College lessons: Genetics, ...

MY SON will not be spending the next four years at Caltech.

“You didn’t apply?� I asked.

“I told you I wasn’t going to, Dad. You just didn’t want to hear it.�

What I didn’t want to hear -- what no parent wants to hear -- is that a child whom they groomed and coaxed for 17 years doesn’t have the SATs, ACTs, GPAs, IQ and extracurricular activities to clear the formidable hurdles to elite colleges. Damn.

“You didn’t even apply?� I repeat.

“It was pointless.�

“But you’re so good at math.�

“Dad, Caltech is another galaxy.�

Ever since my son won a few math awards in fourth grade, I have occasionally -- well, often -- imagined him going to a school geared to mighty minds. As college application time approached, I began to explore admissions websites and was quite struck by the descriptions of courses and research at Caltech.

OK, I figured that physics would be a big deal there, but what was being described in the Caltech catalog had nothing to do with the physics I almost flunked in college 40 years ago. In addition to astrophysics, there’s crustal geophysics and single-molecule biophysics. Who knew of geo-, helio-, hydro-, litho-, magneto- and tropospheres?

And then there’s chemistry, which totally undermined my high school GPA, but at least I could spell it. Some catalog items had me wondering if I was seeing extra syllables, such as biogeochemical cycles and fluxes and catalyzing biochemical interconversions.

There are plenty of articles, and books even, that offer cautionary tales for parents whose sons and daughters are giving themselves over to the rigors of college applications. No matter how many times I hear cautions to be realistic, I still find it hard to believe that my kid isn’t as worthy as those who ... well, those in the Caltech realm. Truth be told, he wasn’t one of the kids who won a Siemens-Westinghouse prize for math, science and technology projects.

Still, I’m in the gravitational pull of those against-the-odds stories such as “Stand and Deliver,� in which barrio kids from East Los Angeles are inspired to achieve AP glory in calculus. I recall for my son how much we enjoyed that movie, watching it again and again.

“It was raining, Dad. You refused to rent any other videos, and we didn’t have cable.�

“But you got into it.�

“Dad, didn’t you tell me you almost flunked calculus in college?�

I can’t refute his logic, but I do wonder whether there is a science to investigate the phenomena that make parents lose all sense of equilibrium, hoping against hope to propel sons and daughters to be stellar where we were not.

The answer is out there -- somewhere, perhaps, between string theory and spectrophotometrics.