Do I have a chance?

chsowlflax17
Sun, 23 Jan 2011 01:05:00 +0000

Ugh.


You won’t get any responses you’re looking for from current students (which is mostly what this forum is for), so you may as well try somewhere else.
Yes GPA matters, yes ExtraCurrics matter, yes etc. etc., but a chance thread takes away the one thing that give you the BEST chance, and that is your humanity. A bunch of stats and scores and things you do don’t (usually, anyways) tell us who you ARE. A good application ANYWHERE will remedy this (for instance, I’m applying to internships: a big component of my cover letter is revealing to the employer me as a person, not just what I can do). An online forum can’t.
Brown already accepts the cream of the crop. We can’t really get any more creamy, because we DO attract (and I believe admit) a niche group of students. Not NECESSARILY the highest scoring, but the best for making our school what it is. We shouldn’t WANT the “highest-scoring” or “most-extracurricularly-excellent” students, and from what I’ve found, MOST people who I know who aren’t here, who applied to Brown and other peer schools, getting into say Princeton had only a moderate correlation on whether they got in here. Because we’re looking for something DIFFERENT than Princeton is, and we have enough applicants that we should be able to pretty much cherry-pick only those applicants with our most sought-after qualities (and yes, there is some of overlap in most-sought-after qualities… but not completely).
A chance thread is nothing more than an effort to either get people to give you a pat on the back or, if you’re masochistic, to shoot you down and deride you. I have no problem in people asking “what type of student does Brown attract, what type of activities/scores did people who got in have,” etc., but ALL of those have already been answered, or are EASILY viewable on sites like collegeboard (or now, cc). Asking for a chance here is highly unlikely to actually help you, it just gives us a hint that you don’t have confidence in your own capabilities. You can’t do anything to change your stats now, and the only chance you’ll ever have is if you apply (which is where the admiration SHOULD be coming from: getting in is just a chance reward for going through with an admirable effort).