<p>I do think an MIT or other top schools can hope/expect hs kids will stretch themselves in their fields- and if that means math contests, ok by me. Other activities, as well. Slightly different respects for other majors. Some in the school, some outside. But, rather than consume themselves with one aspect, kids should go for balance. Intelligent, well-thought out balance that, in the end, shows a well-rounded and grounded, thinking kid, able to take on that college’s challenges and ride the rough spots. And, have fun, try new things, grow personally.</p>
<p>The only “correctness” or LF “meter” is that your app should end up a good, college-relevant presentation that shows you in a good light. Try to understand what may be college-relevant (including what shows those personal attributes, the ones adcoms need to see.) Try to remember that the adcom team doesn’t know you, can’t fill in what’s missing or second guess what you really meant, the way hs teachers sometimes can. If all adcoms had to do was take you on your word, that would be a lot easier for the candidates. Instead, they ask for something “wholer.”</p>
<p>So think it through and do your best. It’s not hard, imo, to understand what makes “college-relevant.” </p>
<p>QM, my questions about your “data” vs suppositions began with 1754. In short, you got to 18 by assuming 2/3, some balance of 21 minus 3 red flags. In fact, we don’t know. So, how does one sell it as 18? This isn’t about the calculations, but the input.</p>
<p>I’m many pages behind the rest of you and this topic may have already faded. Nevertheless, I find the idea of spending $10,000 on some short overpriced feel-good trip as being totally absurd. Both of my children have been to more than 25 countries on 6 continents, and we did the traveling not for college admissions (it was never mentioned) but rather for the joy and perspective of seeing how other cultures cope, often with very limited resources.</p>
<p>Most of this traveling has been on a backpacker-plus budget. Once you get past the cost of airfare, many places are dirt cheap, especially in much of Asia and South and Central America: $6 a night pp for a hostel in Borneo, $35 a night per room for a 4-star hotel near Angkor Wat. A buck or two for a tuk-tuk ride, $5 for a meal for two at a local restaurant. Even London is affordable if you spend your days visiting their world-class museums, which are still free.</p>
<p>There is a lot of value in learning how to haggle gracefully and with good humor. There’s a lot of value in the experience of “leading a parade” of a dozen child vendors, each eager to sell you $1 trinkets. But I think a lot of these expensive pre-packed trips give you either little understanding or even a misunderstanding of how the world works. The worst misunderstanding is that we from the West know better and have, out of benevolence, come to help.</p>
<p>Seriously, the locals are pretty darn smart and are willing to work much harder than most of us in the West; they are just short of cash. US-trained medics and engineers provide valuable skills, but most American teenagers? What can they do, dig a ditch? These teens would be much better off paying some local guy $5-10 for the day to do that work and thus put some money in a local family’s pocket and then spend another $10-$15 over the rest of the day buying trinket souvenirs from other locals. Their skills aren’t needed, just their money. Unfortunately, 80-90% of the cost of these packages never help the locals, it mostly goes to Western middlemen.</p>
<p>There are definitely ways to help the locals. But usually the most efficient way is to locate a Western ex-pat (typically European) who married a local and decided to stay permanently and who now works on his own pet project in his community. These people are not that hard to find: visit an Internet cafe or outdoor restaurant, chat with the obvious Westerners and ask them. I contributed to building a clean-water system in Africa and bought used books at a local store for a school library in rural Columbia. In Egypt, I bought a smart 9-year-old street girl, fluent in self-taught English, her first pair of shoes. In these kind of situations, even a few tens of dollars can really help – image what one could do that hypothetical $10k that folks pay to hopefully impress Ivy League adcoms.</p>
<p>If someone tells me about his or her family’s travels abroad, I don’t ask how much they spent. I’m not sure why people assume so much. This $10,000 figure was pulled out of the air, as far as I can tell. Anyway, I don’t think it’s fair to assume anything about the value of anyone’s insights simply based on what they spent on a trip or what you imagine they spent. And to those of you who assume you know what these privileged kids’ essays look like: How many have you read? A person could write a good essay about how little a trip abroad actually “changed” him or her.</p>
<p>As far as wall street jobs,truth is many of the recruits to wall street are recruited athletes at the top ivys. High SAT scores are certainly not required for those jobs rather being part of the old boys club is more important. Think crew, lacrosee… high income sports.</p>
<p>It’s not the money, it’s the sincerity. In any case, a lot of families don’t have the resources to send their kids alone to exotic destinations.</p>
<p>When I was in high school, my family took a week’s vacation to Haiti. Our parents let my sister and me wander around the market in Port au Prince by ourselves. I was taking medication that needed refrigeration, so I got to see the inside of a number of restaurant kitchens in the countryside where the staff had kindly let us store my medicine. That trip was the most eye-opening experience of my life. I learned so much–then and later–about the resilience of the people, their amazing creativity and warmth, and the terrible political history of the country. I brought back a deep respect for the people and a sense of outrage over the unjust differences in the way Haitian refugees to the U.S. were treated compared with those from Cuba.</p>
<p>Of course, my parents didn’t set out to teach me all these things–they just wanted to take us to a Caribbean island with a different culture from those we had visited earlier. There was no “EC” benefit to the trip as far as college admissions were concerned, but that was not the point.</p>
<p>absweetmarie is correct. There was a presumption made, by Sue22 herself, I think, that these apparently common African trips that include community service, cost $10K. That is where the $10K figure came from.</p>
<p>LI, I enjoyed reading about your travels on-a-shoestring. The hypothetical trip we were addressing was not a family trip, rather it would have been one for underage high school students with chaperones, which would by definition require additional costs.</p>
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<p>The idea that students take these trips only to “impress Ivy League adcoms,” is again a cynical guess, as far as I can tell. It inherently assumes that the parents of these students are stupid, and I don’t think parents we don’t know deserve that assumption.</p>
<p>I do think that a mission trip or community service trip could indeed change a 17 year old’s worldview. However, the singular trip is less likely to impress the admissions committee and less likely to sound sincere than a sustained committment to a service project over time. Framed a different way - which sounds more authentic: “My two week trip to Guatemala changed my view of humanity” or “My time spent serving the poor at the soup kitchen, three hours every week for 3 years, has changed my view of humanity”?</p>
<p>Our high school hosted an admissions forum with adcoms from our state flagship, a top 15 private university and a top LAC. The question of how to write the essay was a lively discussion among the panel members, one of whom said, “Don’t write about your mission trip”, and the official from top private uni said, “Yes, it’s amazing how many churches there are in Guatemala.”</p>
<p>Hey, it’s OK to spend bucks for that foreign service trip to help you stand out from the crowd in the whole elite college admissions game. It’s a win/win situation. Your kid learns about a foreign culture, and the service helps those poor natives, right? If your kid gets a great college essay out of it, that’s a bonus.</p>
<p>Just don’t ask me to spend more than the current sky high tuition to help fund financial aid for some poor and/or working class student at an elite college. It’s my money, I get to decide what I want to do with it, and I draw the line there. Those kids get to go to their dream school for basically free, and my family is being penalized for being full pay. </p>
<p>My kids will get a whole lot more understanding of diversity and economic injustice by spending an entire week in a third world country than by studying and living alongside a poor or working class student for a measly four years at college.</p>
<p>Those kids don’t have the SAT scores to really qualify for admission, anyway. Bad genes coupled with a bad upbringing that values sports more education.</p>
<p>I agree. Let’s not assume that participants in academic competitions are solely motivated by college admissions, either, as some have done in this thread.</p>
<p>^^^ this is a bit sad that adcoms are so jaded. There are so many kids doing mission trips during summers. So the adcoms are discounting their experiences?</p>
<p>I’ve read all of one essay about a mission trip. It was pretty much an “and we are all the same underneath” sorts of essay. It wasn’t terrible, it wasn’t great. I didn’t think it would particularly hurt the kid, though it might not have helped him a whole lot either. If I recall correctly, he wasn’t applying to the super duper competitive universities. It was well written and came from a 17 year old’s heart. </p>
<p>I have had occasion to read really good essays including one from a kid applying to Caltech who had to answer the “Have you ever faced an ethical dilemma and what did you do about it?” essay. I made some comment that I thought what the student had written wasn’t much of a dilemma (it somehow involved lost wallets) and said something like it would have been more of a dilemma if xyz had happened. The clever kid revised his essay to say, I that the dilemma was to exaggerate the incident to make it more of a dilemma. That kid got in. Mine didn’t. (And I’ll be honest that particular essay might have been an issue for my kid.) There was no question in my mind that Caltech made the right choice at least based on the essays I saw. The kid’s other essay was about physics and roller-coasters.</p>
<p>There is a difference between the types of trading firms that recruit at math contests and the big banks and other firms on wall street. Places like DE Shaw and Jane Street absolutely do not favor recruited athletes.</p>
<p>I prefer to have children follow their interests and then select colleges that suit those interests rather than structure their education and extra-curricular activities around being competitive for certain colleges. I think lookingforward gives useful information on crafting a successful application for colleges looking for “well-rounded” applicants.</p>
<p>I know that sometimes the most competitive schools greatly value the single focused applicant and really pursue the “academic grind”.</p>
<p>Academic pursuits are what some individuals do for fun, not because their parents and teachers encourage them and tell them academics are necessary for competitive college admissions. There are self-directed and motivated learners. They seek out their own opportunities, including math competitions.</p>
<p>Posters have stated that students who participate in academic competitions are those whose parents are aware of these opportunities, or whose schools support these activities. In many cases this is true. However, 30+ years ago while working in gifted education, eleven through thirteen year olds regularly called our office to ask where they could find appropriate level math instruction. They also had math team kinds of questions. These were students who didn’t have parents with the knowledge to answer these types of questions. The students found someone who did.</p>
<p>Ten to twenty years ago students in my homeschooling community sought out academic competitions without any help from their parents and sometimes without much support since my particular group wasn’t much into competitions.</p>
<p>“Let’s not assume that participants in academic competitions are solely motivated by college admissions, either, as some have done in this thread.”</p>
<p>Great point. </p>
<p>While many CC parents embrace racial/cultural diversity, myself included, I also want to advocate the diversity of choices, from academic competitions to sports, and from community services to mission trips. It is perfectly fine to articulate one’s reasoning for doing one thing verse anther. However, let’s try not to be cynical and not to impose our own views, and to be honest, biases, onto others.</p>
<p>Actually, the number I originally used was $3000. This was the per person buy-in for a two week faith-based volunteer trip taken by a family I know. On top of that they had to pay their own airfare, ground travel and personal expenses.</p>
<p>On a lark I googled “volunteer programs Africa”. The first that popped up has a teen program.</p>
<p>The two-week cost for this program is $3068. Airfare from my home would be $3159. Add in all the other costs (travel, food, entertainment, etc.) and I can see how someone came up with the $10,000 figure.</p>
<p>Part of the problem I have with these pre-packaged experience is that they rarely force kids out of their comfort zones. Paid staff and comfortable accommodations ensure that.</p>
<p>I reiterate that I don’t have a problem with foreign travel or even expensive service trips abroad. My kids have traveled extensively. What I do have a problem with is the self-congratulatory back patting that I’ve seen go along with these glorified vacations. “I was struck by the wisdom in the eyes of the Kigali villager as I placed the shoes on her feet” from a kid who’s never bothered to drop in on the old lady down the street.</p>