am I reaching too high?

annikasorrensen
Fri, 06 Jun 2008 12:33:36 +0000

Your grades, courses and SAT and ECs look good. The reality is that competition is tough everywhere… and you seem to want to minimize the cost (time? money?) of applying to too many colleges. You will need to weigh exactly where that balance is going to be for you. Stanford is a reach for everyone. Apply if you feel very passionate about Stanford or if you believe it is worth the effort even knowing only 10% will be accepted.

Specifically, though, your biggest hurdle is that while you are a solid student, your application (so far) doesn’t “pop”. For example, your Academic Honors/Awards are all school related, not national. Your extracurriculars do not show any particular passion that stand out and more look like someone who is just constantly busy busy busy.

There might be something buried in your “Others” section that is worth highlighting, but you’ve thrown so much into that area that it is difficult to find it. An admissions officer looking at just this raw list wouldn’t really know who you are or what your passion is by reading the list. While I don’t advise becoming specialized at this young age, admissions officers often like to see some focus on one particular type of activity or passion and see how it has been followed through.

There is time for you to reorganize and reframe your activities and/or focus on one or two ideas over the summer and early fall in order for you to hone your application. Unfortunately, what I read is that “jack of all trades” is not the approach that seems to work, so you need to trim some of the less relevant activities and highlight some of the others. Steer away from generic awards like perfect attendence unless you have a killer essay that uses it to illustrate a larger point (ie: someone going through a life-threatening illness or lives in a warzone and still manages to have perfect attendance would potentially be able to craft a very interesting essay that shows great character strengths… for the rest of us more fortunates, getting recogniztion for merely “showing up” is not really something that will get the attention of most any admissions counselor.)

Hope that helps to get you started. It really is all about packaging. You have the great grades/scores… to get into a place like Stanford or any of the highly selective colleges, you will need to develop your hook - what makes you stand out in a crowd? This is important to consider and develop for any college you want to apply to - so I would keep Stanford in your list (or some other very highly selective college) so that you have in your sights a goal that inspires you to frame all of your materials in the application in the best light possible.

Annika