t satisfy everyone.

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Wyatt MacKenzie

Wyatt MacKenzie, like Venus, was formed spontaneously from sea foam and emerged carrying an IBM Selectric. He is physically incapable of producing anything but the most perfect reporting imaginable and has won seven Pulitzers for his work investigating CMC cafeterias. He hopes one day to report a story so hard that it stops ethnic conflict in the third world.

 
 
 
 
  • Junior NOT applying to be a RD

    Very well written and researched, but a somewhat tame article about such a divisive and hurtful program. I think you could have written a little more about how the program affects non-RDS students instead of glazing over the bitterness expressed by those students.

    For example, the fact that one of career services’ employee’s first priority is finding jobs for RDS students is BULLSHIT. We all pay for career services through our tuition– why should one of their employees help some students more than others?

    We all applied to CMC expecting to be treated as equals by our college’s administration. With the RDS program and “a personal career services employee,” this simply is not the case anymore.

    There are plenty of possible suggestions for improving the program. One, for example, would be making the admission process a pure meritocracy. Letting students either take a test to get in or go by cumulative GPA would be inadequate, but at least better than pitting students against each other in some kind of Donald Trump undertaking.

    Also, it’s impossible to limit bias and favoritism by the admission committee in such a small school. Inevitably, the people who hang around the FEI, know the professors choosing the spots, sniffing around for jobs, etc. will be the ones who get the spots (you all know who I’m talking about).

    Who thought up this admission process anyway?

  • Junior NOT applying to be a RDS

    Very well written and researched, but a somewhat tame article about such a divisive and hurtful program. I think you could have written a little more about how the program affects non-RDS students instead of glazing over the bitterness expressed by those students.

    For example, the fact that one of career services’ employee’s first priority is finding jobs for RDS students is BULLSHIT. We all pay for career services through our tuition– why should one of their employees help some students more than others?

    We all applied to CMC expecting to be treated as equals by our college’s administration. With the RDS program and “a personal career services employee,” this simply is not the case anymore.

    There are plenty of possible suggestions for improving the program. One, for example, would be making the admission process a pure meritocracy. Letting students either take a test to get in or go by cumulative GPA would be inadequate, but at least better than pitting students against each other in some kind of Donald Trump undertaking.

    Also, it’s impossible to limit bias and favoritism by the admission committee in such a small school. Inevitably, the people who hang around the FEI, know the professors choosing the spots, sniffing around for jobs, etc. will be the ones who get the spots (you all know who I’m talking about).

    Who thought up this admission process anyway?

  • Josh Siegel

    Good post, Wyatt.

    I think the commenter above is referring to Michelle Chamberlain, the new Director of Employee Relations, whose job includes (but is not at all limited to) finding jobs for the Robert Day Scholars. Michelle is doing a great job getting employers to recruit students from CMC, so she’s doing a service to the whole school, not just Robert Day Scholars (though her job does include finding RDS students jobs as a priority, I think).

    But yes, I’m against the idea that some students should receive extra help finding jobs than others at the school (but I’ll probably apply anyway). I assume this and the other benefits Robert Day Scholars receive or will receive– private interview and finance training programs, etc.– are to ensure that the RDS program is a success. If Robert Day Scholars (seniors) are seen to have trouble finding jobs, then the program can be seen as a failure. That brings up the question, what is the purpose of the RDS program? Is it to offer a better educational experience for some students, to offer extra help in finding jobs, or something else?