<p>You mean people skills? The kind of skills which couldn’t be determined by SAT or GPA?</p>
<p>And can’t be measured by the name of the college on the diploma.</p>
<p>My kids are both engineers. S1 on the consulting/business side. S2 will join a science and technology consulting firm when he graduates in May. I think engineers with good people skills ae probably in demand.S2 was an underachiever in HS,despite 700+ math SAT’s. He is at a state school. The val with perfect SAT’s ended up at at an HYP school. They both ended up at the same firm last summer for an internship. Small world! The firm recruits from all over-MIT,Ivies, as well as state schools. They just look for the “best and brightest”, which can be found all over, not just MIT!</p>
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<p>Why don’t they say so? Because that is not what they have done for a long time. Despiite the notable efforts to disseminate “information” as one of the first schools to adopt the web to lift the corner of the arcane world of admissions, the information has always been somehow misleading. The latest efforts, and especially the inclusion of the amateurish blogs are more TMZ-like than really helpful. </p>
<p>In the case of MIT, they will not only tell whom they will accept but also not tell you whom they might accept. And they will, as the defrocked past fearless leader did show plainly misrepresented what a candidate should bring to the table. </p>
<p>Examples? At the same time as she was still polishing her resume, she went on tirades about the need for the kids to recapture their summers and stop building r</p>
<p>DD is in a PhD program in history. I have a PhD in English and would not fare well in her classes. Of course reading the material presents no problem for me. The problem arises because I don’t see the world through the lens required by current historiography which can vary some but is also somewhat normative. For one thing I am not trained in doing primary research which is necessary in current history.</p>
<p>My S is in a grad program in Art History where I would also flounder. I am not trained to do formal analysis of an art work.</p>
<p>In English discussions of the relationship of language to theme are difficult for non- specialists to master, the neither of my kids, who have mastered their disciplines, have the creative writing skills, or general writing skills, to master literary criticism. Literary essays involve more creativity than their fields.</p>
<p>That’s why so many literary critics are also creative writers in their own right.</p>
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<p>Other than class discussion, what is the point of being “memorable” in the classroom? I wouldn’t bring up my other interests while I was in class or who I was dating. In the context of the classroom, my goal was to do memorable work. </p>
<p>When I was on the playing field or something else, my goal was to do that well.</p>
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<p>Speaking as a history major, not necessarily. One major stumbling block many undergrad students have when they start taking college-level history courses is how with the exception of gut courses for non-majors or weak history programs geared towards providing Ged Ed fulfillment courses where multiple choice tests are commonplace, memorizing and regurgitating facts will no longer be enough to excel with an A-level or even B-level grades. </p>
<p>Learning how to critically examine, evaluate, analyze, and interpret different and sometimes conflicting sources and to synthesize them into a coherent essay of some kind becomes much more important. There’s also the matter of learning how philosophical, literary, and social science theories have been/could be used to facilitate all of that. Emphasis of all that only increases in grad school. </p>
<p>It’s not too different from students who breezed through HS STEM courses solely by memorizing formulas only to find that no longer works in undergrad STEM courses or in the case in my two intro CS courses for majors, thought knowing their way around the PC/Mac, running programs, taking a PC/Mac applications class in HS, etc was adequate preparation for excelling in a intro CS course teaching a programming language like C++. </p>
<p>Several undergrad classmates found that out the hard way when they started receiving their first -B/Cs in the intro and intermediate history classes at my college and heard similar accounts from HS classmates with other classmates. </p>
<p>Even the ones who took APUSH and scored 5s didn’t necessarily fare any better considering an older classmate who bypassed our college’s USH courses ended up struggling in his intermediate/upper-level core major courses in a related field because they all assumed deep understanding/knowledge from the college’s USH courses. Ended up providing him a quick crash review course on the material and concepts covered to plug whatever gaps he had.</p>
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<p>Out of curiosity, have you considered your view of them being “robotic clones” is coming from the perspective heavily colored by popular American culture which tends to value extroverted social butterflies and aggressive self-promoters over more introverted academic intellectuals popularly known as Nerds?</p>
<p>For some reason, you seem to have some serious disdain…possibly even some hatred against Nerds. What harm did the Nerds do to you during HS/college/work?</p>
<p>Re: robotic clones; this def of robotic works for me: having the characteristics of a robot <performs with="" robotic="" consistency="">. And clone: One that copies or closely resembles another, as in appearance or function: “filled with business-school clones in gray and blue suits”</performs></p>
<p>Agree with cobrat. I am a wooly headed poet type who happens to do very well on standardized tests. I recoil from stereotyping any group of students as less human and less humane than others. To paraphrase Shakespeare’s Shylock: cut them to they not bleed? People whose success can be demonstrated by numbers will feel just as devastated as people whose success is demonstrated by description.</p>
<p>Where does MIT mock students on the link? I do see they bullet: ability to prioritize balance . Work hard, play hard. Not just the former.</p>
<p>Nerds… they laugh at Schrodinger’s cat jokes. They trade mp3s by embedding them into .doc. Divide by zero? So funny! Some know all the class designation acronyms for Federation ships. They read linear algebra to relax: Given [Di] at ti and [D0] at t0, we can define the relative displacement [D0i] = [Di][D0]−1 which represents a displacement from the reference configuration [D0] expressed in the fixed frame. The kinematics equations of a relative displacement take the form [Di(Δθi)] = [T(Δθi1, S1)][T(Δθi2, S2)] . . . [T(Δθim, Sm)],(1) where Sj are the Pl</p>
<p>The following is one example of how some MIT aspirants have a hard time handling rejection:</p>
<p>[North</a> Korea declares 1953 armistice invalid - CNN.com](<a href=“http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/11/world/asia/north-korea-armistice/index.html]North”>http://www.cnn.com/2013/03/11/world/asia/north-korea-armistice/index.html)</p>
<p>:D</p>
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<p>Sorry, I wasn’t clear. They weren’t memorable personality-wise outside the classroom. I might have not been memorable to them, either. Oh well. I prefer people who have some spark of personality - which is entirely consistent with being either introverted and preferring one-or-one or small group interaction, or extraverted and preferring constant company of others - and it seems like MIT does as well. Seems like being personality-less is the kiss of death for most elite colleges, and I’m not sure why so many feel uncomfortable with that.</p>
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<p>I don’t recall saying that there was anything wrong with being like this - but an entire campus like this might be a bit much.</p>
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<p>Because whether someone has a “spark of personality” or not depends so much on the individual eye of the beholder that it’s extremely arbitrary and open to being heavily influenced by one’s prejudicial outlooks, socializing influences, and background. </p>
<p>Especially considering such adjectives have been used in recent history by elite private college senior admins here in the US as means to justify limiting applicants from immigrant, ethnic, and religious groups in favor of those they considered having such a “spark of personality”…wealthy well-connected WASPs.</p>
<p>Oh, PUH-LEAZE!</p>
<p>Cobrat, </p>
<p>IMO, you are being offensive yourself. The idea that private college administrators are favoring “wealthy well-connected WASPs” is every bit as bigoted as the statements you protest and just plain silly. Do private college administrators favor wealthy, well-connected people? Yes, they do. Do they care whether they are WASP, Jewish, Catholic, African-American or …gasp…Asian? Not in the least.</p>
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<p>A drawback of holistic admissions is that if applicants believe your statement above, the 90% of applicants who are rejected may interpret the rejection as a judgement by important people that they have no personality. Under a system I would favor, where most of the weight would go to grades and standardized tests with high ceilings, their rejection would be less personal, simply an indication that they had slightly lower grades and test scores than the accepted students.</p>
<p>Steve Sailer has written about this in[“Holistic” college admissions](<a href=“Steve Sailer: iSteve: "Holistic" college admissions”>http://isteve.blogspot.com/2011/05/holistic-college-admissions.html</a>) :</p>
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<p>People are “ranked holistically” all the time. If I go to a bar to meet someone (well, I haven’t in 25 years, but you know what I mean), I didn’t pull out a spreadsheet and assign points to the guys based on their height, weight, age, IQ, earning power, body, and how many times they made me laugh. I evaluate them holistically and they did the same to me. The same goes for choosing friends. I know who on here I think is interesting and who on here I think is boring, who is amusing and who is annoying, who is pretentious and who would be fun to have a drink with. I evaluated that holistically as well. We all make many decisions holistically in life. No one says the people I choose are “better” in the absolute than the people I don’t. They’re just better for me. Likewise, if someone is stupid enough to believe that not being chosen by MIT (etc) means that they “aren’t as good” (as in worthwhile) as other people – that’s their own lack of intelligence kicking in, because that’s not what is being said, by MIT or by anyone else.</p>
<p>Not to worry. It does work.</p>