Hmm, hard to say about this. My counselor has said she doesn’t have a lot of students applying to Princeton and only one applied to Williams (he did get in but it was 8 years ago and she just remembers he was “community-minded”) but she did say that the student who got into Princeton took a lot of initiative and she thought he could be a Senator or something one day, and then said he and I were super similar. No idea what she meant by this (personality? ECs? academics?) but I do know the profiles of some of the most recent students to get into top East Coast schools:
Class of 21, apparently it was the most competitive year ever for our school:
1 Princeton (was another counselor’s student): Didn’t know her but one of my friends did and all they know is that she head of a food bank’s teen volunteers, chem lab assistant, chemistry club president
1 Columbia: research with the Clean Air Club on our school’s air filters and spoke about it at a forum at Davis, was a NASA teen volunteer online during her junior year summer, president of science olympiad when they qualified for states, and led a fundraiser at a local food bank which raised $10,000 over two years
1 Brown: URM, part of a nearby prestigious choir school where he went in middle school and did international tours with them as a kid and then was a teen coach, also in the state choir, and served as a school board member, plus did work with GenUp and the CA Student Board Members Association, with leadership roles in both
Class of 22, this is where things were more “normal” in terms of admissions according to my counselor:
1 Stanford: Jazz musician, played in the school band (one of the best in the state though), learned like 5 instruments for fun, did half-marathons in SF with his dad, and received an honorable mention in an international songwriting contest for a piece he composed
1 MIT: founded a local nonprofit for free tutoring, ran the Science Olympiad club when the again got to states, and did three research internships at Cal, SFSU, and a private research company studying viruses and then Covid-19
1 Cornell + Dartmouth (went to UC Berkeley in the end though): Class president, varsity soccer, research summer program at UCSF, piano (may have done ABRSM but he didn’t tell me), co-president of MUN
Feels like I’m somewhat in between the Class of 21 and Class of 22 students. Most kids apply in-state mainly because of UC Berkeley and UCLA with lower tuitions – looking at Naviance, we never have more than 12 people apply to MIT or more than 17 to Yale in a class of 250. Still a lot, but something like 125+ kids apply to UCLA and 75+ apply to Stanford. Probably the most common OOS school for applications is Harvard but my counselor says nearly all the kids just “shoot their shot” and expect to not get in.