This discussion was created from comments split from: Chance Me - Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Columbia, Stanford, Berkeley, Wharton ect..
@GregB77777: With all due respect, it’s impossible to tell from someone’s chance thread if they are “intelligent, dynamic individuals who have the potential to make a positive, lasting change in the world . . and who aren’t jerks or psychopaths.” To determine that criteria, you need to read interview reports, teacher recommendations, guidance counselor reports and essays. And those items are never posted on College Confidential. That’s why it’s impossible to chance someone from their posts because most of the critical information used in making admissions decision is missing.
@gibby I disagree VERY strongly with what you said.
I don’t need to read interview reports, teacher recs, or guidance counselor reports or essays to determine if a poster here is intelligent or dynamic or if she’ll get in to Harvard. Nope, not at all. Not in certain cases. Not in this case, specifically.
The OP in this thread, if what she reported is true, has already been vetted by several very well known groups. Do you have any idea how hard it is to get a Y Combinator incubator grant for a startup? They give 85 each year! Worldwide! The fact that she then took that small amount of money and grew an $8 million company with it kind of shows to me that she’s a dynamic individual.
She’s already been vetted by the Yale Young Scholars program.
She won the Time Magazine 100 most influential teenagers award.
She won the First Speech Australian Parliament competition.
I don’t need to read anything she’s written to tell you she’ll be accepted.
I will agree with you that those things (rec letters, essays etc.) are necessary in many intermediate cases to make a legit evaluation. I think I even sort of alluded to this in my last post. Which is why I previously wrote that it is hard to make a legit analysis for students in the middle like that.
However, in cases like this student, there is no way she would have been given $120,000 and flown to Silicon Valley without having had stellar rec letters and proposals and so on. She wouldn’t have been admitted to the Yale Young Scholars program without them. She wouldn’t have won the Time Magazine award without them.
The results she’s achieved are proxy for those items you list as important.
But, even more than that, she has achieved spectacular success in the real world. No one builds an $8 million company without being dynamic, motivated and intelligent.
I guess that’s one of the reasons why my daughter, who just graduated PBK Magna Cum Laude from Harvard, hated the people there so much. Admissions idea of dynamic and motivated is another person’s nightmare of type A jerks. I challenge you though to go through the decision threads, and without looking at the decision, pick who Admissions has accepted.
@gibby I have my own feelings about some of the people I met at Harvard as well. I met a fair few of the type you’re describing. I experienced some crazy, selfish, nasty things there from some of my classmates, some things bordering on sociopathic. You might not believe me if I told you the specifics. I can’t argue with your daugther’s experience. I had some similar ones. Harvard is not an easy or friendly place in many ways. It’s definitely not for everyone. even for those who can get in. I heard this recently: Harvard’s a great place to be from, but not a great place to be. A little dramatic, but with a grain of truth.
It’s a place that will probably kick your ass.
But it’s a place with certain unparalleled opportunities.
I also met my two lifelong best friends there.
In any event, I have my own feelings about how the admissions process can be improved. A better focus on moral development would be a good start. I recall interviewing a kid a few years ago who was the most sincere, selfless person I think I’ve met in this whole process. His main activity was community service, but not because of applications— that was just who he was. He whole life was devoted to service. He worked in tough places, getting his hands dirty, in the nitty gritty world of homeless people and drug addicts. He also happened to be his valedictorian— but hadn’t won any national awards or anything. I wrote him a spectacular letter. He got waitlisted and went to Duke instead. That upset me.
However, although I don’t entirely agree with the focus of the process, I’m still pretty confident in my ability to determine who will make the cut given the process as it stands. I don’t need to go through all these other threads. I’ve done it enough times on CC and in my own personal life to know that I know what I’m talking about.
And you’re right: “dynamic” taken to extremes is “a nightmare type A jerk.”
I have a lot more I can say about this
I have to strongly agree with @gibby I have met lots of Harvard students. If you read this thread and their other one they posted their gpa is 3.7 Not a lot of 3,7s get admitted unless their last name is Gates or Kennedy. While taking a bunch of AP tests without taking the clsses is very admirable I do not believe it will be given much weight in the admission process. What does co founder mean? Does it mean they lived in Menlo Park for 3 months at age 13 with their dad and got their name put on the company. They are not a STEM person so what exactly did they do for this start up? In the other post they were in tenth grade. There are a lot of unknowns to make a decision as Gibby points out. Only 8 students from Australia get into Harvard each year.
@florida26 “If you read this thread and their other one they posted their gpa is 3.7 Not a lot of 3,7s get admitted unless their last name is Gates or Kennedy. While taking a bunch of AP tests without taking the clsses is very admirable I do not believe it will be given much weight in the admission process.”
These comments are, just frankly, not true.
@GregB77777 You may want to take a look at some of the admitted students profile. http://features.thecrimson.com/2014/freshman-survey/admissions/ Also admissions officers have said repeatedly that scores alone on AP tests are not given much weight. Frankly you should check what you claim to be facts
@florida26
Now, hold up a second. Let’s parse this properly.
Your original post said “Not a lot of 3.7s get admitted unless their names are Gates or Kennedy.”
This is just false. You’re making some old school assumption that says that only children of famous people get in with lower grades. That’s just not true. Sorry.
I do agree that people with 3.7 GPAs don’t get admitted as often as those with 4.0s. However, that is NOT what you wrote!
Also, you wrote that “taking a bunch of AP tests without taking the clsses is very admirable I do not believe it will be given much weight in the admission process” That’s just plain not true! It’s not!
AP exams are given weight. Are they the ONLY thing that matter? No, of course not.
Look, you’re arguing with the wrong guy here. I’m a Harvard grad and have been interviewing applicants for 18 years.
I know this stuff really, really well.
@GregB77777 NOT a lot of 3.7s get admitted to Harvard. That is a fact!!! The comment about Gates is an attempt at subtle humor. Please see the attached article on AP exams. You must have some inside knowledge on AP exam scores that isnt readily available to the rest of us. http://www.theatlantic.com/national/archive/2012/10/ap-classes-are-a-scam/263456/
@florida26
I read that entire article on AP exams. It has many reasonable critiques of the AP program.
The one thing it doesn’t address, however, is the correlation between AP exam scores and college admissions. Nowhere does it says that AP scores won’t “be given much weight in the admissions process,” which is what you said in your first post.
I’m not saying the AP program doesn’t have problems. The whole point of this discussion here is that you said they aren’t given much weight in the admissions process.
That is not true. I’ve seen it again and again in the students I interview. More and better AP scores correlates with better admissions results.
That’s all I’m saying.
The article you linked to doesn’t prove otherwise.