Ohiodad- I get your frustration. Really I do. But you are making it really complicated.
There’s no sorting stick in adcom land that allows you to separate the Columbia kids from the Dartmouth kids. Even though the popular wisdom on CC is that no kid could possibly love both schools unless he/she was the ultimate prestige-%^&*, I’ve known plenty of kids in real life who loved both. The schools are MORE similar than dis-similar, once you get past the weather and the skiing.
Same as JHU and Brown, even though Brown gets tagged as the place for the Boho’s who are constantly protesting and marching, and JHU is for the pre-med grinds.
Etc. you get my point. A kid who is academically talented, who has challenged himself/herself intellectually to whatever degree is possible based on life circumstances (and this is where the affluent kids frequently fall down) and has an interesting story to tell- should apply broadly and cover off reach/match/safety or whatever terminology you want making sure there are affordable options in the mix.
Kid doesn’t have an interesting story to tell? Add a few “heavy stats” schools where just having high grades and high scores is generally enough. Kid isn’t academically talented? Don’t bother with the elites unless you are Malia Obama (even though it seems that in fact she IS quite the student) or Bill Gate’s kid.
Don’t encourage your kid with the 650 SAT scores to fall in love with Yale. Don’t encourage your kid with the 780 SAT scores who doesn’t have anything else going for him/her to fall in love with Yale. Don’t encourage your kid who wants lots of sunshine and good surfing to fall in love with Yale.
Don’t assume Brown wouldn’t be interested in a great, activated artsy-boho type,with multiple interests across disciplines. The kid whose main deal is she makes macrame bracelets, not so much. This is what some of us mean by looking beyond the obvious. She wouldn’t have to have awards for the macrame, either. Or have sold them to raise pennies for some distant orphanage.
Let’s say I was editor of the school newspaper. I can talk about this in so many ways:
Following my lifelong passion / dream
Leading a team of junior editors
Working collaboratively with others on the paper
Helping other writers improve / being of service to them
Pursuing social justice through the articles I write
Learning more about myself through the process / self discovery
Demonstrating leadership qualities
Fulfilling responsibility, being dedicated, determined, nothing slips through the cracks
challenging my own thinking - I started out thinking A about a topic and now I think B
Advancing the status quo
Challenging the status quo
Working hard / playing hard
Deep dives into intellectual topics of interest
I just brainstormed that in 2 minutes, but those are examples of how one THING could be used to demonstrate a bunch of different VALUES. It’s not about the newspaper at all - it’s about what I demonstrate about what I value through how I talk about my newspaper experience.
I know I said I would quit, but I believe you are the only one conflating values with activities. And as far as Marketing 101, I am not a wiz bang marketing guru, but I am pretty sure that there is a difference between affirmatively reaching out to a wide group of people to sell a brand by pretty obviously targeted television commercials and asking people to define admissions priorities from who a college got to come speak at commencement, or what clubs are advertised in the UC. Surely you can see the difference? And sure, some of the marketing materials/web sites are “broadcast” in a sense, same as tv commercials. But there is far more uniformity in the viewbooks and brochures sent by highly selective schools than there is in Saab and BMW commercials.
@lookingforward, forgive me, but all those generalities you are highlighting would seem to apply to essentially any UMC kid applying to any one of 30 or more schools. While I get the whole idea that highly selective schools want kids who are prepared to and can function on their own intellectually, I am not seeing how that jibes with the “you have to know what each school is looking for” advice.
Ohiodad, I have twins. One of mine went to Northwestern, the other to Wellesley. Now, obviously both of those schools look for capable students yada yada. But what those institutions each valued - and what each kid them emphasized in his/her application - simply could not be more different. These were entirely different schools, with self-concepts that were very different. Things NU says about itself Wellesley would never dream of saying about itself, and vice versa. Of course there are shared values of excellence and intelligence and leadership and diversity and so forth. But they have different characters / personalities.
"And as far as Marketing 101, I am not a wiz bang marketing guru, but I am pretty sure that there is a difference between affirmatively reaching out to a wide group of people to sell a brand by pretty obviously targeted television commercials and asking people to define admissions priorities from who a college got to come speak at commencement, or what clubs are advertised in the UC. Surely you can see the difference? "
You know all those communication studies classes we all laughed at in college as being laughably easy? (Don’t worry, I did too.) Well, maybe they were onto something and they weren’t as dumb as we all thought. I’ve had a lot of this training through my real-life marketing and ad agency experience, and it all falls under communication theory and persuasion.
I feel like this almost begs the question. To use your car analogy, are HYPS more like Tesla vs. Hummer vs Porsche, or is it more like Lexus vs. Infinti vs. Acura ? I think it’s more like Lexus vs. Infiniti vs. Acura, which at least to me seem pretty similar in terms of their marketing and positioning. Yeah, sure maybe Lexus is a bit more sporty, but we’re really talking 3 peas in a pod compared to Tesla vs. Hummer.
If you were auditioning to buy a Lexus vs. Infiniti vs. Acura, you’re far better off working on showing you are a great, safe driver than on trying to read tea leaves to find out the nuances of what each of the three brands is looking for.
Are highly selective colleges looking for very different traits? Although in some cases I’m sure it’s true, I still think this is being exaggerated for cases like @Ohiodad51 's Harvard vs. Princeton vs. Yale.
It’s true that some colleges have a distinctive “type”. But that doesn’t necessarily mean that it’s because the admissions office is looking for that type. Other reasons
It could be that in the past a school just happened to make investments in certain areas that now give it a “type”. For example, over a 100 years ago Mr. Wharton gave Penn money to build a business school. Now, Penn has a much stronger pre-professional image in part because of Wharton.
No surprise, kids with a strong interest in business are going to want to apply to Penn.
It could be something as simple as this - kids who fit the current “type” end up liking the school when they visit, so they apply there. The applicant pool is then filled with these types, and this creates a self-perpetuating cycle.
Honestly, for all we know the admissions office at Brown is sick of the fact that they attract so many “activated artsy-boho” types. Maybe applying as that type actually hurts an applicants chances, at least when the final hard decisions are being made?
Another example. No secret that Yale has been trying to attract more top-flight STEM types. But do the really good STEM kids who get admitted to Yale attend? The answer is more often “no” than Yale’s 70% yield rate would indicate. Even though Yale is a great, prestigious school, they’ve been working on this for at least 10 years … and if a school like Yale has to work that hard to change the composition of their class, then I can only imagine how hard it is for other schools.
Brown is not sick of the activated arts-boho types. But the bar for being one of them is higher than it is for a kid with strong math chops who is interested in big data. Not the academic bar per se- high for both. But the “human interest” angle.
Blossom - I am not advocating contorting round pegs to fit square holes. You know me enough to know that
I am advocating that it’s incumbent upon the applicant to think conceptually about how best to talk about her strengths in the context of what the college appears to value. Not to lie or misrepresent them.
And I’ve got no problem zigging where others zag. One of my kids wrote an extremely daring essay. The kind that’s routinely advised against on CC - a very deliberate high-risk gamble. Because the unorthodoxy of the topic itself reflected an aspect that the school cherished about itself.
I think a Young Republicans club member could write a kick-butt essay for, say, Oberlin.
I agree. Just to give a concrete example. My younger son did a little project for the neighborhood association archiving their papers. (It’s an interesting neighborhood as it fought redlining in the 1950s.) My son got intrigued though by two other stories - one had to do with a fight about open classrooms and another about whether the school playground should be open after hours. He described what he found out using these primary sources and how realizing how incomplete the story was made him feel like a real historian. The project wasn’t important in the grand scheme of things. It was the way he looked at it as a future academic, his insights, that made that essay (IMO) more interesting than most.
His grades and scores weren’t perfect, but he was able to show that he was a smarter and more interesting kid than his stats.
“those generalities you are highlighting would seem to apply to essentially any UMC kid applying to any one of 30 or more schools”
The issue is who’s showing the attributes those schools look for. Many kids expect adcoms to read minds- as if: *oooooh, she’s editor, she must be mentoring./i
Many kids, eg, write their big essay on trivial issues, off track, not relevant. What do you think that conveys, in a fierce competition for astute thinkers and doers? Not to mention, the missed chance to note relevant attributes.
You don’t just walk in, toss your resume and say, here I am take me. The app/supp isn’t about writing off the top of your head (not if you want to compete against tens of thousands.) What other tough competition would you do that for?
All of this is speculation and assumption. Many kids with great GPAs, test scores, ECs and other wonderful attributes likely write mundane essays and still get in to super elite schools or they don’t. Others may write a fabulous essay and still get rejected by their top choice school. I am just not sure the essay is as make or break as many think it is . Especially when schools know that many high achieving, well off kids get essay help, be it in their English honors class, from their school GC, or from a highly paid consultant. I am not convinced that the colleges are always able to distinguish an essay that is 100% kid-written from one that had help. And it sounds like, if this thread is correct, that kids who do not get help on their essays are not going to get into a top choice school (or will have a much harder time).
One of mine wrote an essay on a topic that, if I had known about CC at at the time, would be considered a bad choice. He was not applying to top 20 schools, but did just fine in admissions one notch below that.
Sigh. Go ahead and do what you want, then. Believe it doesn’t matter. Rest your proof on some anecdotes. Go for it. Or hey, wait, maybe it’s not so hard to dig a little deeper,especially if you think you’re top quality for a tippy top college and care about an admit.
^I think @lookingforward is right particularly for those who made into many top schools except for the tippy top few. OTOH these kids may not be crazy enough about the tippy top.
But I thinking @lookingforward IS taking about the tippy tops! It is surreal how this thread has evolved into an “essay talk”. Do good essays (and how the “total package” is put together) help? Certainly. But it’s just too common to be as effective as a “hook” like legacy. There’s no reason to believe legacy get in because they write better essays. There’s no reason to believe that AOs put more weight on essays than any hook or even stats. Strange notion…
I disagree. I think the ability to write an essay that shows that you really “get” what the school is all about is precisely the advantage that legacies have. (That’s not to say that all or even most legacies can do that well – it’s to say that the personalized knowledge of the school can enable someone to do so.)
Here’s an example from S’s experience. He happened to spend a few summers there taking summer classes – not because he was a legacy kid, but because it offered programs that were interesting to him and what kid didn’t want to have the fun of being on a college campus for the summer. I suggested to him that he leverage his on-campus experience in his essay. One of his first drafts almost sounded like a travelogue – “I remember sitting at x location, going to lectures at y hall, hanging out with my friends at z location.” OK, fine, that would demonstrate he knew the physical campus more than the average applicant, but so what? How we counseled him was … ok, now there is a specific element that this school prides itself on. Demonstrate that as you were sitting at x location, going to lectures at y hall, hanging out with your friends at z location, you were engaging in the kind of dialogue and discussion that you know this place values. In other words, your familiarity with the actual physical campus merely serves as a jumping off point to demonstrate the values you embody and why having you on campus will be of benefit to campus life as a whole. See the difference between those things?
