Joie’s Newsletter #9
I Gave Myself My Own Assignment
A few weeks ago, Dartmouth Alumni Magazine published a great piece about the Dartmouth Jewish Alumni Group, an organization I co-founded after realizing Dartmouth was the only Ivy without one. Talking with the reporter, I found myself explaining not just what the group does, but why I felt so strongly it needed to exist at all.
I should say up front that I loved my time at Dartmouth. Many of my closest friendships and most formative intellectual experiences came from those years, and as the granddaughter of Holocaust survivors, I never took the sense of belonging I found there for granted. That is part of why, after October 7th, I felt so protective of the institution. I was proud of how Dartmouth tried to navigate an extraordinarily difficult moment while still defending civil discourse and its educational mission. And yet, in conversations with the alumni office, I learned something that surprised me. Despite Dartmouth's long Jewish history, there was no official group bringing people together in any meaningful way, so I decided to help build one.
I have built things before. I wrote my books because families deserved more honesty about the college admissions process, and I started College Prep 360 because I believed students needed more genuine, expert mentorship than they were getting. After two decades of this work, I thought I knew what building required.
But the Dartmouth Jewish Alumni Group has been different, and it took me a while to understand why. With my books and my company, there was always a structure pulling me forward, whether a deadline, a student, or simply a reason the work had to get done that week. The alumni group has none of that. No one is waiting on it, and there is no finish line, no metric, no moment where someone hands you the outcome. There is only the slow and unglamorous question of whether you will keep showing up for something simply because you believe it should exist.
Somewhere in the middle of all those calls and half-formed plans, I realized I had given myself the exact assignment we ask of our students every day.
The admissions process has become so saturated with strategy and branding that many students begin to relate to their own lives transactionally, asking what will "look good" instead of what genuinely matters to them. So our counselors tell them to build something real instead, to notice what is missing and build it.
This time, I was not the one giving the advice. I was the one following it.
Over these past few months, I have been reminded of something that is easy to forget once you are good at building. When there is no payoff attached, no deadline, and no scoreboard, the work asks something different of you. It asks you to stay invested when nothing outside of you is requiring it. That kind of building is genuinely hard, and the difficulty is not a flaw. The difficulty is where the meaning lives.
This is what we hope our students will learn as well. Building only to "stand out" is a smaller and hollower version of the real thing, because the moment the external reward disappears, so does the reason to continue. The real thing is quieter and slower. It feels like deciding, again, that the thing is worth your time. And then doing it the next day and the day after that.
I have spent much of my career helping students get into extraordinary colleges. But the most important thing our team does is ask them to build a life that means something with or without anyone watching. It turns out this is not advice I give from the sidelines. It is work I have to keep doing too.
Education expert, founder, author of “B+ Grades, A+ College Application.”
