Stop Making Sense
Stop Making Sense
Blythe Butler
Co-Director of College Counseling
Catlin Gabel School
“...and you may ask yourself, ‘How did I get here?’” - Talking Heads
We are all storytellers. Some of us use literature to make sense of the world. We put together stories or theories based on evidence and experimentation. We tell ourselves stories to explain why people act the way they do, or how events in the past can inform our current world. We use stories to make sense of the nonsensical.
As my students compile their college applications, I encourage them to find their stories, pull the threads of their experiences together to identify their values, find colleges that match those values, and share themselves. I help a student think about why their choice to learn to play the ukulele might have a connection with their interest in engineering, and which colleges might recognize what a ukulele-playing engineer will bring to their campuses. I watch them identify the stories a college tells to help students understand its culture and learning environment. I assist them in imagining how their qualities might fit into the class a college is building, mapping out its story for the future. I try to help them make order out of a process that can seem disorderly.