Relentless Pursuit by Donna Foote

site. The children mobbed him for his amazing feat; before long, their parents were inviting him to dinner.
    The TFA selector reading the essay drew brackets around the paragraphs outlining Hrag’s success at winning over the villagers. Next to the brackets was the notation “I/M,” TFA shorthand for “influencing and motivating others,” one of the key competencies TFA had identified with the help of McKinsey consultants.
    At one point in the seven-hour process, the candidates were split into two groups for a discussion based on readings the applicants had been sent. Hrag hadn’t studied the articles; he scanned them even as he led the discussion. He didn’t really know what he was talking about. What he did know was that TFA interviewers were watching the group to see who would step up and lead the conversation.
    During the one-on-one interview, Hrag emphasized his leadership qualities. He spoke about the growth and success of the Armenian Club at Boston College under his stewardship. When he had first arrived at BC, the club was just about moribund. Because the club had only four members, getting himself elected president was easy. The hard part was finding a way to revive the organization. Hrag decided to scan the names of all the students on campus and e-mail the ones with names ending in “ian.” The plan worked. Enrollment jumped to fifteen. With the club showing signs of life, Hrag started holding events on topics he thought would be of interest to Armenian Americans. He then convinced professors to give extra credit to anyone who showed up. The night before Hrag’s interview, seventy people attended the club meeting and lecture, a number unheard of before his tenure.
    Hrag had also gleaned that the organization put a premium on persistence. TFA called it relentless pursuit. It was the first of the organization’s five core values. After all, TFA owed its existence to the fact that Kopp had persisted against all manner of seemingly insurmountable odds, especially in the first five years.
    Hrag knew all about persistence. At Boston College, he had taken his GPA from a 3.18 as a freshman to a 3.78 as a junior. Before that, his career as a high school wrestler at Pascack Valley High School in Hillsdale, New Jersey, was an ode to persistence. The tale said as much about his father as it did about Hrag.
    Hrag made it onto the varsity wrestling team as a sophomore, but he never won a single match that year. His father didn’t care. He made it a point to attend every match. And through every one of them, Manuel silently endured the reproaches of another dad seated nearby—a father whose son actually won some matches. “Yank the kid,” the guy would say. “It’s embarrassing—to the boy as well as the team. You’re hurting your own kid. Stop. It’s painful to watch.”
    Manuel never responded.
    Then, in what seemed nothing short of a miracle, Hrag took on the school’s rival in his junior year—and won! And kept winning. In his senior year, he was ranked second in the league.
    Hrag’s first victory came in the only match of his wrestling career that Manuel wasn’t able to make. It didn’t matter. That night, when he arrived home and heard the news, Manuel heaved his teenaged son atop his shoulders and paraded him around the house like a Greek god. Hrag savored that moment as much as the victory.
    The TFA staffers handling the interview process that day kept a score sheet for each applicant. Candidates were rated on the seven competencies along a sliding scale of 1 to 3, with 1 signifying an unacceptably low score, 2 indicating a solid performance, and 3 representing exemplary, the highest possible rating. Each score on each trait for each candidate was carefully entered, first on the work sheet, later into TFA’s burgeoning computerized data bank.
    At the end of the day, Hrag was tagged a “Best Bet,” a candidate