The worse thing you can do is look like you did all your ECs for college.
Case in point:
Girl raised 20k+ for a NPO, impacted 80+ kids, went in person to india/africa to do charity for a “get kids an education” cause. She made this weird mishmash of dance and raised money through that to help people in education.
She accomplished a lot. But as an AO i bet you get many hints of disingenuous behavior/“padding” college app. What teen in their right mind, from the bay area, a) cares so much about getting kids an education through dance??? b) it is the most overdone topic of the early 20th century. I can’t believe she didn’t do anything more unique and original
BTW she is going to UCLA. but keep in mind that this was in 2020, before the pandemic and she was valedictorean. She didn’t have to do so much, her valedictorean status would have carried her, like the 2nd valedictorean that is going to UC berkeley with nothing else at all. She clearly was shooting for t15s.
Oh and she published a “poetry emotion book” on amazon for no damn reason other than to pad her app. At least do it a little inteligently related to your major… oh right you are a business major.
No matter what you have accomplished, if the readers have a slight inclination of disenginouty/ “doing everything to get into college” behavior, you are screwed.
Maybe one who’s involved in dance? So You Think You Can Dance has been on for years, and encourages that kind of thing all the time. If it was something she was involved in and could raise money for a good cause by doing, then why not?
I guess the AO didn’t mind in the long run, though. Or just didn’t even pay attention to it. So, no harm done. But, yeah, I agree it’s probably best to do something a bit more original.
Today you start a thread entitled “Avoid Being Disingenuous in your ECs”
Well done you have come a long way from this posting you made two days ago!
“Also is it possible to claim im hispanic without repurcussions if i claim i am part of a dying religion that no one knows about, which could work for proving im hispanic, and have a ec that tries to save that.”
You have a couple of threads going on this forum that mostly relate to how you are viewed relative to others…or how someone else is viewed.
I am boldly going to suggest that you stop it. Concentrate on YOUR college applications and application process and stop talking about other people, and how they might affect your application process.
Some people do things because they enjoy them. They like dancing, they like helping people get an education (maybe because they see how much an education has helped them?), they like writing poetry and essays?
Are you saying this student didn’t get into a top school even though she did all this, or are you saying she should have just been happy at UCLA all along? Maybe she chose UCLA because it will allow her to continue her charity work, dance, and writing as it is what she really likes?
She self published a book relating to her emotions(why???), tried to inflate her AP numbers by taking some outside of school like me, and now is trying to be a quant. She so obviously did it to get into one of the big 15. So yes, I am saying this student didn’t get into a top school even though she did all this.
I mean, talking smack about your peers on an anonymous forum seems like an original and authentic EC to me. Run with it; I’m sure it’ll catapult you ahead of the disingenuous pack.
How has her doing all things things changed anything you did to get into your college? Let her do her thing and you do yours. Shortly you’ll start your college and she’ll start at UCLA and you never have to worry about her any more.
you genuinely do NOT know the inside/whole story of any of the people you have described/compared to yourself. The Collegekids have gone to a couple of different hyper-competitive secondary schools, where “everybody knows” what somebody else did to try and get into a famous name uni. I have direct knowledge of the facts behind rather a lot of those stories- and there is almost always more to the story. Yes, of course, lots of the students/families are trying to get into top name schools, in both more and less honorable ways, but the fact is that you simply do not know what you do not (and can not) know.
and
the only race you can run is your own. Even if all your darkest suspicions are 100% true (which is unlikely in the extreme)- it doesn’t matter. You have to run your own race. Have you read this piece?
It’s not the main point, but stop for a minute and think how that student who built a nuclear reactor in the garage and still got turned down by MIT felt. You can imagine the certainty that s/he must have felt- this is going to dazzle them! Who else could have this on their application?! And then to get a ‘no’. They could blame a student in their class who did all the nefarious things you list above to try and ‘fake’ their way in. They could blame some external fact (zip code, gender, ethnicity, etc.). They could blame AO’s who are so oblivious that they don’t even realize that they are being conned.
OR…they could realize that the AOs see the whole application, including essays & LoRs; that they weigh all the pieces of an application against their own institutional needs/goals, the other applications they have read in the past, and the applications they have already evaluated in this cycle, and then pull the ones that stick out for them. The AO’s I know/have known (and me, when I read grad school apps) talk about what sticks out, what catches the eye, what lifts one app over a dozen similarly qualified ones. I can imagine that the MIT AO who read about the nuclear reactor slowed down at that, maybe even went back and re-read some or all of the app- but clearly s/he ended up deciding that overall other students fit the class that they were building better. And you can bet that it wasn’t because that student was an Asian student from the Bay Area, or a white suburban girl from the mid-Atlantic, or any of the other ORMs that feel hard done by in the college admissions process.
How should you let go of the bitterness? I’ll bite.
Concentrate more on YOUR applications and stop your critiques of what others have done. Fact is…what others have done doesn’t have anything to do with you…except that you seem to think it does…(it doesn’t).
Start dealing with your own college search. Stop fixating on others.