Most important aspect of the application.

Diocletian
Mon, 28 Aug 2006 22:59:09 +0000

dont worry jeffz, diocletian patronizes everyone.



Only people on CC, really. Until I came here I never realized that people could get so obsessed about the minutiae of college admissions. That, and the fact that this question has been asked about 1,345,642 times. Search, people! You can look and see how many times I’ve answered this question or some variation on it – my answers have become more sarcastic over time. Nobody believed me when I said essays and the difficulty of your class schedule were the most important parts of the application, and gave the same spiel I’m about to give.

Do you really think there is a big tablet ranking the various aspects of an application and their relative importance? Or that there’s some Admissions Finite State Machine into which you plop an application and out comes a number?

Admissions wants to know if you’re the kind of person who would do well at Chicago and be happy here, which is why essays and transcripts are the most important. Tests and ECs say something too, but they’re always going to be refracted through the lens of your essays, which hopefully makes admissions understand why your ECs are what they are, your transcript, and, to a lesser extent, your recommendations.

Finally, what does it matter what the relative rankings are of a given admissions department? If you really want to go to the school you’re going to put your best foot forward. Since presumably your ECs, test scores, and transcript are more-or-less solidified, the only things you have any control over are your essays and your recommendations. Anything beyond that is in the hands of the admissions folk and is not worth fretting over.

People usually respond with some nonsense about how worrying is cathartic. Yadda yadda. The college application process is only stressful if you focus on the wrong stuff. In my opinion, things like “Does Chicago rank ECs higher than test scores when considering an application?” is the wrong stuff.