<p>It’s not the “rare” EC.<br>
It’s the set of ECs that show all the things they need to see, then, maybe, one or two last bits can get them excited.</p>
<p>2300 plus rodeo clown won’t cut it. Has to be something in between, relevant . </p>
<p>Cob, when you quote western history, on some issues I query dh and get back a wellllll… tho I like the Hun humor-</p>
<p>thumper1, you are welcome to use the “ignore” function for my posts. Really, I have no problem with it.</p>
<p>If everyone on the thread ignored me, I would probably detect it soon enough, and stop posting!</p>
<p>You may wonder why I care about what MIT does, if I am not all that interested in them, really. (Or you may be so fed up with my posts that you do not wonder at all.) Well, if anyone is wondering, the reasons are two-fold:</p>
<p>1) Trends spread in academe. Other institutions often do follow the lead of the “top” schools, in their own contexts.</p>
<p>2) I’d like to see that everyone receives a balanced reading of the application, just in the interests of fairness. If a student applies to MIT with 2400/2400/4.0 UW/and (say) 10 AP’s, I’d like to feel confident that the reader does not run down the train of thought in the post that leads in short order to the idea that “often” such a student “knew how to grind, but brought nothing else to the table.” That blog post is “old history,” but it is still one of five (or so) linked now from the MIT Admissions web site, in the entry on the selection process: [The</a> Selection Process | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/apply/process/selection]The”>Our selection process | MIT Admissions)
So I assume that still stands. The highlighted blog posts haven’t changed recently, to the best of my knowledge.
I don’t disagree with all of the blog post that is linked–but I think it could use some editing.</p>
<p>That’s good, lookingforward, #1601. I think the publicity for some of the rare EC’s tends distort people’s impressions of the admissions process (at least some people’s impressions). </p>
<p>I am not more interested in someone who breeds Affenpinschers than in someone who breeds Golden Retrievers (despite the Westminster records of the two breeds), nor more interested in someone who plays the Flugelhorn than in someone who plays the violin.</p>
<p>
Not true. When HP removed EA, no one followed suit. HP came back to the dark side, as a matter of fact.</p>
<p>Now, I am going to try to figure out what you wrote in the second point:
What does this mean? Are you trying to say that you want to make sure if a student has perfect stats, adcoms should not assume that the student is just a grind and would bring nothing else to MIT? If that’s what you are saying, how do you think you are going to make sure adcoms wouldn’t have such a bias? By posting on CC over and over again? MIT adcoms, just like all other adcoms, are going to do what is necessary to get the kind of class they want, and it is not going to be 100% of students with 2400/4.0, 80% males/asians.</p>
<p>MIT </p>
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</p>
<p>[Applying</a> Sideways | MIT Admissions](<a href=“http://mitadmissions.org/blogs/entry/applying_sideways]Applying”>Applying Sideways | MIT Admissions)</p>
<p>What is wrong with this? So much I don’t even know where to begin. </p>
<p>First, I hesitate to even copy and post it here. MIT is “outing” a candidate and that candidate’s admissions results in what I firmly believe should be a confidential process. I thought all candidates were entitled to privacy regarding where they were applying and admission results?</p>
<p>We don’t really think there is more than one candidate who built a nuclear reactor, do we?</p>
<p>I assume this is a real candidate - though I would be absolutely delighted to learn it is a poetic exaggeration. It isn’t my kid. If it was my kid, that post would not still be up. I have been protecting my children from this sort of media “attention” practically since they were infants.</p>
<p>Second- they are bragging about not taking the candidate. What’s up with that? Again - unprofessional and hurtful to the student. And for what reason? To make others feel maybe they can be “better” than someone who a freakin’ nuclear reactor in the admissions arms race?</p>
<p>Unprofessional, hurtful, no purpose - in my opinion. I am concerned about someone who would write and publish such a post judging any of our children.</p>
<p>Adding:</p>
<p>PLEASE let’s just confine comments to whether or not you agree with posting the information, NOT whether something was “wrong” with the candidate. That is really not the point.</p>
<p>Alh
I am not new to the thread. It just took a direction that made me uncomfortable and then it just got sorta strange. Helpful for insomnia though :)</p>
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</p>
<p>It was a new team last year (2nd year this year), and the teacher/coach was not always present (they let parents & mentors man the lab sometimes). It is a little “Lord of the Flies” – the coach is not an engineer, so unless it comes to blows or loud shouting, she doesn’t get too involved except to make sure safety rules were being followed and tracking team finances. And there was a lot of chaos, as one might expect in a first year team (no designated sub-teams, like a bunch of little kids chasing a soccer ball). </p>
<p>My D did get her hands in sometimes, especially near the end of the first year. But she really wanted to help the team, so tried to do what she was asked to do. But after a little while she realized that the boys weren’t being asked to do the same things – and by then she had been tagged as the “fundraising/marketing” kid. Eventually (about 2 weeks before the end of build, so 2/3 of the way through the season) she told the mom that the other kids also had to take turns at those tasks, and she wanted to work on the build. And she would just start doing stuff – fortunately the boy who is the best “engineer” (the one who I would say is her equal in smarts & admissions criteria) is her friend, and she talked a bit with him. He started giving her more tasks to do, and eventually she developed some expertise on certain components. So when they broke or needed work, she just stepped in (literally stepped in front sometimes!) with the right tool and went to work. She would just ignore the boys who were being jerks. She said she learned that keeping the essential tool in her hand between tasks (so the boys couldn’t grab it and take over the job) was important!</p>
<p>This year they had “sub teams”, and she made sure she got on the design & build teams. She also took lead on the awards team (mostly essay writing), so the team could benefit from her writing skills. But… the boy who knew the CAD software and led the design team really didn’t want to share that work. When the pressure was on, he insisted he had to do it himself. So she trained on the software, but didn’t really get to do much design. Build was better this year, I saw her plenty of days cutting and measuring, doing math on the whiteboard to calculate loads & balance points, and wielding a wrench. The boys would still occasionally try to take a tool away and take over a task she was working on, but she wasn’t having that this year. :)</p>
<p>"I’m off to ride my unicycle now. "</p>
<p>What an impressive EC. If only she had applied some where, any where.</p>
<p>It was a well written blog. alh is twisting it to make it what it isn’t. Chris P said:
Contrary to what alh is saying, Chris P is saying that one doesn’t need to build a nuclear reactor to get into MIT, not that one needs to do one up over this rejected candidate in order to get in.<br>
Chris P also said:
What’s wrong with that? Isn’t this what we have been telling our kids?</p>
<p>I am very good at sleuthing, but I don’t think I could find this student who was rejected by MIT. If you could, my hat off to you. I know what PII (Personally identifiable information) is, what Chris wrote didn’t come anywhere close.</p>
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</p>
<p>I am the person who brought up that I think having a “pushy, arrogant, aggressive, insincere, self-promoter” type personality helps in elite admissions. That’s my own opinion. However, I also said that if you were going to measure social skills, that one should at least do it by rewarding something that actually requires someone to like you–and I used being class president as an example of this. A person who makes up BS extracurriculars, who inflates their own accomplishments, or who is a brown-noser is typically resented by their peers. (I concede that an enthusiastic student may be unfairly labeled as a brown-noser, though.)</p>
<p>You disagreed that being class president would be a measure of being a likable person. I didn’t go to a normal high school, so I didn’t think about the scenario where a cliquish “Mean Girls” personality would be elected president. However, regardless, at least <em>someone</em> has to like you to elect you president.</p>
<p>So anyway, clearly I did not characterize extraverted, class president types as arrogant self-promoters, and I am not aware of anyone else making this association.</p>
<p>oldfort, I don’t understand the part of your post #1604 where you say that MIT does not want the kind of class that is
I do understand why they would not want a class that is 80% male. Having been in even more imbalanced classes through much of my college education, I still think that an 80% male class at MIT would be a bit too tilted. </p>
<p>However, according to the SAT data tables for 2012 (at <a href=“http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2012.pdf[/url]”>http://media.collegeboard.com/digitalServices/pdf/research/SAT-Percentile-Ranks-Composite-CR-M-W-2012.pdf</a>) there were 220 males with 2400 SAT I single sitting scores, and 140 females, in the cohort bound for college in fall 2012, giving an 11:7 ratio, not 4:1. I would guess that if you threw in the 4.0 UW GPA, the male:female ratio might decline a bit further (totally admitting to stereotype about the GPAs of young women–could be incorrect).</p>
<p>Their classes are considerably larger than 220+140, anyway, and quite a few of those students want to go elsewhere. (I don’t know whether College Board tracks superscores. It would be interesting–in a kind of masochistic way–to know how much larger than 360 the 2400 group grows if you superscore.)</p>
<p>I am not so certain that posting in a forum will have no influence at MIT. Maybe so. Maybe the initial reaction in Admissions will be to close ranks around the claim that their process “ensures that every decision is correct, in the context of the applicant pool” (their words). But maybe not. In any event, I am sure that Stu Schmill is up to his ears in work right now, and not doing much else (including reading any letter I might send him in the current time frame).</p>
<p>The one element of good that I might be doing on the forum is shedding some light on the admissions practices, for those who have been previously unaware. </p>
<p>Not me personally, but overall CC has been enormously helpful in illuminating admissions practices, for those of us who live in regions where HYPSM+C take only a small number of students each year, so no patterns whatever are discernible. Of course, the posts have to be taken with a grain of salt. Some may be entirely phony. But there are a lot of reports built up over the years, so that the “bad data points” are probably not overwhelming.</p>
<p>
You seem to want desperately to believe that these girls will eventually prove themselves to have been unworthy of their MIT educations. Science, mathematics, engineering comprises a HUGE enterprise. There are hundreds of thousands of people around the world working at various facets - engineers, researchers, teachers, etc. </p>
<p>The idea that breakthroughs are only made by some mad scientist hovering over a beaker in his lone laboratory is naive. More and more, research is done in collaboration with other researchers often in distant parts of the world. The “limits” are pushed in a million directions by the combined efforts of many, many people. And the relative importance of any given pusher may not be all that clear. And “pushing the limits” is not the only measure of success or contribution. It is, frankly, unlikely that you will know the career outcomes of all these students and whether or not they contributed in some small or large way to their fields.</p>
<p>"If you do well in school, you will be smart and prepared for an MIT education. If you are nice, then your letters of recommendation will convince us that MIT would be a wildly better place with you on campus. And if you pursue your passion, you will have developed a love for and skill at something that helps distinguish you from other applications - something that is your “hook.” "</p>
<p>Most people miss this part. This would apply across board to any school with holisitic admissions. You got your grades, your scores and that is like one third of your app. What have you done with your ECs, does your teacher know you exist beyond the 93+ you scored to get an A, were your essays overly braggy without content? There is 2/3rd of your application practically up in the air.</p>
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</p>
<p>This is just obfuscation. </p>
<p>People who have clearly outperformed others in classes and in academic ECs are more likely to be better contributors in collaborative scientific endeavors in the future.</p>
<p>QM:
No, you are not shedding any light on the admission practices. Not even with all of those numbers thrown in because they do not add anything to the conversation. This is what people are saying to you, when someone says “80% male/asians,” they are not saying that is what it is (% wise), they are just making a poin. It could have been 60, 70 or 90. There was no need to post:
The point is that MIT, Caltech, Cornell Engineering do not want 80% males or asians, they want a balanced class.</p>
<p>This kind of like when someone says, “It has been raining everyday.” Then someone says, “Well, actually it is not really true because 3 days ago, we did have a sunny afternoon, and 10 days ago it didn’t rain either.” This is just wouldn’t be a normal conversation.</p>
<p>LF: I wonder if you found the MIT blog post unprofessional? Are students entitled to believe the fact they apply to a school, and the contents of their application, will remain confidential? Do you agree with oldfort that I am twisting this? Thanks in advance.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl said her daughter’s EC was mentioned by her college adcom. What’s wrong with that? Adcoms say this all the time, “We don’t admit all students with 2400 SAT scores.” How is that different than, “We don’t admit all students who have build a nuclear reactor.” </p>
<p>Chris P was trying to calm the students down by telling them that they just need to continue to do what they have been doing, but don’t do anything to just try to get into MIT (Caltech, Harvar, or any school name you want to stick in there). On top of that, if you don’t get into MIT, you could still be happy some where else.</p>
<p>Perfect message for all seniors.</p>
<p>oldfort, it’s understandable to desire a “balanced” class and I don’t think anyone here argues with this. It’s that “balanced” is not very well defined and varies by school. For example, 30% of applications to MIT are from females. Assuming male and female pools are similar in abilities, the ratio of admitted would be 30-70 (not 1-4). Now, I think it’s a good idea to increase girls’ chances for 2 reasons: having more females on campus would beneficial and some AA for girls is needed in this society where girls are under represented in STEM. But why have a fixation on 50-50 gender balance? Is it because of the proportions in the population? Then why not create artificial ratios based on racial/ethnic proportions in populations? How about balancing hair colors, height etc?</p>
<p>I work with techies all day long, and most of them graduated from those top tier schools. I tell them don’t try to out tech me or use jargons with me. They need to be able to communicate very clearly to me on what they are doing. By using a lot of mumble jumble words is not going to make them sound more intelligent or convincing. I see this is what people have been trying to do here. </p>
<p>College admission at many top tier schools is holistic. They all want to look beyond someone’s test scores and GPA. Some schools may want to attract certain type of students, and if you happen to fit that profile then you’ll have a hook. 5-7 years ago, someone donated a lot of money to Princeton to build a performing arts building. One stipulation was for Princeton to attract more performing arts students. For few years after that, they made a great effort to attract more of those students. Now, if you had that piece of information and you were a dancer then maybe you would have a better chance at Princeton than Yale.</p>
<p>I wonder if the rejected student who built the nuclear reactor in his family’s garage happens to be the current leader of a certain East Asian country well-known for “interesting” international headlines and irking even its closest allies. </p>
<p>:D</p>