<p>So what if these kids don’t change the world over it? I still don’t understand the scorn for kids who have actually had the good fortune to learn about certain world conditions and felt the desire to write about it. Isn’t that what most journalists do? Why must these kids be required to start up an African relief fund or else they are just spoiled brats? Why isn’t a few visits to the local soup kitchen viewed the same way? Is all community service viewed negatively unless the student actually made some humungous impact as a result of it? If so, then that would be good to know, and applicants should omit any community service work at all, unless it made some sort of extraordinary change in the world.</p>
<p>Yes, and it is NOT that hard for any of us, and adcoms to see right through those projects. The question is really why we cling to the notion that the academic competitions are somehow different and not just as pragmatic in their objectives.</p>
<p>^ Bay, it can’t be the only things a bright hs kid does to benefit others. If it is the only thing- or the rest is simplistic (helped empty the school recycling buckets,) then it does not portray well. We’re talking top colleges that, among other things, like it or not, like a variety of efforts and accomplishments that do more than serve that kid.</p>
<p>Remember the context is ECs, personal qualities and college admissions reviews. You overestimate what they write about it. If this is bothering you, feel free to pm me. I think we should consider taking this discussion off the main here.</p>
<p>I do know a young lady who did one of those expensive-to-Africa trips. She was admitted to Yale, Stanford and a few other very fine colleges and is currently at Yale. She attended an elite public high school and clearly came from a well-to-do background with two professional, elite-educated parents. No one is saying that no kid who goes to Africa won’t EVER be admitted or anything. But they don’t want 100 of them in the class. What part of “they want some of this and some of that” continues to be unclear?</p>
<p>“I don’t see how you could possibly know this, unless you have a way to follow these kids’ life paths.”</p>
<p>Because those kids come home and commit themselves to some kind of concrete action, the kind lookingforward refers to. And as lookingforward also notes, these kid usually start with action at home and take it to the larger world. They don’t write essays about learning how shoeless African children are “just like us”.</p>
<p>Maybe I’m just feeling cranky after spending my day writing grant proposals. I’m well aware of the good that $3,000 or $5,000 or $10,000 could do if it weren’t being used to pay for some middle class American kid’s airfare and lodging so they can go halfway around the world to learn about world poverty and doing good.</p>
<p>As I said on another thread, I’m all for world travel and learning about the lives of people in other cultures. What I object to is the idea that participation in these expensive “service” trips is a mark of selflessness.</p>
<p>None of those traits sound unimportant, so the question would be how costly it would be to gather information about them. The onus is on the people who think it is important to identify students who will contribute to campus life to define what they are talking about. If you cannot define a goal – finding people who contribute to campus life – then there is no way of knowing whether your efforts to achieve the goal are successful.</p>
<p>Residential colleges want students who won’t be jerks as roommates. Maybe a survey of what people thought about their freshmen roommates could be correlated with personal ratings of applications. Colleges want happy students. Survey students before graduation and correlate satisfaction with items on the college application.</p>
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<p>I knew she had been a prize-winning student (but not USAMO :)) and had entered a profession with a high IQ threshold (medicine). I verified that she was not a liberal (such a woman would be happier with someone else). She is cute, too. She and her family thought I was a good match in part because I went to Harvard.</p>
<p>Sure you can. You can look around you and see whether your campus life is vibrant. It seems you have little room for intuition or any observation that’s not fully data-based.</p>
<p>Essays are undeniably important and the readers need to be knowledgeable, unbiased, and probably not too young. I think one that I met from Duke seemed like that. What if the essays are not from the applicants alone?</p>
<p>^A lot of times, they’re not. One of my son’s friends–who had a disastrous experience with applications to elite schools–submitted a common app essay that had been completely “frankensteined” by the many people who read it. It had no “voice” whatsoever and I am convinced that was part of the reason he got rejected by all his top choices.</p>
<p>I actually do know someone who used an algorhythm to try and find a wife. He was an amazingly gifted young man-graduated high school at 13, college at 17, got his PhD at Caltech at, I don’t know, maybe 22 or 23, but boy, he really wanted to find a wife. It all worked out well for him. He’s a college prof at a small conservative Christian college, married with two kids, and a happy, mortgage free home owner.</p>
<p>Sometimes, those mathy types can even figure out the problem of matrimony with a formula!</p>
<p>I was going through the link provided by lookingforward. MITChris’ link to his own blog summarizes who they want very nicely.</p>
<p>“There is no easy way into MIT. There is no backdoor or bootstrap. You are admitted to MIT because you are awesome. You may be awesome and not be admitted. We only have so many beds and so many seats. But for every person we admit, you can be sure that they are sufficient prepared to do the work here, and that they are also going to contribute something to campus.”</p>
<p>I mentioned several years ago that a 16 y.o. Entered MIT as a grad student. He was fortunate that the local U was a top flagship. Another tangent.</p>
I’m not sure meaningful is quite the right word - I’d say something where the kid really learned something. My favorite essay of all the ones my son wrote was about helping create an archive our neighborhood association’s paper. Now we are an interesting neighborhood - historically politically active (particularly in maintaining a diverse neighborhood in the 1960s), but also in trying to keep open classrooms in the schools. My son got involved in the project of scanning the papers because he needed 10 hours of volunteer service to a community organization. But what he talked about is that how he learned about this issue, knew how it must have turned out (no open classrooms when he attended the school), but the records themselves, despite all the letters back and forth, never actually document how they lost the fight. He talked about how it made him feel like a real historian to be reading the first hand sources, and yet at the same time seeing how they came up short and didn’t tell the whole story. It’s not a project that will change the world, but it changed him and he was aware of that piece of intellectual growth as it was happening.</p>
<p>I always thought your example showed his intellectual curiosity, vibrance. And, how a small project came to intrigue him, get him thinking. I’d think his essay- even the topic choice- “spoke volumes.”</p>
<p>Is it hard to believe that a genius needs to work hard to achieve excellence? Or should the genius rest on his laurels and wait for greatness to be thrust upon him? Let’s not forget what Edison said about genius.</p>