<p>Your thoughts.</p>
<p>I don’t think so. Their very nature makes them so selective. They are small, national programs with a (well-deserved) reputation for excellence and a high level of prestige. Not to mention the fact that they are free, a rare thing among summer programs. They attract a lot of applicants for a small number of spots, and that’s all being selective boils down to.</p>
<p>I was honestly speaking more on behalf of the ‘crapshoot’ part. It seems as if you have to just get extremely lucky to be accepted.</p>
<p>I personally think luck has nothing to do with acceptance, at least for TASP (I can’t speak for RSI as I never even considered applying). The application process is based virtually on your essays alone, and I don’t know how you could “get lucky” in writing those. You either write well, have good ideas, and show that you’re an interesting, passionate person, or you don’t. No one is chosen (even for the interview round) for no reason whatsoever. The idea that applicants are selected simply because they got lucky is a disappointing and slightly ridiculous one to me. </p>
<p>I wish low acceptance rates didn’t automatically signify a crapshoot selection process, but I understand why you’d think that initially, given that low acceptance rates at institutions like the Ivies could be considered crapshoot, and that’s probably a rational association to make (low admit rate = random/luck-based admission). Know that TASP has a far too holistic approach to the selection process to be legitimately considered a crapshoot admissions program.</p>
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I am not really sure about TASP, but the more holistic a process gets the bigger of a crapshoot it becomes. Crapshoot or luck in an admissions process usually alludes to the fact that your admission could be based upon (and it very well could be…) the mood of the officer, the officer himself, and so forth. In a purely objective process it’s cookie cutter, the “better” person will always prevail. Being a holistic process (good, nonetheless) has a greater margin of error with regard to the “small details”.</p>
<p>I am not sure about the admissions process at TASP. Is there a team of officers, in which each officer reads an x amount of applications? </p>
<p>RSI always seemed more objective, making it more a question of how amazingly advanced within science/tech are you.</p>
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<p>Telluride Associates, CBTA house members, and other affiliates of the Telluride Association read applications every year around the country. They are virtually all unpaid volunteers. So to answer your question, no, there is no team of officers, but rather a team of passionate people who know the organization well and care about it enough to keep coming back and pitching in. Roughly 1,000 juniors applied to TASP last year, and hundreds of people volunteer annually to meet that need. </p>
<p>TA is holistic in that (obviously) it looks at the applicant as a whole, rather than the sum of something like URM + Good Book List + Resident of Wyoming, what have you. They look at you as a person, your individual situation: what you’ve experienced, what you can offer, what you represent, what you care about, what you feel, etc. What makes its holistic application philosophy different from crapshoot ones is that those are barely ever applications that consist of essays alone. This kind of application process is one that truly allows application readers to see the real you (intellectually and personally) in your own words, rather than what you can squeeze into a few Activities, Awards, and Standardized Test Score boxes.</p>
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<p>This is straight from the Telluride Association website. One thing I think should be said about the TASP application process (and I think this goes for applications in general to a certain extent): TA’s decision is NOT a reflection on you as a person, it is just a reflection on your essays. This distinction, though obvious, is sometimes lost in TASP’s extremely personal application process and this leads to a lot of neurotic behavior and dramatics that can be very unhealthy. In addition, a word of advice: do not actively craft the topics of your essays to fit the characteristics that TASP professes to be looking for. Look at the prompts, write what you want to in response. Being really passionate or involved in a “non-intellectual” topic sounds a lot better (and makes you seem more mentally engaged) than an essay about the most obscure intellectual topic you could pull off an essay about. </p>
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<p>Referring back to my first post, RSI gets so many applicants for so few spots that lining them up in some kind of order and picking the top ones is not possible, so the process is going to have a certain amount of “crapshoot-ness” to it like the selection process of any selective institution that uses anything besides a GPA-SAT formula, and it may come down to small details or subjective parts of the application (like the essay). That being said, RSI is probably a lot more “predictable” than TASP. If you are applying to RSI with a USABO gold medal and a first place finish at ISEF as well as a 240 PSAT you have a pretty good idea of what your chances are. With TASP, the only way you could “chance” someone is by having someone who knows what TASP is looking for read all of their essays, and even then the amount of qualified applicants would lend a certain crapshoot-ness to the prediction. I apologize for the wall of text.</p>
<p>I think they are “too” selective in that there are way more young people that could benefit from them than can be given the opportunity. Consider that TASP and RSI are both free. That means that there are an army of volunteers fundraising, reading applications, and working in various ways to make these programs happen. So spots are limited.</p>
<p>My son went to RSI with relatively little research experience or credentials. Mainly he had a love of technology that motivated him to read everything he could get his hands on about inventions, physics, etc. This enabled him to write essays that were informed, detailed, and enthusiastic. Still, I view it as a great blessing and a minor miracle that he was accepted. He would say that that summer was the best experience of his life.</p>
<p>It is a tragedy that there are many other students out there that are hungering for the TASP or RSI experience that don’t get the chance. Yes, there are other good experiences to be had: my son’s fallback for that summer was a course in game theory and studying a foreign language in the county that it is spoken. We could afford that for him. Most families can’t.</p>
<p>If I were supreme ruler, I would decree that every high school student that hungers for intense intellectual conversation, and just having a fellowship of bright peers would get that experience.</p>
<p>People get it. Now, if they accepted no one then they would be too hard to get in to. Apply. Wait. See. Remember that people get in.</p>
<p>Very well put, geomom!</p>