Have you ever read “Quiet: The Power of Introverts in a World That Can’t Stop Talking” by Susan Cain? A very interesting read for both introverts and extroverts.
As far as interviews and social skills - I think it is more about getting to know the personality and going beyond the numbers. You can gauge a student’s level of maturity and depths of their interests. Even an introvert can do well in a one on one interview especially when asked to elaborate on their favorite hobby or EC.
Math and computer science are chock-full of introverts. There are many varieties of introverts, from really socially intolerable to a woman I know who is a CEO of a large multinational corporation. It took her a while but she turned her introversion into an asset in business instead of a handicap. For me personally that would be a job from hell.
The description of the popular kids in the OP made me laugh. I asked D once (around 8th-9th grade) if there was a popular group or clique in her grade, and she laughed and said there were a few kids who thought they were the popular group but no one really liked them. By which she meant they were kind of full of themselves and most everyone had friends and a social life that had nothing to do with those kids or any hierarchy they may have thought there was.
But add me to those saying “Huh?” at the mention of social skills being important to college admissions. Can’t recall ever seeing that.
I believe that I am accurate in saying that the single-initial CC schools do not admit on objective academic criteria alone (not even Caltech). If the other elements that are considered in admissions boil down to curiosity, inventiveness, depth, and kindness toward others, then I think that is great. I’m all for it!
I’m really not assuming anything, lookingforward, I’m just asking questions and posing some hypotheticals. That’s different from believing the hypotheses.
Interesting point, OHMomof2. I can’t say that people I’ve known did not like students in the “popular” groups in their schools. Shades of Yogi Berra: “Nobody likes those kids. They’re too popular!” Good job with raising a level-headed daughter, though.
A fair number of the threads that I have seen on CC have placed some emphasis on social skills for admission to “top” schools. Pizzagirl was a great advocate for social skills. I’ve been here a long time, though, so the emphasis might have abated in the last few years. When I have a chance, I will look through old threads to the extent possible, to see if I can provide a few references.
The recent thread on giftedness in the main Parents forum includes some remarks on the importance of acquiring social skills, mainly from those who oppose acceleration, but also from those who would like to see gifted students accelerated to a level where they might learn social skills more readily, because they have a better fit with older groups. This is not totally disconnected from college admissions (or life).
My point about the grad students was that there are only a few, rare students (1 per 200 or so) who seem to me to be deficient in the “soft skills.” If the “soft skills” can be used to differentiate applicants to the “top” schools, then it seems to me that there must be much bigger differentials at that stage than I observe among the grad students. Or else they would only remove a very small fraction of the applicant pool (as garland suggests) and would not be particularly useful in screening among the academically qualified applicants.
So I am not sure how the not-strictly-academic criteria are used, unless my guesses in paragraph 1 of #23 are correct (in which case, “Hooray,” I have come full circle and I now agree with lookingforward).
My point about the faculty is two-fold: One, that the number of faculty members who seem to have difficulty with the soft skills is actually higher than among grad students (at least in my observation), though it is still quite low. This seems counter-intuitive to me, because I would have expected that soft skills were more important for successfully navigating grad school and post-docs than for handling a typical undergrad program. So its odd that the incidence of difficulties should appear to increase. (Perhaps I just need a better reference set; perhaps it’s the pressures of being a faculty member.)
I have more explanations, hypotheses, qualifiers, and clarifiers, but will spare you those for the time being!
@QuantMech , what you were talking about in your OP was social manipulation, not true pro-social behavior that is so important to successful adult life. Real social skills take time to develop, and require empathy and a basic understanding of the need to carry one’s social weight–for example, asking the stranger seated next to you at a work dinner about his life, and giving appropriate responses.
I think both introverts and extroverts can learn this type of social skill. I am a very social introvert. I know how to make people feel comfortable (and recognize the need to do so), but boy, do I need time alone.
The biggest hindrance to developing social skills is self-focus, and that can be a problem for people of any age.
Yes, there is much greater differentiation that 199/200 are good, and 1/200 is bad. For example, one of the criteria MIT says it is looking for in the link I listed earlier is quoted below:
Different applicants display this desired collaborative & cooperative spirit to different degrees within their application. An applicant whose LOR mentions the student goes out of his way to help out his classmates is likely going to do well in this category. An applicant who says he doesn’t like group projects because the other group members are often slackers that slow him down (as indicated in LOR, interview, or elsewhere in application) is likely not going to do well in this category. Most will probably fall somewhere between these extremes.
QM–I’m not trying to be oppositional here, but for me your issue seems to be a moving target. Maybe I’m just not getting what you’re querying, but a premise built on one former poster and one thread that does not seem to jive with the bulk of the CC understanding, seems shaky at best. I really do not see this social skills issue in the way you are characterizing it–not when it was attached to the “popular kids in high school” as you introduced it initiallly, and not in later posts. In your post 23, you do seem to describe what is generally accepted as the kind of subjective criteria that “single letter schools” might look for. I mean, we know it’s not just grades and scores, so that’s not a new observation. And i know you know that, so again, I’m at a loss to understand what we’re examining here.
I don’t equate “social skills” with popularity per se, although popular people often have well-developed social skills, at least social skills of certain kind. I define social skills with being able to act and communicate positively in social situations, to put others at ease, and to understand how one’s words and actions will be perceived by others.
I’ve known a few individuals who apparently lacked this skill. One guy in particular I can recall who was reasonably smart but was sincerely oblivious to how many of the things he said would be taken by others. Consequently, many people regarded him as something of a jerk. He certainly did mean to be. In fact he was be astonished on the occasions when he was told how negatively something he said was taken. I’m not expert but I don’t think he had Asperger’s or any other true pathology. He just had low social skills.
What I don’t understand is how this can be evaluated very well in the context of a college application. The guy above certainly managed to get into college well enough. He graduated from an excellent flagship state U. Most schools don’t do interviews and the ones that so usually don’t dig very deep. As long as you can be calm and polite and can ask and answer questions semi-intelligently for 15 or 20 minutes you can pass an admissions interview. Unless some teacher puts a plain statement in the rec that the student in question has good/bad social skills I don’t see how it’s going to figure much in an admissions decision.
I’m an introvert. I’m shy. I’m certainly not popular.
If popularity was needed, no one from my high school would’ve gone to top colleges. My HS had 6300ish students. Popularity wasn’t a thing. No one could be popular because there were just so many of us.
Funny, my son is both. In random groups at school he often ends up doing most work. In extracurricular projects with his friends they work great as a team. I still don’t know what you’re supposed to do when other group members are actually slackers. In the workplace a group normally has a designated leader and various options to deal with slackers up to firing. What can you do in school if other group members are fine with a lower grade but you’re not? Sorry if this strays too far from the topic, just wanted to point out many things about social skills are not clear-cut.
One of the riskiest pieces of advice on CC is to just do what you want, even when those things separate you from others. Or that claimed “passions” are enough, when they’re solo. Compare that with kids who try various group (or otherwise collaborative) ECs.
No one needs to guess or wait for an LoR statement, to see how activity choices roll. How a kid writes tells a lot, too. To Data’s point, yes, kids reveal all sorts of things that can pothole them.
Note OP mentioned MIT, not “most schools” that rack and stack.
In the most competitive scenarios, it all matters.
garland, #27, you are right that the specifics of my posts are moving around a bit.
In my recollection, the need for “social skills” for admission to top schools came up fairly often on the threads in the early days of CC. There are a lot of threads on CC, and my reading tends to focus on just a few. So if these do not overlap with other posters’ commonly read threads, we might be encountering quite different statements. I have not had time yet to search through threads to find the ones I recollect. I am not imagining them! I hope you will believe me on this point. There was also a fair amount of discussion of the need for “polish,” if one wanted to attract venture capital in the long run. Hence, colleges selecting for “polish” were acting reasonably.
The exclusionary actions of the members of the “popular group” in my high school were not necessarily representative of how they interacted with people from day to day. (I had only a few bad examples.) It remains plausible to me that overall, they had excellent social skills, which made it possible for them to be members of that group to begin with. I am not sure that popularity is necessarily a superficial phenomenon, either. (How would I know? 
) While I don’t equate popularity with social skills, I have a bit of difficulty drawing a clear-cut line between the two.
Another point of difficulty for me is that when I think about social skills of the students around me (grad students), they all seem much of a muchness, so I don’t see how one would differentiate academically qualified applicants on that basis, unless one were looking for stand-out social skills, which are also relatively rare.
I agree with yucca10 about the group work issue. A lot of the parents on CC don’t like group projects for just the reasons that yucca10 and Data10 have mentioned–that a few people wind up doing the lion’s share of the work. Different schools may structure group projects differently, so this happens less frequently. I personally would not “ding” a student for not liking group projects in high school. (He/she would rate highly on honesty, in my view.) Later groups are organized differently and group work becomes more effective, fairly divided, and enjoyable.
I don’t think there has been a really satisfying answer to my character vs. skill question yet. If you don’t accept the premise that “skills” are discussed by the “top” schools, this would be a moot point, obviously. If you are willing to humor me on this, great!
Well, if it’s “polish” we’re talking about, I’m lost here. I sent a couple friendly, empathetic but certainly not “polished” kids to a couple fairly top schools. In fact I think they’re still pretty ragged around the edges (just like their parents!)
Anyway, even if 50 posters wrote something, most (and that includes hs kids) don’t necessarily know, on a forum of this sort. Some know some pieces, few can speak to the whole.
In my example, there were 2 issues. The student said he didn’t like group projects at a college that encourages a lot of group work; and the student called his classmates “slackers that that slow him down”. He might have other parts of his application that pushed the net evaluation to be positive, such as out of classroom ECs that demonstrate the desired “collaborative & cooperative spirit.” Also note that this is only one of 9 personality/character criteria MIT said they are looking for. He may have excelled in many of the other criteria, even if he didn’t demonstrate collaborative & cooperative spirit, and done well overall in the personality/character evaluation. The MIT page summarizes what they are looking for with the statement below.
While it does take a certain tact to not make harmful comments in the application and interview and/or “polish” to present yourself in a way that fits with what the college is looking for. It’s also relevant to find a college that truly is a good fit, rather than present yourself in a misleading way. If you abhor group projects, then you probably aren’t going to be happiest at a college with a lot of group projects; If you are extremely shy and hate speaking up in class, then you probably aren’t going to like a LAC that emphasizes a lot of class participation; … Many posters may disagree with MIT’s evaluation criteria or other college’s, and that’s perfectly fine. They have the option to apply elsewhere, if they think they’d be happier at a different college, and/or prefer that college’s admission criteria.
I think that when colleges “indicate” are looking for applicants with good “social skills” - they meaning they are looking for NICE kids who are well regarded by others. How a student is regarded by their peers / teachers can often be “teased out” of LOR’s, or comments by HS Counselors.
You make a good point, lookingforward, in #34. As I think about it, I cannot recall a post by anyone who (presumably) worked in an admissions office of a “top” college and used the term “social skills” per se. There have been posts by adults who (presumably) interview for “top” colleges who did use the term, to the best of my recollection. Then there have been posts by (presumably) successful applicants who have written about the importance of social skills. I don’t read much into the posts by high school students, who are still in the midst of applying.
I have the suspicion that “polish” tends to be less important for a career in STEM fields than in other areas (people needing venture capital excepted). If you go to the San Francisco airport on the day that people are flying to Boston for the start of a Gordon conference, I believe that you can identify many of the scientists without working too hard at it. I’m pretty sure I can and have done it. (They mostly head for the pick-up points of the Gordon conference buses.) One of my colleagues remarked that when he went to the airport to pick up a visiting scientist he had never met, he looked for the person who came off the airplane looking like she was ready to start an argument. He guessed right. Many people really admire the late Steve Jobs; I admire Steve Wozniak. These are anecdotes, but the underlying pattern is there, in my view. So I am still somewhat uncomfortable with the thought of STEM colleges using selection criteria that people in science fields generally would not meet. (Maybe they don’t use those criteria.) But I am hard pressed to come up with a scientist I know who has a truly good sense of humor. (Kind of good, yes, but truly good? Probably not.)