Admission is the story of Portia Nathan, a thirty-eight year old admission officer at Princeton University, a place so discriminating that it can afford to turn down applicants who are "excellent in all of the ordinary ways" in favor of the utterly extraordinary- " Portia compares her job to "building a better fruit basket" and achieves career success by helping her institution pluck the most exotic specimens, but her personal life is permanently on hold because of a traumatic incident from her own college years that she has never come to terms with.