More confused than ever, Valerie doesn't hesitate to contact Trent with a request for help, which goes beyond simply asking for a letter of recommendation. She also realizes that, even though, for MIT, she would need one recommendation letter, but from a non-STEM teacher (here the band teacher), everywhere else she may as well use whichever teacher knows her best outside of Trent.
She ends up writing not only about what made her realize using others for furthering their own goals is unacceptable, for Common Application purposes, but also for what sparked her initial passion for math and, from there, mathletics, because it tied into one of MIT's short essays, as well as one essay at Caltech.
When she finally gets an appointment with Trent, she notifies her parents about it around the dinner table later that night. Glen is a little nervous.
"I'm going to see Trent at his home tomorrow. He will help me set things straight for my college applications, and I want to meet with him without you" Valerie notifies her parents, especially Glen, whom she feels would place undue pressure on him.
"I'm a little confused. After you publicly announced on parish radio that you were eliminated from the race to the IMO right out of the gate, do you think it's wise to go see him after such a spectacular failure at the TSTST?" Glen asks him, while visibly annoyed by Valerie's suggestion.
"He knows that college applications are upon us for rising seniors" Valerie then tells her father about the whole radio thing. "Telling publicly that I lost is being honest with the parish, including but not limited to him. However, I didn't want to tell the whole parish about you using me as a pawn in getting the parish's schools back in order, as I still believed there was work to be done to actually get the parish's schools back in order, and getting you fired as a superintendent would not help me at all, much less the parish"
"Before Glen took office, the parish school board was dysfunctional, and there was little to no accountability. So Lacassine could get away with using ESSER money to buy two-sided LED signage, supposedly to increase student engagement, and VA could somehow operate as two separate administrative entities, one for grades seven and eight, and the other for grades nine through twelve, despite sharing one campus" Selena then explains the changes between the old parish school board administration and the new one. "Sure, he had the whole parish install the same LEDs as Lacassine, but it was instead for raising advertising revenue"
"But why without me, however?" a puzzled Glen asks Valerie after Selena ran down the before-after of superintendence.
"It's personal to me, I think he would be able to help me out with the essays, too; he's less biased than you"
I need to take my time to write these essays. But what confuses me most is about which one to do REA (restrictive early action) at between MIT, Caltech or Stanford. I'll just do regular decision at all three of Tulane, LSU and Carnegie Mellon, while remaining mindful of not stepping on Chantal's bounds. With so few people vying for Ivies and Ivy-equivalents this year, it's really between her and me, Valerie then muses about this entire process is going to strain what relationship she might have with Chantal for the coming months.
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The following day, when Valerie arrives at Trent's home, he can feel like Valerie is a little distraught, and she comes to her coach for answers.
"Hi coach, I need to sort out which one to do REA or ED (early decision) at. I have no idea what kind of student they're looking for, which one I align best among the following: Caltech, Carnegie Mellon, MIT and Stanford" Valerie makes the facts clear.
"Valerie, you think these colleges look for a specific kind of student. You probably know that it's better to excel in one or two areas, hence your preliminary list. Especially critical given the two-team policy in place here. Might want to add an Ivy or two in RD if REA/ED fails. However, it's a gamble only at that level of colleges. If you decided that, say, Baylor, UF or Wisconsin was a good fit, like Éliane back in the day, no biggie, these are certainly safeties" Trent tells his mathlete.
YOU ARE READING
Venomous Agenda Memoirs
Teen FictionGlen, an assistant principal in a rural southwest Louisiana high school, takes up the mantle of the principal of that high school when the previous principal died, alongside the school's football coach, of COVID-19. He inherited a school with its lo...
