Difficulty of Ivy League Admissions

bananainpyjamas
Sat, 25 Jun 2005 08:38:14 +0000

exactly… its mostly regarded as a lottery by people who don’t get in/cheer the ppl who didn’t get in. there is always subjectivitiy but at my school there are a few kids who apply to harvard(14 are going this year i believe) and i truly feel that those 14 kids stood out from the kids who got rejected from my school. for example, one was rsi/intel semifinalist… one was ranked #2 in math team… one was secretary general of our model un club(over 200 members and one of the best teams on east coast)



haha, no. Three are going to Harvard…and ironically, none of the three specific students you described are going. One of the Harvard kids was captain of It’s Academic, another was editor of the school newspaper, and another had a four-generation legacy. 14 are going to Princeton. Please tell me you’re not a senior, LOL.

sarasote - No, I’m saying that when you compare some of the admits/rejections within my school, things sometimes don’t make sense. People with so-so GPAs, SATs, and ECs get in while people with much stronger stats (and ECs for that matter) are rejected. Obviously no one knows what the national pool was like, but comparing in-school competition, quite a few of the decisions are head-scratchers.

Plus, I have talked to admissions counselors. One of my father’s colleagues used to be on the committee for an Ivy. She said luck is a factor. You just need the right person to be the one to first read your file. If they like an applicant, for whatever reason, they’ll fight for them. There’s a good chance that if their file had started off in another person’s hands, their admission status would be different. Similar sentiments have been expressed by other adcom officers (one of my father’s students who used to be one for another “elite,” and an officer for his university).

I’m not saying it’s a crapshoot. Just that for the majority of applicants, luck does play at least a small role. If you want to think luck is no factor, then fine. I’ll still take the word of those three people with, you know, actual first-hand experience, over your’s.

BTW, phrasing your response as a criticism of me was not neccessary at all. I was not talking about not understanding my own rejection, though I did call, and had a long conversation with the admissions rep which basically amounted to “I fought for you, I really did. The committee agonized over your case. There was nothing wrong with your app. There just wasn’t enough room.” So no, I am not saying these things out of bitterness or not understanding my own rejection. Luck was against me in that case, but it worked for me in another.