Keeping it simple - as well as pithy and interesting - is good advice. Not because of adcom intelligence/capabilities, though but more because, given the increasing number of applications, you only usually have a few minutes to hook the readers of your application. Hemingway’s style was actually pretty minimalistic. 
I am sorry you are feeling disappointed with your result. UMich is one fantastic school, hopefully you will come to appreciate that and not dwell too heavily on the rejections!
@Publisher , mea culpa, I was typing from memory, which was lazy, as I have the book a few feet away.
You have one acceptance to a fantastic college and you can only attend one college. If you get no other acceptances will be time to embrace the school that has embraced you. If you want to feel badly for yourself for a day or two that is your prerogative, but also take a moment to think about how many people would give just about anything to be in your position. Go forth and make the most of your opportunity.
I want to chime in as well to say that UMich is a fabulous school. Congratulations!
Northwestern takes a huge percent of their class Early Decision. And, they care about interest and connection with the school.
I’m curious, did you visit every school? Did you show interest? I’m baffled too, but also tend to think it’s yield protection. Seems unfair to top students who worked so hard.
Congratulations, you just insulted an entire profession. The AOs I know are all dedicated professionals who have degrees from the very institutions people here would kill to get into. Keep in mind, undergraduate admissions are very different than graduate admissions, and that admissions offices are very different than they were 30 years ago. The reason simple, straightforward prose is recommended is that unless you are a truly gifted writer, anything else can go sideways pretty quickly.
Several decades ago, I applied to three Ivies and I got in with full financial aid. ( impossible today, I know) But one, Wesleyan accepted me second semester. I was saddened but really wanted to go there. I went off an studied elsewhere for a semester. This turn led me down another path and away from Wesleyan. I never regretted my choices not even for a minute. It wasn’t meant to be. What you want at age 18 is probably not what you want at 20.
Have you considered doing something else for a year?
When my D was brainstorming ‘topics’ for her Common App essay I told her the ‘topic’ is you. You just need to come up with a ‘MacGuffin’ to highlight what about you is interesting to colleges. I’m sure MTG would make a great MacGuffin in a well written essay. I’d guess that a witty, quirky essay would be appreciated at about every school you applied excepting maybe the publics.
As an aside my Nephew was a big MTG player in the 90s and had a similar experience to you and was on a traveling team during one summer. He applied to like 5 high reach schools out of HS and didn’t get accepted. He ended up taking a gap year interning at the CATO Institute and then started an online business. After he got bored with that he traveled and lived in various places around the world and played online poker to make a living.
In may opinion all of those schools were reaches except CWRU which was a match and being a match does not mean you will get accepted. I think CWRU felt you would likely not accept a spot at their university (which I am guessing they were right if you had been accepted to just about any of the other schools you applied to) and chose to put you on the waitlist. You are definitely academically qualified for all of the schools. The thing is so were most of their tens of thousands of applicants. Unfortunately you weren’t chosen.
If you look through this topic you will realize you definitely aren’t alone. Their are many posts from surprised and hurt high stat students. The one thing they had in common is that they for the most part applied to primarily very selective schools and didn’t see themselves within the bigger picture. You aren’t being compared to the rest of the kids in your HS, or county, or even state. You are being compared with every student who is as accomplished as you who applied to these schools and there tens of thousands of them. They are also applying to many of the same schools you did so in some ways you are competing with many of the same students at many of these schools.
I can’t tell you why one student is chosen while another is rejected but I can tell students to look carefully at the attributes you want a college to have and to choose options that meet your criteria and fit into the safety and match categories and to look at reach schools as reach schools. There are many universities you would have been pretty much guaranteed admission to and many others that probably would have been excellent choices for the plans you have for the future. You just didn’t look at them. The good news is you have a great option in Michigan. Best wishes.
OP: Please read post #48.
Last year, D’s school had handful students accepted to ivies, but couple of the top of the tops applied to Michigan and were not accepted. Once you are in the top range, it is no tell who will get accept and who will be rejected by a particular college.
Maybe college admission is like NBA draft, it is more about potential. The 22 AP taken might make the admission officers thinking that you have top out at the HS level.
The posting regarding MTG is how non-MTG older adults usually think about MTG. By them, it’s considered to be somewhere between the pokemon card obsession and professional poker gambling, sort of a stepping stone between them. My relative was in a similar situation to yours - EXTRAORDINARILY high stats, very advanced MTG player from a very early age. Wound up at the local flagship, where this brilliant genius majored in… MTG. In other words, studied something, but really spent all the time traveling to play MTG. There were other issues, so I never thought that the poor admission results could have been the MTG if it was even listed in the application. But seriously, even though it shouldn’t be this way, listing high achievement in MTG SCREAMS future professional gambler. And no amount of you saying that it isn’t so, that everyone respects this achievement, it’s not true. Older people - and that’s who are making the admission decisions - consider it an adolescent obsession, and a precursor to gambling.
@parentologist: It screams other things equally troubling as well.
“The 22 AP taken might make the admission officers thinking that you have top out at the HS level.”
Re-read the original post. Op did not take 22 APs. He undertook “22 semesters of AP coursework”. Different kettle of fish, smells a lot like fish (or puffery). Especially if somewhere on the app he described it as he did in the OP - implying one thing - and then the AOs looked at his transcript and realized the attempted exaggeration.
Those last two posts made me giggle! Thank you!
Look, folks, let’s not ignore the obvious. If sky-high GPA and test scores are not enough to distinguish a student for the highest levels of what is, after all, an academic endeavor (tertiary education), the conclusion is that grading in high school is way too easy and that standardized testing is not difficult enough to make distinctions at the top end.
Thirty years ago, about 6 kids a year got perfect scores on the SAT, now it’s about 600 (I’m generalizing a little of course). It’s unlikely that kids have gotten much smarter in the intervening thirty years. If they have, make the tests harder, and problem solved. Ditto for grade inflation.
I can’t help but wonder how much of the frenetic craziness of college admissions today stems from the understandable desire of the top 5% of ability to present themselves as the top 1% (substitute 1% and 0.1% for those figures in the context of the most elite admissions schools).
In my opinion, Michigan is a better school than any of them you got rejected from. You won’t lack for challenges or intelligent peers if you end up there. If fact, it will kick your butt plenty of days. Your ego is feeling bruised right now, but you have an excellent choice in hand.
“If sky-high GPA and test scores are not enough to distinguish a student for the highest levels of what is, after all, an academic endeavor (tertiary education), the conclusion is that grading in high school is way too easy and that standardized testing is not difficult enough to make distinctions at the top end.”
Not necessarily. The population has grown in the last 30 years but the number of spots at the top colleges haven’t grown as much. Simple law of supply and demand. Of course there are going to be more students with high SAT scores … there are simply more students.
Colleges have realized that beyond a certain level, all students are capable of the coursework. Further stratification of the top SAT scores won’t help because they don’t admit based on top scores. They gather the pool of kids who have enough indication they could benefit (such as all students with an SAT above ____) and then make decisions based on other factors.
It wasn’t the scores that was the issue here and in most cases. It’s the other factors. You’re looking at the trees, but it’s the forest.
While obviously population has grown, it’s not clear at all that - absent the exogenous factors of increasing numbers of smart East Asians - the true pool for “top” colleges has grown that much at all. Also, the definition of “top” has expanded dramatically. Thirty years ago, students with (then) top credentials - say, 3.7+ GPA + 1450ish SAT - looked at Columbia and Cornell as safeties, and schools like Rice and Vanderbilt wouldn’t have even been on the radar. In my high school class (an admittedly high caliber group of kids), 22 kids out of maybe 40 (entire class was 130) were accepted at Williams, which had nowhere near the reputation it has today. Just some food for thought for people out there…
What is the problem with making the tests harder? Why shouldn’t there still be only 10-15 “perfect” scorers in the country? Why is it necessary for kids to go crazy amassing all sorts of useless indicia of intelligence and earnestness like 22 semesters of AP work?