You may have been accepted to Duke if you were from Nebraska. Or if you played the French horn instead of running XC. Or if the application reader who picked up your file wasn’t extra tired that day or hadn’t just read an essay that was similar to yours, making you sound less original.
My point is all these things are/were outside your control, there is a bit of a lottery at work in admissions in elite schools, and there is no way to game the system to make just the right tweaks to make sure you get in. So don’t second-guess or question yourself too much.
The one thing you can do is make sure your unique personality shows through in your essay and says something about you that is individual enough that no one else could put their name on the essay. Because it reveals something about the way you think, not just something that happened to you or something you do.
If you have done that, then I think you just have to let the rest go and leave it up to destiny.
My child is like you — a top student, an athlete, and someone who has given a lot of time back to the community. But not a student with a national science award, Olympic medal, patented invention, international nonprofit founder, published researcher, or war refugee.
That means applications that will stand out among most high school classmates, but perhaps not among the 50,000 being reviewed by Stanford. It’s not a personal indictment.
So if an acceptance from a top tier school is not forthcoming, we’ll take it as a sign our student was meant to have a blast (and perhaps less academic peer pressure) at the top of the class in an honors college or other special program at a less selective school. Probably with more scholarship money, which sounds pretty good to us!
I hope you realize this doesn’t take away from any of your amazing achievements or potential. The more you learn about some of your other options, the more you may find to love.