5 Little Known Tips for Getting In

Parents Forum
921

<p>Well we started with the suggestion/premise that MIT’s admissions process was flawed. Then we took it down a notch- some random professor’s claimed that they got it wrong 15% of the time (so 85% of the time the result was fine, OK, outstanding, something other than flawed). But now it seems that it’s not 15%- it’s a couple of kids a year- at most- who want to study string theory, and who take from their MIT rejection that they should become high school gym teachers or something since attending one of MIT’s peer institutions in physics would be too terrible to contemplate. Or that attending Harvard and developing a love for genetics or neuroscience is much too prosaic for such a theoretical 17 year old giant.</p>

<p>So we’re sliding down the slope and now- maybe- it’s one kid that someone once knew who got taken down by John Von Neumann (who family members of mine used to refer to as “Johnny”- they were colleagues). And all of you scientists here (I am not one, just a corporate, boring suit who doesn’t have a cot in the office to sleep on) have used the scientific method and concluded from this one datapoint that MIT admissions are flawed.</p>

<p>With tremendous gusto expended in the process of explaining why the management kids are dumb. The engineers are dumber than the physics majors. Kids who get into Harvard but not MIT have their egos bruised beyond repair and may end up in finance of all things. That people who run MIT admissions are nothing like “real” MIT people and therefore can’t possibly recognize the 17 year old geniuses who they routinely reject for admissions.</p>

<p>Not a scientist here… but any manufacturing company or process I’ve worked with in the past sets an error rate and then develops algorithms and creates fail safes to keep the rate at the acceptable level. Which is why occasionally your cable bill is wrong. Of the tens of millions of bills the cable company sends out, they’ve calculated that if every customer gets a bill with an error about once every two years, that’s an acceptable frequency. Any more accuracy- they’re spending too much money on billing. Any less accuracy, and they will start to lose customers who get aggravated by “my bill is always wrong”.</p>

<p>You with me? So among the boring and stupid MIT management students who are nowhere near as special as the theoretical physics students, they’ve managed to calculate that the heavily manual process of reading undergrad applications has an error rate of what- 3 students a year that they reject but should have accepted, and what— 10 students a year that they should have rejected but in fact accepted. But to create a system with more accuracy would be cost prohibitive for the additional value to the institute. And to create a system with LESS accuracy would erode the mission and values of the institute. So- everyone is on board with their error rate, and nobody loses sleep, within reason, over the fact that the admissions team is not omniscient, and that sometimes, a 17 year old who looks high potential turns out to be a lazy, beer pong playing slug… and sometimes, a 17 year old who looks uninteresting and uninspired turns into a Nobel laureate.</p>

<p>I can’t claim to understand string theory… but I’ve run large and complex recruiting organizations for global companies, and it seems to me that once MIT sets its target on errors and does its six sigma or whatever process improvement to map out the function, the success metrics, and the results, they are smart enough to know that they are never going to be at 100%.</p>

<p>That’s the way a dumb corporate dweeb like me looks at the problem.</p>

922

<p>A U sours kids on the pursuit of knowledge, by not admitting them? </p>

<p>Btw, if you read 920, read it again. All this fuss and muss over a few kids is reverse logic, if logic at all. </p>

923

<p>Re, lookingforward, #911: No, actually, I can’t put it all into 2 sentences–at least, not without multiple semi-colons connecting compound-complex clauses and decorated with so many parenthetical expressions and dashes that I’d never get out of my own maze.</p>

<p>But I will try to set it out in a concise form.</p>

924

<p>But their feeeeeeelings might be hurt. And see, if they are theoretical physicists - really smart ones, at that! - their feelings are paramount in decision-making, and the world is obligated to contort itself not to Disappoint Them At Any Turn.</p>

<p>Disappointment, not getting what you want, desiring plan A and having plan B be the result, are simply part of life. 95% of MIT applicants are going to be disappointed that they didn’t get in. And, of course, the vast, vast majority of those students are winners in life and they will drown their sorrows for a day or two in ice cream and tears in their room – and then they’ll get over themselves, and go kick some major butt at CMU or JHU or Berkeley or any one of a number of fine institutions. Because that’s what makes them winners in life – they swung the bat as best they could. Sometimes it won’t connect. The finest ballplayers only connect 1 out of 3 times anyway.</p>

<p>Thought experiment: Suppose MIT were to have a secret camera to record how the applicants react, and they could know that before they issued the acceptances. Do you really think they’d want the kids who are going to be sooooooo devastated by a MIT rejection that they’d abandon their love of science forever?</p>

<p>For the life of me, QM, you talk about emotional intelligence but you only seem to define it in terms of having empathy for people. Empathy is great and it’s wonderful that you have it, but there are other components of having emotional intelligence too – which includes the ability to set your own destiny instead of being a victim. Maybe the geniuses you’re so worried about should develop that level of emotional intelligence.</p>

925

<p>QM, Even MIT seems to view CMU as a peer, even if you do not. They chose 7 schools as peers in the Chronicle of Higher Education review and CMU happened to be one of them. But apparently your Velda would be doomed if she actually had to go there. I can’t imagine what would happen if she had to go to your school (which I don’t believe you’ve named but I don’t have the impression it’s any MIT). <a href=“Who Does Your College Think Its Peers Are?”>http://www.chronicle.com/article/Peers-Interactive-Data/134262/&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

926

<p>1) QuantMech was served equally well by her choice of universities, as she would have been by the “CC Top” and Ivy League group. True. Maybe better served, in fact. I certainly didn’t outgrow anyone; I didn’t take advantage of more than a fraction of the educational opportunities that I had.</p>

<p>2) Richard Feynman would not have been equally well served by a host of other universities. I sincerely believe this is true.
2.a) Rebuttal: Genius will out, so it didn’t matter where Feynman went for undergrad work.
2.b) My response: That might be true. There is no empirical way to test it. On the other hand, I do see Slater’s influence in Feynman’s work. After MIT, Feynman went to Princeton for graduate work, with John Archibald Wheeler. Wheeler was his own kind of uniquely brilliant, and one of the very few physicists around at the time who could have corralled Feynman. Would Feynman have been admitted to Princeton for graduate work, and would he have been able to have Wheeler as his Ph.D. advisor, had it not been for MIT? Again, I don’t know. The shameful prejudice against Jewish people was still operating then, which is a further complication.</p>

<p>3) If Richard Feynman had not been admitted to MIT, he could equally well have gone to Harvard, Princeton, or Caltech as an undergrad. (Stanford was pre-Linear Accelerator in those days; I have met living people who have told me about a ramp-up in Stanford’s academic program that occurred while they were on the faculty.) Yes, probably. The odds that everyone would miss out on a true genius are low. But if all the “top” schools operated admissions in much the same way, there is still a possibility that he might have been admitted to none of them. Then he would not have been equally well served (in my opinion).</p>

<p>Apologies for the length of this. It continues below. Apologies also for the things I cannot know.</p>

927

<p>I’m ignoring anything about Feynman.<br>
Here goes, Q:
There are some kids whose apparent field-specific talents are so strong, by some measure or other, as viewed by acknowledged (top) specialists in that field, that they should outweigh other things a tippy top U in their field would normally demand from strong applicants.</p>

<p>Is that it? Yes or no will do.
Of course, I added the part about being vetted by tippy top experts in that field. Not just by other profs, alums or random friends. Or their own precious egos. Deleted any speculations about how their scores would exceed current measures or they may someday save the world or be depressed if they got rejected and had to go elsewhere. </p>

928

<p>4.a) This one starts with a Rebuttal: Okay, so at this point, QM has a possible, though improbable problem for Richard Feynman, who is probably the best American scientist since J. W. Gibbs, and wasn’t actually affected by this issue. That’s really unconvincing. How many of these people are there, anyway? One in the last 80 years?
4.b) My response: I think it is very likely that all of the U.S. International Mathematical Olympiad team fits into the category of students who would not be equally well served outside the “top” universities. There are 6 members of the U.S. IMO team. That’s one field, math, and the number only includes people who like competitions. If we add other fields, including many non-STEM fields, with some overlap of the extremely talented people across fields, maybe there are somewhere on the order of 100-300 students annually who would not be equally well served outside of the “top” universities.
4.c) Another rebuttal: They all get into some “top” university or another anyway.<br>
4.d) My response: Again, I don’t know; but I have seen some really strong-looking people on CC for whom this didn’t happen.
4.e) Another rebuttal: You didn’t see their full applications, nor the files of other applicants.
4.f) My response: Totally true. You have a good point.
4.g) Another rebuttal: These students would flourish wherever they went, if they were really good. (Weak schools are excluded from this analysis–totally appropriate.)<br>
4.h) My response: I acknowledge that this could very well be true. It’s not possible to run the experiment. I am reasonably certain that their undergrad experiences would not be as good as they might have been (see 2.b). </p>

929

<p>5) In non-academic areas of human endeavor, we tend to match the most promising young people with the best teachers and coaches, within the limitations of geography and socioeconomic class (which certainly have negative impacts). For example, potential stars in figure skating, tennis, gymnastics, and swimming tend to train with top coaches, if the families of the potential stars can afford to move, or send them for training. If we think that a really good match is important in sports, why not in academics?
5.a) Rebuttal: Sports stars have a limited span of years to play their sport, so the “genius will out” analogy does not apply here.
5.b) Okay, good point. Take music instead. We tend to match young virtuosos with master teachers. Cellists, sitar players, and many others have long performance lifetimes, so they should be in the “genius will out” category. Does this happen in classical music? Again, I don’t know. </p>

930

<p>6.a) My recommendation: I think that if young people of truly incredible talent apply to a “top” school, they should be admitted to every one they apply to, because there is no way short of collusion for admissions to know where else they may have applied.
6.b) Rebuttal: Wow, are you out of it, QM! They already get in without exception!
6.c) My response: Okay, great! (Parenthetical note: There did seem to be a fair amount of dumping on my hypothetical geniuses about what they lacked, if this is true.)</p>

931

<p>So finally–sorry for the extreme length of the posts! No one needs to read them. I did try to keep them as non-repetitive as possible.</p>

<p>It is totally true that I have no real idea how “top” school admissions works. So 6.b) may be 100% true.</p>

932

<p>blossom, #920, I apologize for creating the impression that I think that “management kids” are dumb. I don’t know how I created that impression. Particularly at a place like MIT or Penn, they are certainly not. Nor do I think that engineers are dumb. I think they are different from scientists. Their objectives are different, in large measure. They show their genius differently.
’
What I would not be comfortable with is a screen that selects for top engineers and/or people who will go into management, and applies it to scientists, for whom often it is somewhat different characteristics that matter, especially when you get into “more.” Of course, some scientists would pass this screen anyway.</p>

<p>This might not be how admissions works–again, I confess my ignorance. </p>

933

<p>Okay, in response to lookingforward’s question in #926: Yes, as long as the applicant does not have character flaws. Weak people skills are not character flaws. </p>

934

<p>@lookingforward and @pizzagirl - I don’t think QM ever once said that Greg Genius was (a) judging his own genius or (b) reacting with great depression/anger to not being admitted to MIT. My impression was that she thought that adults like professors at MIT, would recognize the genius even if the adcoms did not, and that the kids might happily go on to a different college, leaving the world forever poorer.</p>

935

<p>sevmom, those data are fascinating! MIT thinks it has 7 peer institutions. 5 of those institutions also consider MIT to be a peer. But there are 29 colleges that think they are peers of MIT. </p>

<p>It will be interesting to look at the methodology, and some other colleges.</p>

<p>I apologize for severely under-rating CMU. I knew they were of top quality in computer science, but I did not know how far their top-quality programs extended. Mea culpa!</p>

936

<p>@QuantMech - “Weak people skills are not character flaws” - I wonder about this. Surely it matters what kind of people skills, exactly. Remember, colleges legitimately want to build campus communities. There’s a lot of wiggle room for various personality types, but really anti-social people or “jerks” - I am not so sure they should get a pass, because eventually, as they say, “your behavior becomes your character”. Do you not agree?</p>

937

<p>Harvard’s is funny: 3 colleges they select as peers, of whom 2 select them back. 25 colleges that think of Harvard as a peer. I thought they might think they were peerless. :slight_smile: Just kidding.</p>

938

<p>I think jerks have character flaws. Well, we all have some character flaws, and I am sure that some of my posts have been jerk-like. But I mean people who are real jerks. In my view, anti-social is different from non-social. To use a scientist other than Feynman as an example (cheers!), P. A. M. Dirac was pretty reclusive, so I’d call him non-social. But he was a genuine genius, and I have not heard of him deliberately doing anything hurtful to anyone else–which would be my definition of “anti-social.”</p>

939

<p>It’s Princeton that seems to think it’s peerless–or else they just didn’t participate (more likely).</p>

940

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<p>Most people who are well-beyond the top track in their school (i.e., before college) have to deal with plenty of unnecessary antagonism and hardship from the school in the form of pulling them back or putting them down; if they still end up well beyond the curriculum by the time they leave high school, it’s with a string of people hanging onto their heels. It’s an extremely common story. The idea that these people are emotionally weak because they might be fed up after getting a college rejection on top of everything they have overcome, or in the very least, might finally have their trajectory altered or reconsider their priorities, is totally flawed. College as the ultimate destination can be very easily built up and idealized. At the very least, this is the place which is supposed to value academics the most. To use a lighter analogy, it’s sort of like one of those zombie flicks where you navigate all these zombies to get to the sheriff’s office, where you’ll be SAFE, and lo an behold, his chair swivels around, and he’s a zombie too!</p>

<p>Your phrase “set your own destiny” reminds me of something a CEO once said when he visited MIT during a business class, though. Someone asked him what made a good employee. He listed some attributes, and then at the end, half-joked that these aren’t the same attributes that make a good CEO. Going with the flow, assuming that the people at the top ultimately must be correct and their must be unseen factors clouding one’s own judgement if one disagrees-- these qualities may make a good employee. The need to define one’s own environment was the most common attribute the CEOs listed. Perhaps the answer for the sort of person “sooooooooo” bothered by the status quo is that they need to be running their own company.</p>