How anti hook is this?

BrownshoeLawson
Thu, 06 Jan 2022 00:12:35 +0000

Jason10:

How much harder is it to get admitted to a top school as an asian male from the bay area going for cs?

I wonder if this might be a ■■■■■■■■ question, and note many of the responses quickly went to ‘race’, and I’m not sure either the implication in OPs question, nor the answers, are justified or appropriate.

FWIW, I think the economist for Harvard in the SFFA case pointed out that the admissions rates to Harvard for Asians from your region was higher than what a model might have suggested (worth double-checking), so I’m not certain it is accurate to suggest that being “Asian” is somehow a disadvantage as you imply, or “anti hook,” given where you are applying from, and for a school like Harvard.

That having been said, given your location it is likely that you are in a very competitive subset of people applying to top colleges from that area - males (gender association with CS) from the Bay Area (regional association with CS intent) seeking to major in CS. By “competitive” I mean “likely to have many other people who have high academic scores and demonstrated interest in the field.” I’m not sure there is a practical difference between CS and “electrical engineering” in terms of the profile of applicant.

I also suspect that many of these candidates, regardless of race, will “look alike” - meaning nothing to do with culture or race, but that they have a tendency to focus their ECs on things like “math club” or “lab internship” or “robotics,” maybe aren’t as likely to be Class President or multiple-team-sport Captain, and so if you present a similar profile of activities, it will be even harder to “stand out.” Any relative advantage might be derived from having a different kid of story (hardship/first gen), or say a completely different kind of EC interest (lead in your school musicals? winner in Young Arts competition? anything less typically correlated to engineering applicants generally, etc.).

If your profile (again, not race) looks like so many others… then it becomes very difficult to stand out. There are colleges that are more likely to value this more narrow set of interests and activities, perhaps an MIT or Carnegie Mellon (both fabulous schools), vs those who are seeking to have a student body profile that is not as heavily skewed towards engineering/applied sciences (including Harvard or even Princeton).