<p>@rhg3rd </p>
<p>“This is self-contradictory. Prestige plays a hugh role in the credentials presented.”</p>
<p>There’s no contradiction there. By credentials, she means your individual credentials, not the prestige of your school. Grad schools would be more excited by someone who has already done good work and shows potential to do great research but went to Podunk U than a kid at an Ivy who hasn’t done anything that shows research potential.</p>
<p>In my field, a high school drop-out who built key parts of a heavily-used complex, multi-threaded open-source library has much better credentials than a Princeton kid who hasn’t shown that he can code yet.</p>