There is something quietly amazing about an index card that was made by hand getting into a conversation at Stanford. A lot more often than people think. It’s not because admissions officers are looking for study aids, but because the best ones show how a student really thinks, not just what they’ve learned.
The card in question was based on the ideas of David Gauntlett, a British media scholar whose identity-related ideas have been taught at the A-Level level in the UK since 2017. For many students, Gauntlett’s name shows up on a list of required theorists and stays there until exam day, underlined and not fully understood. However, it seems that one student (whose name has been changed) chose to do something different. She made a card. A small, dense, and almost architectural card that laid out Gauntlett‘s ideas not as a list to be memorized, but as a living argument about how people become who they are.
The Stanford admissions officer who saw it, reportedly at an interview with an alumni in London, said it was the coolest way to study that she had seen in all the years she had been reading applications. That’s a big thing to say. It’s likely that she had seen hundreds of them.
When you think about Gauntlett’s ideas, they are really interesting, but they are also really badly understood. It’s a little confusing that the UK exam puts him under the heading of “representation,” since representation is about what the media shows and identity is about what goes on in a person’s mind. Gauntlett has himself said that this way of putting things is strange. He thinks that identity is not something that a movie or an ad makes. Years of inputs—parents, friends, songs heard when you were fifteen, fights at the dinner table, and images seen and half-forgotten—have made it what it is today.
It looked like the best study card got this idea across: that no single media text can help someone feel like they are who they are. The accumulation is important. This is clear from Gauntlett. Media texts give people ideas about who they should be, but each person processes those ideas in their own way. They leave some things behind and take others, and in the space between, they quietly build a self. All signs point to the card showing this as something like a diagram, with influences coming from within and identity not coming from a single source but from the collision of many.
This way of putting things stuck with someone whose job it is to judge how students think. A common way to revise a theory is to make it flat: Gauntlett says that identity is fluid, so write that down and say it again on the test. This student seemed to get that Gauntlett’s argument changes over time. It changed over 20 years. His earlier work, like Media, Gender, and Identity, was mostly about how culture affects how people see themselves, especially when it comes to race and gender. In later works, especially Making is Connecting, he wrote about a more positive idea: that the internet had truly democratized identity-making by letting regular people become creators instead of just consumers.
It’s possible that the second part of his mind is more alive now than it has ever been. There have never been cheaper or easier ways to share creative work than there are now. Every day, people show parts of who they are through the things they make, post, and share. According to Gauntlett, media is no longer a collection of finished products made by different industries. Instead, it is a messy network of millions of individual contributions. This sounds less like theory and more like a description of Tuesday afternoon.
It’s still not clear if the card changed what happened to the student. The admissions process isn’t clear enough for that level of certainty. But it’s impossible not to notice what it meant: someone who had gone deeper into a theory and found something really interesting to think about.
