<p>When I was in middle school, there was this awesome game I played (until my parents thought it was distracting me from school) called [SimTower[/url</a>]. The object of the game, essentially, was to build as big and as tall a commercial tower as you could with the goal of reaching 5-Star status. Doing this meant meeting certain preset conditions - reaching 100 floors, for example. As you built, you used different types of rents/sales/ammenities/services to create revenue and attract visitors and tenants. There were many, many ways to do this. You could focus on leasing office space, or put in lots of hotel rooms, or shops, or restaurants.</p>
<p>But at a certain point, you needed to have some combination of all the different pieces to reach 5 Stars.</p>
<p>Gaining admittance is kind of like playing SimTower (only generally less fun). Your application needs to reach a certain point of strength for that admittance. Your academics are the foundation; the stronger your academics are, the closer you are to 5-Stars right from the beginning. If you follow the analogy, a solid student with good testing might be have 2.5 Stars: 40 floors already in place, a couple good restaurants already in the lobby… A valedictorian with perfect ACTs would be 4-Stars, looking for the fifth: 80 floors, a ballroom, skylounge on the 50th floor. (No one is admitted based on academics alone). Your essays/recs/extracurriculars/perspective/interests/background are how you build up your application the rest of the way. Those are the pieces that allow you to layer in the rest of who you are.</p>
<p>There are, however, some students who apply and who cannot convince us that they are prepared to be successful at Tufts. Fortunately, this is a really small portion of the applicant pool. Unless we come across information that allows us to look at academics a different way, we will not admit those students regardless of the essays. No one benefits if we admit students who are not prepared for the Tufts classrooms. </p>
<p>I was mostly just excited to talk about SimTower, so I ask: did this make any sense?
[url=<a href=“http://youtube.com/watch?v=wmyvW26hzGU]YouTube”>http://youtube.com/watch?v=wmyvW26hzGU]YouTube</a> - Sim Tower (PC) preview](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/SimTower]SimTower[/url”>SimTower - Wikipedia) Yay for SimTower videos!</p>