I'm back from Munchen and shipping off to Asilomar for the World Affairs Council's annual conference.   It'll be my first time attending the event and it should be cool cuz Walter Russell Mead and Charles Kupchan (among others) will both be in attendance.  I'll have my laptop with me and will take / post any blogworthy notes.  The World Affairs council is a good org if you live out here in SF and I highly recommend it -

In the meantime, I thought it would be worthwhile to bring forth this fine essay by the NYT's David Brooks with advice for students preparing those all-important college applications.   Given my circles, I've known many-a-soulless high achieving students and with their images in mind, Brooks' words ring very true -

...You are being judged according to criteria that you would never use to judge another person and which will never again be applied to you once you leave higher ed.

For example, colleges are taking a hard look at your SAT scores. But if at any moment in your later life you so much as mention your SAT scores in conversation, you will be considered a total jerk. If at age 40 you are still proud of your scores, you may want to contemplate a major life makeover.

I can't tell you how many folks I run into out here who's last significant achievement was their university.   
We've all been through the dance at a social function when you meet some new character and folks casually bandy back and forth their credentials to establish a place on the status hierarchy.   It's no small thing, for sure, but it is sad that for many folks, those "Ed Creds" are the pinnacle of their lives... Why?   Brooks provides a partial answer -

...To achieve that marvelous G.P.A., you will have had to demonstrate excellence across a broad range of subjects: math, science, English, languages etc.

This will never be necessary again. Once you reach adulthood, the key to success will not be demonstrating teacher-pleasing competence across fields; it will be finding a few things you love, and then committing yourself passionately to them.

The traits you used getting good grades might actually hold you back. To get those high marks, while doing all the extracurricular activities colleges are also looking for, you were encouraged to develop a prudential attitude toward learning. You had to calculate which reading was essential and which was not. You could not allow yourself to be obsessed by one subject because if you did, your marks in the other subjects would suffer. You could not take outrageous risks because you might fail.

You learned to study subjects that are intrinsically boring to you; slowly, you may have stopped thinking about which subjects are boring and which exciting. You just knew that each class was a hoop you must jump through on your way to a first-class university. You learned to thrive in adult-supervised settings.

If you have done all these things and you are still an interesting person, congratulations, because the system has been trying to whittle you down into a bland, complaisant achievement machine.

...Those admissions officers may know what office you held in school government, but they can make only the vaguest surmises about what matters, even to your worldly success: your perseverance, imagination and trustworthiness. Odds are you don't even know these things about yourself yet, and you are around you a lot more....

For a lot of kids in my day - getting good grades was more often about avoiding mistakes rather than sticking your neck out and doing something unanticipated with your knowledge.   They fell victims to that classic management warning that often,  the measure becomes the goal rather than just a measure - to the detriment of imagination, trustworthiness, and perserverance.

See mom?   that's why I didn't have a 4.0