Irena Smith
Irena Smith is a college admissions expert and the author of The Golden Ticket: A Life in College Admissions Essays, a blend of memoir and sharp social commentary about her work in college admissions. She was born in the former Soviet Union and grew up in Moscow in the waning days of the Brezhnev regime; when she was nine, her family emigrated from the USSR and sought asylum in the United States as political refugees. In spite of tearfully vowing that she would never, not ever, learn English, she went on to receive a PhD in comparative literature from UCLA and taught humanities and composition at Stanford before transitioning to college admissions work and writing. She an inveterate advocate of reading as many books as possible, chocolate-covered espresso beans, and the Oxford comma.
Twitter: @IrenaWrites
Instagram: @Irena.Smith
What’s your favorite comic strip or graphic novel?
Favorite comic strip: Calvin and Hobbes, which ran in an actual print newspaper while I was high school and to which I was, and continue to be, utterly devoted. I still thumb nostalgically through the books every once in a while (honestly, is there a better title than Something Under the Bed Is Drooling?), though these days I’m finding that I identify more with Calvin’s acerbic, beleaguered mom than with Calvin.
Favorite graphic novel: Mira Jacob’s Good Talk, where Jacob describes raising her biracial six-year-old son in Trump’s America. Her son’s first questions about race—“Is Michael Jackson white or brown or black? Can you become white? Can daddy become brown?”—segue into increasingly more complicated conversations, which range from heart wrenching to hilarious, sometimes in the space of a single sentence.
Have you ever experienced Imposter Syndrome?
On the first day of teaching my first ever discussion section as a 22-year-old graduate student, I walked in wearing a size small men’s blazer from Goodwill and clutching a styrofoam cup of coffee because I was convinced that the blazer and the coffee made me look authoritative and teacherly. Did I mention that it was 88 degrees that day? But no way was I going to take off that blazer and appear before my students in a tank top, and no way was I going to sip that coffee for fear of spilling it all over myself, so I set the coffee down very carefully on the seminar table and proceeded to lead a discussion about the theme of hospitality in The Odyssey while trying to ignore the rivers of sweat coursing down my back and the voice in my head muttering, “Who do you think you are, holding forth on The Odyssey like you actually know what you’re talking about?”
I should note that I made it through that discussion section without spilling my coffee, letting on that my expertise on the Greek classics was wafer-thin, or melting down (literally and figuratively), but I will never forget that out-of-body feeling of watching myself and feeling like a total fraud.
Is there another profession you would like to try?
Chef or caterer. I love the mess, the heat, and the exuberant creativity of cooking and the deep satisfaction of setting a beautiful table and putting together a plate where every detail—color, texture, garnish, taste—is just right. I would, however, need a hefty support crew to keep me organized (not to mention to help prep and clean up!). Literally, that is my dream: a tidy little army of mise-en-place bowls with fresh spices and minced garlic that someone else measured out and arranged for me.
What brings you great joy?
We’ve been going to the same family camp in the Sierras for the past 20 years, starting when our children were 2, 5, and 8. It’s basically a sleepaway camp for both children and adults and has everything you’d want in a camp—miles of jaw-droppingly beautiful hiking trails, a lake, evening campfires, archery, arts and crafts, and a tennis court. We go with close family friends, and one of the highlights is playing family camp tennis with my friend Jeny. Family camp tennis is like tennis in that it’s played (mostly) on the tennis court, but beyond that, the only objective of family camp tennis is to lob the ball over the net as many times as possible while energetically shouting loud compliments to the other person. There are no rules. It doesn’t matter how many times the ball bounces on each side of the net; it doesn’t matter where or how you serve (in fact, you don’t even have to serve overhand if you don’t feel like it); it doesn’t matter if the ball lands in or out. I can think of few things that bring me greater joy than running after a ball on a sunlit court and finding as much delight in a well-executed (well, relatively speaking) rally as in a wayward ball that goes spinning wildly over the fence.
Do you speak a second language? Do you think differently in that language? Does it influence your writing?
My native language is Russian, and although I primarily speak English in my daily life, the substratum of Russian is always there. But often, it feels like an absence rather than a presence.
My parents and I came to the US from the former Soviet Union when I was nine, and being suddenly rendered mute and inarticulate was unbearable. Even simple exclamations like “ouch” or “hey” were beyond me; I kept reaching for Russian words only to find that they were useless in my new homeland. Now, after spending my adult life in the US, I find myself reaching for everyday Russian words which elude me because the English equivalents come more easily. It kills me to admit this, but my native language is getting rusty, and I will probably never catch up with current Russian slang.
At the same time, I continue to be fascinated by words and concepts in Russian and in English that are untranslatable. When my parents and I arrived in San Francisco in the late 1970s, we couldn’t wrap our heads around the English phrase “take it easy.” Take what easy? How? Why? Now, I find myself obsessed with untranslatable Russian words—words like toska, which encompasses but doesn’t fully capture longing, nostalgia, soul-pain.
The thing about moving between countries and languages is that something is always lost. But at the same time, that loss opens up a rich in-between territory, a space where in trying to find linguistic equivalents, we connect and understand on a level that goes beyond language.
