The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays

The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays is a poignant, candid, and engrossing memoir that grabbed me in the first chapter, then tugged me in closer and closer. Smith brings us into her life as an admissions’ counselor at Stanford, where they only accept 4% of undergraduate applicants. Told with humor and soul, Smith’s empathy for the young adults, whom she statistically has to reject, sheds new light on how our college admissions system is broken.Each stage of life in this slim book is a treasure. When she was nine, Irena’s family immigrated to the US from Russia. We glimpse how she survived that tender age as an outsider, “sobbing on her bed every day after school” until she “discovered T.V. and ... The Brady Bunch” which helped her learn English and comprehend American culture. This child goes on to earn a PhD in Comparative Literature, marry her high-school boyfriend, and become a college admission’s counselor at Stanford—one of the most prestigious, competitive universities.Several times while reading The Golden Ticket, I teared up or laughed out loud. During a scene about a family situation on page 83, I cried. As her work as a sought-after private college admissions’ counselor takes off, she encounters some of the most “tightly-wound, competitive” applicants—and their striving, anxious, and frequently overbearing, usually wealthy parents. Her rapport with many students is “so strong it feels nearly telepathic, but my own children are opaque, impenetrable,” she observes.Smith and her husband are loving, attentive parents who face unimaginable challenges raising three “non-neurotypical” children, who perceive “advice as criticism, questions as nagging.”A dozen times, I called out to my husband and read chapters to him, because they resonated with aspects of our application experience with our congenial, but unconventional, son. Despite his high math and social aptitude, he came close to not getting into college (but did). While his rejections trickled in, I experienced a sharp sense of failure and panic. What had we done wrong as a parents? The Golden Ticket helped me appreciate that our son’s college application experience was unnecessarily traumatic.Irena Smith’s keen observations, use if vivid detail, humor and wit, make The Golden Ticket a captivating, must-read for parents, aspiring applicants, and anyone interested in the social consequences of allowing high rejection rates—rather than college graduates’ employment success and psychological well-being—determine a university’s status.

I don't write reviews often, but felt obsessively compelled to write one for this. It is the most brilliant book I have read since the Lessons in Chemistry, Bonnie Garmus' best-selling 2022 debut novel. If you liked that book, you'll love this one.Like Bonnie Garmus, Irena Smith is a first-time author who suffered repeated rejections (66 to be precise, not far shy of Garmus' 99). It's hard to believe that this much talent could be overlooked by so many. Or not. Smith's genius as a writer and memoirist is about as subtle as a stick in the eye. Knowing her personal story, which is deftly revealed in a collection of pithy, poignant and often hilarious essays inspired by real college application essay prompts, makes you want to root for her even harder.Like Garmus, Smith portrays characters (mostly herself, but also her Russian Jewish immigrant family, her husband and children, and her clients and colleagues in the wild world of college admissions) as deeply flawed and quirky and -- because of their myriad imperfections -- deeply lovable.Like Garmus, Smith is an exceptionally intelligent, creative, and precise writer and satirist, weaving golden threads of acerbic wit and incisive social commentary from the straws of painful and absurd experiences (to borrow her own metaphor), ranging from lusting against her mother's wishes after a bodice-ripping romance novel called Lace, to getting kicked out of Europe on a high school trip (and engaging in an awkward to-hell-with-it sort-of-orgy in the process), to watching her grandmother almost choke to death on a danish, to realizing and reckoning with the fact that her first-born son has autism, to guiding hyper-competitive Palo Alto parents and their prodigies, ahem, I mean, progeny, as a highly sought-after college admissions advisor.Smith is everything you could want in an author: wise, witty, entertaining, and real. In that exquisite torture of all great books, the pages will fly by (I say, jangling from caffeine having stayed up all night reading it, just so I can write this review), yet you'll want it to never, ever end. You'll find your breath snatched away by her artful twists and turns of phrase. You'll find yourself laughing out loud at her uncannily relatable observations. You'll be crestfallen at the twists of fate that she, like all of us, long to avoid but inevitably endure, becoming all the wiser.You'll also learn about how to write well (literary present tense is deftly explained in a funny footnote), follow your passions, and mine life experiences for life lessons.Last but not least, you'll learn about how get into college, that elusive Golden Ticket to which the title refers, because Smith's sharp story-telling is exactly the needle of grit, passion, messy authenticity, compassion, and humor that colleges themselves are seeking in the haystack of their admissions pools.In short, this is a must-read for anyone who loves humor, memoir, or social satire, and for anyone who has children going through the college admissions process. And, for everyone who relishes the sheer joy of reading a great writer.