I think it's odd to slice the bologna so thin. At any 10,000 foot level, it's all the same.
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Touche. But, hey, this is CC - methink I am allowed to engage in some navel gazing. :o)
At any rate, I do stand by my comment (analogous to my believe that there is definitely a material difference between having $10M in net worth .vs. $100M) :o)
QM, the very fact that you struggle with this …
Having the passion for Old Wheezy and being self taught is great. Saying you plan to play Old Wheezy at 4 am isn’t.
Winning the Garlic Growers of America cooking contest is great. Saying you plan to cook it in the dorm for hours isn’t.
Please don’t make this difficult. This is obvious.
“Classmates know because they have been with these kids for years. They don’t necessarily pick the smartest or best looking or whatever, but they know who will be successful. Admissions officers unfortunately do not have that same insider info.”
That’s a showy, extroverted mindset. Far better to fly under the radar and be successful and no one else needs to know.
Thats like asking 18 yos to identify who among their classmates comes from the most money. Who in their right mind would ever want to have that be publicly known? I bet the classmates would get it all wrong, since they’d identify the splashy, designer clad, throw-money-around type when in fact the “winner” could be the kid in the modest hand-me-downs who has a trust fund that you just don’t know about nor do you need to.
Silly to suggest the hs peers’ “inside look,” based on their one hs setting and students, trumps the AO insider knowledge of what they need, what works, what has worked over long periods of time, since those hs kids were still figuring out what classes to take, what clubs to join, whether they preferred soccer or track.
Most hs kids only know what they know, courtesy of family, the particular school system and community views. Small box. Nothing against hs kids. But they are high school kids. If they are good, their time will come. And it will come in many different ways. Not always money and power, the bigger house, the ego.
This thread is about the AND. Encourage your kids to go for more than what wins standing in the little hs scene. Life lesson.
I have to be honest, I kind of take a dim view of people who were “super successful” in high school terms. It feels shallow and popularity-contest-based to me, to curry favor with all these people that you’ll never see again.
I’m just trying to understand the statement, "“You can be passionate about things that run counter to the overall a college is looking for, maybe reflect isolation, self-limits, judgment, etc.” in the current admissions context.
This statement seems to me to reflect negativity about multiple applicants. Presumably there would be no point in making it, if there weren’t applicants who are not admitted because they strike the admissions committee as examples of running counter to what the college is looking for. If there was a single such applicant in recent years, there would similarly not be much point.
How many applicants to the top 100 universities does anyone imagine have mentioned membership in the KKK on their application, in the past 20 years? I’m guessing zero. So this is not the group that causing lookingforward to make negative commentary. Ditto for the Little-Rascals-inspired “He-Man Woman Haters Club.” No one is going to mention that on an application to a top college, even if he is a de facto member. Similarly, I don’t think it is membership in “Students for the Candidate with Really Weird Hair” that is tripping anyone up. If there is a student who participates in big game hunting, he would have to be really clueless to mention it on a college application this coming season, Teddy Roosevelt and Ernest Hemingway notwithstanding.
Would an applicant to Bowdoin mention drag-racing? Would an applicant to Swarthmore mention going to raves?
Candidates A, B, and C were obviously over-the-top examples, but nobody in reality is writing that type of thing.
I don’t need a specific example, or anything that would be personally identifying, but there’s just a level of really not liking some applicants that seems to me to be reflected in the statement quoted at the top of this post.
Probably “I read CC and I like QuantMech’s opinions” would be an application trasher.
In another recent post, lookingforward commented, “Spend a little time reading apps and see how little too many kids know abut the values of a particular college, what makes a match, or what sort of essay expresses what the colleges need to see in a candidate, what makes one a more natural likely than another. It simply isn’t popularity, whose peers have faith in him or her.”
Not to be impolite, but this is useless advice to most of the parents who might come here looking for good advice to give their children. Most people do not have access to multiple applications to top schools.
I think it would be really helpful to a lot of people on the forum if lookingforward were to share some of the insider information about what the colleges “need to see,” and what (within the realm of reality) runs counter to what they are looking for.
For example, I found a recent post of lookingforward’s (I am pretty sure I have the attribution right) to be potentially very helpful to students and their parents. It was suggested that students who had participated in a research project should not write in their essays about how much their research mentors liked them (yeah, got that, makes sense, I suppose some ill-advised students might do that), nor about the paper they had published as a result. I would not have guessed that it was bad to write about a paper. Perhaps it was a tone of bragging that undermined the application, or commentary on the high prestige of the journal in which it was published? (One of the top 5 journals in the world!!!?)
As far as showing colleges what they “need to see,” I imagine that some students wrongly imagine that parts of their records speak for themselves, when they don’t actually do that. (I am not just talking stats, nor Pie Club.)
More clarification would be helpful.
FHS, QM, I am not making negative commentary, nor did I previously advocate kids have to be “movers and shakers.” I simply warned (which most grasped) that this isn’t about raw application of the word “passion,” as usually happens on CC. As in, “Have a passion, any passion.” I suspect you want me to cite examples of my own or make some crack about robots, which I will not. I don’t want to suggest some kid’s beloved hobby is mush; it should be enough to suggest they make sure including note of it is relevant to their review.
Enough about me, QM. Too often, I have to explain your impressions are not what I said or repeat the context. The comment you now quote was in response to a poster who suggested hs kids know better whom to send to an elite than adcoms.
I also did not say, “students who had participated in a research project should not write in their essays about how much their research mentors liked them.” The full was this: Just tell him to let that interest/fascination come through. I’ve seen essays about research where you can feel their excitement, how they learned even through failure or long, boring timelines in the lab, or whatever it is. Contrast that to the kid who just wants you to know his lead loves him or how he got his name on some paper.
Enough about me and how I perpetually confuse you. Please and thank you.
The quotation at the top of post #125 does really seem negative to me. Isolation, self-limits, judgment (presumably poor) seem awfully negative.
Also, I don’t read application essays, but a student who wrote about long boring timelines in the lab would raise a red flag with me. It would indicate to me that the student wasn’t thinking hard enough.
Some of you are overthinking this. It’s not necessarily helpful or illuminative to analyze it to death.
About lookingforward’s posts: A number of the posts say that just because something is impressive in the local high school context, that doesn’t mean that it counts as an “AND” outside of the local high school context.
This is quite sensible. For example, a student who is the President of the National Honor Society at the high school is probably not going to get much traction out of that in top college admissions. I’m not sure that’s ever all that impressive within the high school context, though.
There are some things that are clearly not helpful to college applications: e.g., “I spent a week in [impoverished region] painting rooms in a school and now I have a much better perspective on American materialism and I know that people are people wherever they live.” I would guess that the same experience could be reworked into an essay that works–but perhaps there have been so many essays of this type that there is nothing of that ilk left that would work well.
Jane takes cat videos and posts them on the internet. Janet is a nature photographer who focuses on Felis domesticus, and uses web resources to make her photos broadly available. Maybe both are out of the running?
Hey, overthinking, epiphany–it’s what I do. 
@QuantMech It seems like you are looking for the NAND rather than the AND…
Our HS rarely sends kids to the elites. One URM, class president, gifted, got into HYP. Besides all the regular GPAs and ECs, he clearly was respected. Being voted President of Homors society, doing all the morning announcements, and being revoted into that position may help a little. Being the first freshman to make it into the Academic Team as a principal player, helps a little too. Being the first to go to state competitions in math/science, also sets one Apart. Being the first Presidential scholar from the HS was enough to boost one young man into HYP.
The young man I know who entered the Naval academy got involved with naval group in MS. He played. Sports in HS, was NMF, and one of the nicest people I’ve known. He didn’t just throw his hat into the rink, his involvement with naval academy and interest in flying began at a tender age.
OK. Fair enough, QM.
One of my daughter’s lifelong best friends comes from a high achieving family. Both she and her sister hit all the benchmarks with gpa, scores, etc. they are two years apart in school. The older went to a women’s college, but was rejected at the ivies she applied to. The sister applied to several ivies, including the two her sister had applied to. She got in everywhere she applied. Her “and” was that she had acted with success all through her childhood. She was not a child star, but had a solid resume of recognizable roles.
"I’m just trying to understand the statement, "“You can be passionate about things that run counter to the overall a college is looking for, maybe reflect isolation, self-limits, judgment, etc.” in the current admissions context.
This statement seems to me to reflect negativity about multiple applicants."
The statement means exactly what it says, QM. It doesn’t really need explanation. Please don’t be so literal.
I went to Harvard, so I have a pretty good idea about what it offered and still offers. I felt that I had a good, but not great experience there. If I had it to do over again, I’d do better, but I still don’t know if I really have or had the personality to really take advantage of it. That said, I made my oldest apply to Harvard - not because I thought it was the best fit for him - we all agreed he was a more MIT sort of guy, but because I thought Harvard would like him and might even be good for him, if he took advantage of it. In the end MIT rejected him, Harvard accepted him and he liked it much more than he expected to when he visited, but he liked Carnegie Mellon better, and we had no problem with his decision. He never contorted himself to get in. His essay was essentially “I’m a computer nerd, I’d rather write a program than an essay.” By the way, he did submit the list of books he’d read in the last year as his optional “essay”. It was a huge list - over a hundred - some were re-reads - mostly sci-fi, fantasy and then lots of math theory and computer science stuff.
But @epiphany 's post #89 - I don’t get the obsession either. I think most of the Harvard wannabes don’t really get what is good about Harvard at all. And I am a very strong believer in blossom where you are planted. All that said, my only desire for my oldest was for him to go somewhere for college where he would no longer be the smartest person in the room. He got that at CMU’s computer science school and I think he would have gotten it at Harvard too. At his safeties, he’d have gotten an excellent education, but he wouldn’t have been stretched the way I think he needed to be.
My kid didn’t write about video gaming, but an award he won for doing the programming for a Civ 4 Mod was on his list of achievements.
@mathmom, I agree with you, especially comments about CMU. My oldest D is there and and while it is very tough, she needed to be there to have her mind stretched and to think about problems in a whole different way. CMU is masterful at that. She has really blossomed where she was planted and is not the smartest person in the room, but rather one among many many smart kids!
@mathmom, I don’t get the obsession either, and I agree that “most of the Harvard wannabes don’t really get what is good about Harvard at all”.
I grew up as a Harvard brat and had plenty of exposure to it. My cousin spent 10 years there (undergrad and PhD) and did ok - he basically found his niche and thrived in it. My brother went there, and had a pretty unhappy experience - he was plenty bright enough for Harvard, but not competitive enough to be happy in that environment, even though he did fine academically. I turned Harvard down for Stanford undergrad but went there for medical school, and wasn’t particularly happy. It’s an amazing collection of resources and talent, and I found lots of tremendous people there, but I never found it a particularly appealing environment, and as an interdisciplinary person I felt that it wasn’t nearly as easy to cross boundaries at Harvard compared with either Stanford or UChicago, both of which were much better fits for me personally.
I think it’s great to be able to blossom where you’re planted and to be able to succeed in different environments; but it’s also wonderful to find fertile soil which really encourages growth.