Is this an excuse or an explanation?

Applying to College
1

Hi everyone! I’ve been a long time lurker on CC and I’ve finally made an account because something has been bothering me.I’m currently a senior in high school, and college decisions have long been posted. I’ve had enough time to come to terms with the decisions, but recently, I suddenly remembered something, and now it’s plaguing my mind.

Here’s a little background on my situation:
When I was applying to colleges, I considered myself a pretty competitive applicant. I applied to 8 top tier schools. Yes, really, 8. Though I thought I was “competitive”, I understood that college admissions are basically crapshoots. That’s why I applied to 8 reaches. I really expected that out of 8 crapshoots, I could have made at least 1.
Nope. Not at all. I didn’t get into one out of the eight reaches. (2 waitlists, 6 rejects) Now, numbers like this suggest to me that perhaps I can’t fully blame the randomness of the admissions process. Maybe I just wasn’t competitive enough.

So now, let’s just take a quick look at my stats. Feel free to skim over this part.

GPA/Test Scores: Definitely high enough. Well above the 75th percentile for some schools, so I know my application wasn’t immediately tossed out. I also go to a super hard magnet school. Maybe this gave me extra brownie points?

Essays: Main essay was good; maybe a bit cheesy, but well-written and gets the point across. Supplemental essays were a mixed bag and really depended on the prompts. If the prompt resonated within me, I could write an amazing supplemental. (For Uchicago, I went crazy with one prompt and produced literally the most beautiful essay I have ever written.) Supplementals for dream schools were great; I poured out my heart and wrote about why I adored that school so much. Otherwise, my supplemental was probably informative but nothing too special.

Recs: Very well-written teachers wrote the letters for me, but I don’t think they knew me super well enough as to write something really profound. (However, for Dartmouth, I submitted a peer recommendation by my best friend, whom I’ve known forever. He also got into Harvard, so I’m assuming it was a mind-blowing rec.)

Interviews: I interviewed for about half of the schools, and all of them went extremely well.

Hooks: Actually, this one is pretty bad, LOL! I’m Asian, so that probably dragged me down a bit.

!!!Extracurriculars!!!: This is where my problem begins, so if you were skimming before, you can start reading again here.
My brother is ten years younger than me, and the year I began high school, he began pre-school. My parents were working full time, so every single day after school, I’d have to pick my brother up, and stay at home with him. My parents could not and would not pay for child care. I absolutely could not join a single club or sport.
During this time, I was on a local dance team that met over the weekends and I volunteered monthly at a local community center. These were good, but not great. When I look at threads with Ivy-accepted kids’ stats, I always see impressive clubs and sports and volunteer work that probably took place after school.
During junior year, my mom started to work part-time, so I finally was free. I compensated like CRAZY, joining everything I could: Debate team, volunteer club, academic decathlon, etc, WHILE I worked two internships twenty hours a week. I worked SO HARD to load up on activities. Yet, since I joined activities late, I didn’t have enough years on me to hold officer positions, or win any really impressive awards. I was also too old to join sports teams.

Looking back at my application, everything else still seems really great, but my extracurriculars definitely were weak. In fact, it probably looked even worse that I had crammed so many activities into 11th and 12th grade. It took me a while, but I accepted these true facts after getting rejected from all the schools I had fallen in love with…

…Until I realized that I had never explained the situation with my brother on the Common App.
I don’t know what was going on in my head, but it really had never occurred to me to simply explain my lack of activities.

Since then, I’ve just been going back and forth in my head about what would have happened if I had explained my predicament. Would adcoms even care? Would they view this as a valid explanation, or just an excuse?
If I had just taken the ten minutes to write out what I just wrote out above, would I be looking at at least ONE acceptance letter today? I really can’t tell, because on one hand, I’m telling the complete truth. I had wanted to join so many clubs back then, but I really had no other choice but to stay at home cooking dinner for my brother. Yet on the other hand, this doesn’t seem like too rare a circumstance. Everyone has to do babysit, right? Am I just making up excuses?

I’m really not saying I think I deserve to be at a particular school. I’m only wondering if an explanation would have made a difference, because I am seriously going crazy.

tl;dr: I am a relatively competitive applicant for top tier colleges, yet I didn’t get into a single one out of eight. I didn’t do any extracurriculars during freshman and sophomore year because I had to be a mom to my toddler brother every day. However, I didn’t explain this situation in my application. If I had explained it, would I have gotten into some schools?

Thank you so much guys, and please be nice to me. I was shaking so violently while I wrote this, I could barely type. :-S I don’t usually post on public forums but I really really need some closure on this. Thank you guys so much!

2

It’s not an explanation and should definitely not be used as an “excuse,” but it might reveal some important parts of who you are.

3

You need closure so I will try to help you. Everything happens for a reason. Wherever you have ended up, you will do well. You will find your people, you will make the best of your situation. I am going to bet that in 5 years you will be well on your way to doing great things in life. Your responsibility in caring for another living human, as opposed to joining another after school club, far outweighs the fact that you didn’t get into one of 8 ridiculously hard to get into colleges that hardly anyone gets into anyway. You must realize that you can’t just be in the top 75th percentile to get into those schools. You need to be “exceptional.” You are exceptional, but maybe not in the way those colleges are looking for. So forget it. You can’t go back and change it. I suspect you wrote this post so that we would say “yes, you had a chance, what a shame.” I think you just need to accept the truth, which is that at the end of the day, what you did for your family is far more important than the name of the college you go to.

4

First things first: are you in a college that you are happy about? b/c that is what really matters.

Second, this:

is simply wrong. Each of your applications was an independent event: there is no relationship between them. If you toss a coin100 times, each time there is a 50:50 chance that it will come up heads. Those odds don’t change: if you toss the coin 19 times and it comes up tails every time the odds are still 50:50 that it will come up tails the 20th time. The idea that after so many tails it is more likely to come up heads is called the “Gambler’s Fallacy”. Your use of ‘crapshoot’ is really appropriate :slight_smile:

So: to your core question: if you had written something in your app about not being able to do ECs for the 1st 2 years of HS would that have made the difference? Possibly- and possibly not. I’m pretty sure that if the resentment you clearly felt- and still feel- about it had come across in whatever you wrote it would probably have done more harm than good. Even if the resentment didn’t leak through, though, I’m not sure it would have tipped the balance.

You mentioned UChicago. UChicago says that these factors are…

Very Important: Course rigor, recommendations, essay, particular talent or ability, character/personal qualities.
Important: GPA, class rank, ECs, volunteer work
Considered: Standardized tests, interview, level of interest, 1st gen, legacy, ethnicity, work experience
Not considered: residency, religion

Of the things that they say are very important, by your description you had a really strong essay, but your recs were solid not exceptional (you don’t mention course rigor or talent and who knows about personal qualities!). Two of the things that you gave as the strongest part of your app- GPA and test scores- are ranked as second and third tier considerations- and even so 75% of freshmen were in the top 10% of their class. So, at least for UChicago, given that they take less than 10% of applicants it is something of a lottery for everybody- and imo a note explaining your lopsided ECs would not have made the difference.

So: don’t beat yourself up about it. Lottery schools are lotteries. I hope and trust that you had some good match options and that you will fall in love with the one you choose. Let go of your resentment for your family, let go of coulda/woulda/shoulda. You are obviously very smart and achievement oriented. Shine at your college and if in 3 years the sting of a less fancy name is still irking you, go to a grad school with a shiny name.

5

So sorry you’re in this situation. Don’t beat yourself up–hindsight is 20/20. What do you plan to do? Are you planning to go to an in-state school, or are you thinking of taking a gap year?

6

@inversesandwich, You can write a letter of continued interest to the colleges that waitlisted you (just a short note that you’re interested and the college is high on your list). Ask your guidance counselor to add a short comment about your family situation. That way, whatever happens, you’ll know you did everything you could. Then turn your attention to your acceptances because the probability is that you’ll be attending one of them.

7

Focus on what you feel you did right. Then grow from that.
Even if you had mentioned your brother, that’s not a tip.

8

Your story is very similar to my D16’s. She’s half Asian but her (Asian) dad died when she was little, so she’s had very little exposure to the Asian culture. She has 99th percentile scores. She applied to 6 highly selective schools, got into none of them. Applied to 3 matches, was waitlisted at one and rejected at the others.

D16 also had to babysit her little brother when she was in middle school, because I was working. I decided to be a stay at home mom while she was in high school. She did lots of extracurriculars, 20+ hours a week, focused on performing arts, but it didn’t seem to make any difference in college admissions.

9

Were you accepted anywhere or were these the only 8 schools you applied to? As a lurker you had the opportunity to read post after post about applying to safeties, matches and reaches for this very reason. Since we have no access to your application and the information concerning the applicant pool at the universities you applied to I doubt anyone here can tell you why out of 20-40 thousand likely applicants at each of the schools you applied to that you were part of the 16-36 thousand who did not get an acceptance and not the 2-4 thousand that were accepted. I think where your logic failed you was assuming that by applying to 8 schools at least 1 would accept you. Berating yourself over something that you might have done to get yourself to look a little better is pointless at this moment (easy to do though). There are many people here ready to give you suggestions if they understand your situation better. Do you have choices? Do you want to take a gap year? Do you even want advise? Good luck.

10

@Lindagaf: That was beautiful, inspired and comforting.

11

Did you mention taking care of your brother as an EC?

In any case, do you have admissions to affordable other schools that you like?

12

I agree that as long as you got into one affordable school that you like then you are set. The top schools have acceptance rates under 10% so it is unrealistic to thing that they are anything but a reach for any unhooked applicant no matter what his/her stats, recommendations, ECs etc. are. These schools can fill up multiple times with well qualified deserving candidates. It is unlikely that an explanation of your circumstances would have changed much of anything so stop torturing yourself.

The trick in life is to keep moving forward. Now it is time to embrace the schools that embraced you. Go forth and have a wonderful, fulfilling, and exciting college experience.

13

2 things here. First off, I don’t want to be rubbing salt into the wound but you write

This is not what the top colleges want to see, contrary to your belief. Achievement, leadership, initiative. That’s the real key. As Stanford writes

The time you spent on weekends with the local dance team could have been spent pursuing something that really mattered to you; I don’t get the impression this dance team was it. YOu could have spent the time soaked up by the dance team to really let yourself shine.

Second, aside from all that, if you view applying to these elite schools as a crapshoot then your results are easily explainable by chance alone. If P is the chance of an acceptance at a school, the odds of being rejected by all eight schools is (1-P)^^8. If the odds of acceptance are 6%, the odds of rejection at all 8 is 60%. If the odds of acceptance are 10%, the the odds of rejection at all 8 is 43% At elites with so many spaces taken by EA/ED, and preference in regular admission for legacy and recruited students such as athletes, the odds for the ordinary RD are probably lower than 6%.

14

okay, maybe a 3rd thing. You need to understand that success in life, as others have already pointed out, does not have a fixed relationship to where you went to undergrad. Whether you look at measures of actual learning, at grad school acceptances, starting salary, or any other metric you care to use, it sn’t as if first there’s the bank of results from Ivy kids, then near-Ivies, and so on, without any overlap. There’s plenty of overlap! With your drive and potential, if you apply yourself at the college that did take you than there’s no reason you can’t be as successful as you want.