Lowest Score Possible for Elite School Applicant with no hooks

damon30
Sun, 19 May 2019 17:05:29 +0000

But David Hogg had a mighty hook: after surviving a horrific ordeal that would have made most people collapse (and did, alas ), he was among the founders of a national-level advocacy group that got more results in 3 months than most professionals in years.

@MYOS1634
EC, not a hook. The top UC schools he applied to originally all turned him down. But your larger point is correct; be someone famous, or show strong evidence that you will someday become famous, and your odds of admission to elite schools are greatly increased.

From the Harvard admissions blog post I linked above.

We are eager to harbor the next Homer, the next Kant, or the next Dickinson. There is no reason why we shouldn’t expect such a student to spend his or her university years with us. Emerson did; Wallace Stevens did; Robert Frost did; Frank O’Hara and John Ashbery and Fairfield Porter and Adrienne Rich did … It remains for us to identify them when they apply—to make sure they can do well enough to gain a degree, yes, but not to expect them to be well-rounded …