Who reads your college application first?

IIn Stanford's admissions office, the office we learned from, as at many selective colleges, an application's first reader was usually the regional officer who covered the student's high school, often the same person who later presented the file to committee. Every fall, offices divide the map: part of a state to one officer, a few cities in another, a cluster of countries abroad. A reader's region there meant exactly that, first read and last word.

Most families never learn the name of that person. They assume the file is read by an institution, evenly and anonymously, when in practice the reading depends partly on who that officer is and what they happen to love. That sounds like an argument for despair, and it turns out to be the opposite.