<p>Even if the author’s writing wasn’t of mass media “quality” as you say, it doesn’t give an accurate impression of her potential. She was stressed beyond belief, as most, if not all, prospective freshmen are. Just because she was on a popular news website doesn’t mean that her writing will be perfect. I believe that the NY Times specifically picked “random” students from an unknown pool, otherwise they would’ve had 6 (or whatever the number is) completely identical writers/students. In that case, they should’ve only employed one. Being that they have several, it shows that they wanted variety. Just because they had the students blogging doesn’t mean that they, the student bloggers, were professionals.</p>
<p>Agree with poetgrl, and others who have also agreed.</p>
<p>Who knows if the blogger’s application essays were stronger/weaker/same as her blogs? A talented writer can write in various styles.</p>
<p>she will be ok…</p>
<p>tens of thousands of kids in california would kill to have gotten admitted to two great schools like UCLA and UCSD</p>
<p>Paying in-state at UCLA is about as good a deal in colleges as there is, so she does seem over-dramatic and entitled.</p>
<p>I like the USC comment</p>
<p>cluelessdad isn’t clueless at all. He’s exactly right.</p>
<p>Northstarmom has the benefit of hindsight provided by the blogger herself. if the girl had been accepted to more of her schools, Northstarmom would have been more impressed with her writing. lol</p>
<p>U can’t comment on someone’s thought processes from looking at one or two pieces of writing. how dumb.</p>
<p>
I just thought this from CalMom bore a second read by everyone. It’s spot on and would deserve a spot on a CC “Must Read” thread if such a compilation existed.</p>
<p>Otoh, I think the criticism of NSM is off-base. I’ve seen a lot of writing samples from a wide range of students and those quoted fall into the “nothing special” category. Paraphrasing CalMom, until you understand the intensity, competence, and achievement of the competition, it’s easy to overestimate.</p>
<p>And 17 or 18 or not, when you write for publication, you put yourself out there for all criticism. I’ve known some decent writers for whom that was the hardest thing…not writing, not finishing, but exposing themselves to judgment by submitting for publication. Kudos to the student blogger for doing so. But that doesn’t mean she needs to be treated as a delicate flower.</p>
<p>Re Northstarmom’s post #57… given that we know absolutely NOTHING about this student’s stats, EC’s or other aspects of her proposal, I don’t know how anyone can attribute her rejections to a particular factor, especially not to her writing. We are seeing BLOG posts – not the academic writing, or the essay-for-college writing. And the idea of hunting for reasons/justifications for rejection really is off base. We don’t know anything about the kid, the recs, the quality of the school, the courses she took, and other kids applying from her high school. </p>
<p>There are two types of Ivy “rejects” - those whose qualifications are so weak that they were never in the running (the “no way” category), and those who might qualify for admission but do not offer the type of profile to allow them to stand out among the competition (what I might call the “meh” category). I’m going to assume that the blogger kid was in the “meh” category, since she’s obviously got stats strong enough for admission to UCLA. </p>
<p>I don’t mean any sort of insult. My son was the first NMH finalist his high school had seen in years; he had straight A’s in academic subjects, an SAT combined score comfortably within range for the Ivies – and an AP teacher urging him to apply to Ivies. He also had absolutely no EC’s until senior year, when he was elected senior class treasurer after a competing candidate was disqualified. Fortunately he read “A is for Admission” before sending off college applications and didn’t embarrass himself or waste money on application fees. </p>
<p>Usually when I see a kid who has applied to a whole string of Ivies and was rejected by all, I just assume that they targeted badly. Nothing wrong with them – just that they didn’t understand how competitive the process is. </p>
<p>I feel that any college that accepts less than 35% of its applicants is going to be rejecting at least one perfectly well qualified candidate for every one it admits. If people want to speculate about the reasons for their own kid’s rejection, fine. To speculate about others is both callous and misguided. We simply don’t know.</p>
<p>@ the dad-- my feeling honestly is that piling on to a kid who has just been rejected by 11 schools in order to discuss her writing style and depth, which was never once discussed on this website BEFORE she was rejected by 11 schools is incredibly bad form for a group of adults. I know plenty about writing for publication…it’s concommitant downside, but I find it preposterous to do AT THIS POINT IN TIME. You should too, frankly. End of story.</p>
<p>I believe when it comes to college process, less publicity is better. When an applicant becomes too well known, a school is under more pressure to justify why he/she is admitted. As we all know, admission is not attributed to one factor. If Anne had weak academic record, but had many other attributes, she may have been admitted by some of those top tier schools. By becoming too much of a public figure, a school may not have wanted to take a chance of admitting a weak academic candidate (if that was the case) and having to justify it.</p>
<p>Not sure if you all remember a super legacy applicant trying to get into Cornell. She bled RED. Her whole family graduated and worked at Cornell, but her stats were low relative to other applicants. She wrote an article in the Cornell alumni magazine, which her aunt was an editor, about how much she wanted to go to Cornell and about her family history. She was rejected at the end. I think if she had stayed under the radar, she may have been admitted. I wouldn’t be surprised if Cornell’s adcom was afraid to admit her after she made her stats public.</p>
<p>She got into some awesome schools which will cost her very little for a superb education. Who needs Harvard, Princeton and Yale? Nobody really. Its a psychological game people play, deluding themselves into believing they are who the schools accept or reject them say they are. Baloney. </p>
<p>You are the same person whether you attend UCSD or Harvard. </p>
<p>And life is full of disappointments and rejections. Embrace the school(s) that accepted you and move on.</p>
<p>I have to say I agree with poetgrl. First, the girl’s writing and critical thinking levels are about par for the course for mainstream journalism these days. She may well have learned one of the first rules of writing–write for your audience. The critical thinking level there is about the same in most of the other Times’ blogs I’ve read. The only exception I’d make is the blogs of Dana Jennings in the Health columns, which are original and wise. Other than his, I could quote all day from Times blogs that sound more like this young woman’s.</p>
<p>SEcondly, we all can speculate as to why she got rejected, but since we have very little of the facts, and no special insight into the minds of the adcoms, any such speculation is almost entirely ungrounded in evidence. I spend half my writing-teacher life trying to teach my students that just because they “believe” something to be likely true, unless they have a grasp of all, or at least most of the evidence, that is a weak argument.</p>
<p>So yeah, of course, she opened herself to the possibility of this whole discussion. But that doesn’t mean there is any justification for it, regardless. We don’t always have to do what we *can *do.</p>
<p>I liked Anne’s blog. </p>
<p>She needed financial aid. Maybe that hurt her at a few schools.</p>
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<p>Well said Garland.</p>
<p>The trashing of this girl on this thread has laid bare the arrogance of CC at its worst: that students admitted to the Ivies are <em>better</em> than the riffraf who couldn’t fly that close to the sun. </p>
<p>Guess what? Ivy grads crash and burn as often as others. Throughout my career I have seen both many quality Ivy grads and many cases of “lesser school” grads handing the Ivy grads their lunch.</p>
<p>I’ve been bemused/amused by Ivy accepts/rejects from the high school classes where I have known the candidates well. Taking nothing away from those admitted, the Ivies in some cases clearly left superior talent on the table (not to mention the talent that wasn’t attracted to the Ivies in the first place). </p>
<p>I don’t think any Ivy would claim they have cornered the market on student talent. Why do certain CCers insist on trying to do so?</p>
<p>I also think that there was something about the criticism of the student blogger that sounded offensive in NSM’s post. “Trite” is a terribly derogatory thing to say about someone’s ideas. When someone thinks of something for the first time, even if it has been said often and better by others, to the writer it is not trite. To say that a student lacks “critical thinking” based on the blogs someone posts is also off base and insulting. This is just a sampling of writing, and indicative of just that - items chosen for publication, not critical thinking. It is my opinion that blogs are intended to be fluff and entertaining for the most part anyway. It is better to limit your criticism of someone’s critical thinking to an essay on government, economics, philosophy, ethics and the like. Lastly, to criticize “personality” as a reason for rejection is also without substantial basis in the facts (op cit. my earlier opinion about blog content.)</p>
<p>I think a lot of good things have been said by other posters above. I do not buy into the concept of HYP acceptance as a referendum of that person’s ability, intellect, personality, writing style or any other thing (actually that goes for any other college as well). You are what you do in life. Many “book smart” people go on to do absolutely nothing of benefit to anyone else in the world. In my opinion, this is failure, not success.</p>
<p>Right on Clueless Dad @ post 74 above!</p>
<p>here’s a young woman sharp enough to be blogging for the NYT, but somehow Northstarmom felt the need to shoot her down, and as others have said, attempt to boost herself in the process. two posts to tell us her son was writing for a profl publication at 9…and I imagine with no help from mom. </p>
<p>as clueless dad said, don’t use another’s vulnerable moment as an opportunity to market yourself…while you may not agree, most cc’ers can c right through that…</p>
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<p>I had heard that UC Davis had become less predictable for use as a safety a couple of years ago, but this is the first year that I’ve seen UC Santa Barbara reject kids that I thought would surely get in.</p>
<p>This is the simple way to decribe this type of rejection - Simple formula if you understand what I mean:
Candidate 1 - Prominent, Prominent: Accepted
Candidate 2 - Prominent, Prominent: Accepted
Candidate 3 - Prominent, Prominent: Accepted
Candidate 4 - Prominent: Rejected</p>
<p>Probably, considering the rejection letters, she is still prominent, but there are other candidates that are prominent X 2</p>
<p>I wonder what he did to garner all these acceptances? Cure cancer? Develop an easily made alternative fuel source? His comments- and his hoggish (and expensive) approach to applications were incredibly irritating.</p>
<p>Having worked through personal issues in therapy, one thing I was taught was that when we have a reaction that seems way out of line with the nature of what happened, something deeper is at work. The level that some have thrown at this girl seems to fit this category, as I said in my first post it doesn’t make any sense viewed from my angle, where frankly what the girl wrote and where she goes to school or doesn’t has zero effect in my life or anyone else’s. Maybe some feel that they could have written for the NY times blog and were mad that someone they felt was inferior got the place they should have had (or a child), others might be trying to assert some sort of superiority by demeaning the writing, but whatever it is it doesn’t make sense.</p>
<p>This in some ways reminds me of a post on the music board recently, where someone wrote this long post trashing a major music school, and the upshot was it seems like they were upset someone they knew didn’t get in there and were venting that the school was admitting unqualified kids due to politics, the school itself is mediocre, etc, it is a similar thing in that something deeper is at work, otherwise the post made no sense <em>shrug</em></p>