<p>We all know about tips for athletes, development admits, legacies, URMs, and special talents (strange that so many colleges are apparently in desperate need of an oboe player). Is there a conscious effort to make sure that all fields that are taught are represented in a class? Does the faculty get a vote in any of this? The coaches clearly do - they get to influence the entering class, but the chemistry professor has to wait and see who shows up?</p>
<p>I don’t know if there is a concious effort in the sense of any sort of quotas to meet, but I do know that it is a plus if a student intends to focus on an underenrolled or less popular major, at least if the student has the background to go along with it. That is, a kid who simply says he wants to major in classics might not be taken too seriously, but the kid who wants to major in classics and also has studied latin for 4 year in high school might have an edge.</p>
<p>I’m pretty sure that my daughter’s success in getting admitted to several reach colleges had a lot to do with her extensive high school study of Russian.</p>
<p>If you have a particular area of interest it might be worth researching to find a school that has the combination of a strong department with several tenured professors coupled with a history of weak levels of enrollment in the courses in that department. You can get a sense of how many students graduate with degrees in a particular subject from the IPEDS Cool site. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that the schools that need the student the most may not be the schools with the strongest department. For example, no large research university has any shortage of chem majors … but a small liberal arts college with an artsy bent might. Sometimes schools do put in extra effort to attract students interested in certain areas – for example, in recent years Bard has been trying to attract math & science majors.</p>
<p>Calmon has picked a great example. My D visited Bard, expressed an interest in the sciences and was treated like royalty. She was all but promised admission and a good merit award. Unfortunately, Bard would have been a poor choice. The science facilities were minimal and the new science building was only in the planning stages. Bard was NOT among the 100’s of ACS accredited undergrad chemistry programs. Although this example did not work out, the principle is sound. LACs may not attract a large number of science applicants, but often have very good programs and send a high percentage of students to doctoral programs. If you are specifically interested in the sciences, you can check the tables for doctoral origins at nsf.org. It is also essential to tour the departments and determine if the programs meet your expectations. There are also great liberal arts programs at schools known for the sciences. Hopkins gets tons of applicants for pre-med, science and engineering. Hopkins doesn’t attract a lot of liberal arts applicants but has a very strong history department.</p>
<p>It is not always clear how admission decisions are made. In some cases, it may work out as you suggested and departments just wait to see who shows up. I suspect that is the exception and the adcoms are aware of the goals for academic diversity. There is a very effective way to leverage your interests. Arrange for departmental tours and interviews. You can usually do this through admissions or directly contact the departmental office.</p>
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<p>My son played oboe for a while. It is a particularly difficult instrument to master, you have to learn to make your own reeds, and the instruments themselves are very expensive. Also, there are no oboes in marching bands. At high schools where the marching band and sit-down wind ensemble are integrated into the same program, the oboe player is a problem – what do you do with this person during marching band season? I think that kids may be subtly discouraged from selecting oboe for this reason.</p>
<p>My daughter was admitted as a transfer student to a school which would have been a reach for her as a senior in h.s. Her SAT scores are slightly below their range and the school is a reach for everyone, as its admissions rate is below 20%. I am not totally sure how transfer admissions work, as she had excellent grades and recommendations to show from her first college (and SATs may not be as much of a factor for transfers), but I am pretty sure that the fact that she is focusing on fields somewhat unusual for her college (Asian studies, Art, and Art History) helped a lot. Unlike Calmom’s D (with Russian), my D did not study Chinese until she began college, but, as a transfer, was able to show that she was able to do well in the language. I am not sure if this would have been taken into account as much if she had only been able to SAY that she was interested in studying Chinese (as a h.s. senior) without having actually studied the language.</p>
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<p>I agree. Periodically you get high school students here wondering if they can improve their odds of admission by putting an unusual major down on their applications. I’m sure that colleges are aware of this particular idea for gaming the system and that students can readily change majors once they matriculate.</p>
<p>I think being a prospective Egyptology major helped my daughter get into Brown. But she had the pertinent background (Latin, Greek, correspondence courses with an Egyptologist). An admissions person even hand-wrote a comment on a form letter saying that she found fascinating D’s interest in Egyptology and ancient warfare (took a correspondence course in that too). So obviously they did look at what she put down as her prospective concentration and the coursework she had.</p>
<p>Thanks for the feedback. The IPEDS Cool site is pretty interesting.</p>
<p>Marian is right on target about oboe players- some of the oboists I’ve known in band can produce the most amazing dying duck imitations. </p>
<p>Some colleges aggressively recruit certain majors and may even offer merit $. Furthering calmom’s example, Holy Cross offers a couple full tuition scholarships for incoming Classics majors. I received quite a bit of mail from Davidson’s German department as well.</p>
<p>We’ll know in a couple months if Classics is a boost in admissions. Son has seven years of Latin, took a college class in Ancient Rome when he was a rising ninth grader, took a weekend class on teaching Latin in the classroom, and has been very involved in the Classics organization since seventh grade (at the local, state and national level). Fingers crossed.</p>
<p>Bassoonists and oboists help form the HS marching band color guard. Indoors they get another instrument’s music to play during the season.</p>
<p>If one is interested in Classics, it also makes sense to apply to a college with a strong department. The same applies to math, physics, engineering,…I think the outstanding candidate is the one who showed a passion, and pursued their study in ECs (like egyptology or russian language/stay in Russia). I suspect the admissions committee would see these applicants as a “good fit”. A school with a small department in one’s field may very well be pleased to accept said student, but I could see the student getting frustrated down the line.</p>
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<p>The first year that my son played oboe, I was convinced that geese would drop down out of the sky and try to mate with him. The sound was that bad. But it got better with practice (and a decent instrument).</p>
<p>When my D was learning to play her bassoon it sounded more like a seriously sick cow rather than a dead duck. The cow eventually recovered though as D eventually became pretty good.</p>
<p>In our HS the double reeds play in the pit percussion section during marching season. However, it’s not universal. At Arcadia High School in LA the bassoons actually march. How they manage to play them and march at the same time I’ll never know.</p>