<p>kjdflkdsjfldkasjflkdjl k I GOT INNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNNN!!!</p>
<p>congrats rockettgerl!!!<br>
I guess if it got to FL… then… bad news for GA</p>
<p>In another thread we figured that they mail all decision at the same time, but the acceptance go priority and the rest regular… so yeah, not good news for me :p</p>
<p>I only appied to two reach schools, Princeton and Yale, but I’ll get rejected by both and go to U of Nebraska-Lincoln… orlds apart… puts me in my place</p>
<p>Looking at this board I am not sure people applies to enough schools. Rejection from HYPS should be assumed, and a lot of other schools like Duke, Penn, Dartmouth, Brown should be set up along the way as even they are getting very random in their admissions with vrazily low acceptance rates.</p>
<p>yeah I didn’t apply to many schools… had I had a different family I would’ve :p</p>
<p>w0000t THIS is my CLUB!!!</p>
<p>rejected from harvard, yale, MIT
accepted by PRINCETON!!!
now i have hope for my dream school: STANFORD</p>
<p>honestly, i was really assuming i would be rejected. i stopped at the post office after visiting barnes & noble to check out the rankings of Penn, Columbia, and Carnegie Mellon, because i could have swore I would have to accept one of those. princeton makes me =) !</p>
<p>Rejected by Harvard (deferred EA) and Yale, leaving Princeton as a last best hope. If Princeton rejects, it’s between Cambridge, Caltech, and Columbia. I suppose that’s a fairly good set of choices, but all these rejections (MIT and Stanford rejected too) are really depressing. I also agree with haosquared, it’s better to have bad news than to speculate about it.</p>
<p>cambridge is just as elite as those american universities, yo. you just hafta take a little more trouble travelling.</p>
<p>I live in Tanzania, so it’s actually less trouble travelling. And yeah, Cambridge is just is good and better in some ways, I think US admissions departments are just absolutely insane. (Who the heck thought of using extracurricular sport and hobby activities as a basis for admission to an academic institution?) But Cambridge has it’s drawbacks too, and I’d like to have a real alternative. And if I do go to Cambridge, I’d like to be able to think that I went there because it was better, not because the top US schools wouldn’t take me.</p>
<p>umm, princeton is not my last hope as I just got rejected</p>
<p>i support the use of extracurriculars in admissions because leadership for example cannot be quantified by test scores. the extra curriculars are a very important part of culture here and their use in elite US school admissions is a big reason for the prosperity of the United States. if someone wants to debate me on that, lets start a new thread.</p>
<p>Okay, where should that thread be started? A thread full of people who were (generally unfairly) rejected by top US universities doesn’t seem like such a bad place to debate US admissions policies.</p>
<p>University is not about leadership, university is about academics. Furthermore, “leadership” in high school and extracurriculars usually just means winning a popularity contest, and has very little to do with who is actually a better leader (this occasionally applies in the post-college world as well, e.g. the current president of the US). I also fail to see how filling elite colleges full of football captains, class presidents, or even people who do a lot of community service has anything to do with the prosperity of the US. Most of the people currently driving US prosperity were admitted to college before extracurriculars were such a big factor. The lack of focus on academics and intellectualism (and, conversely, the focus on things like extracurriculars) in US education is in my view at the root of the vast majority of the problems with the US, from stupid presidents to trade deficits to religious fanatics who think the world is 6000 years old.</p>
<p>Feel free to start a thread somewhere else if you like.</p>
<p>Disclaimer: I am actually an American, and lived there for most of my life, so my US-bashing is not just prejudice.</p>
<p>I would tend to disagree, not with your angst, because I feel it as well, but with your line of reasoning.</p>
<p>MIT, CalTech, and numerous other schools could care about EC’s if you have a 1600, perfect GPA and can prove you’re a freakin’ GENIUS</p>
<p>The others (Harvard, Yale) orginally stemmed from ruling class or religious institutions, for future leaders. As such, now that they are meritocratic they are searching for individuals with a SPARK that will make them inspire, lead, and drive the future of the human race.</p>
<p>MY complaint falls along the lines of social justice. My favorite quote of all time is, “Give me a place to stand, and I will move the world”. The moral? Not everyone gets to stand up or on the shoulders of giants, not everyone has the same chance.</p>
<p>College and University Admissions in the US is generational. Your parents have to be in the right place and of the right caliber if you are really going to have the social mobility to get into the TOP universities.</p>
<p>We need a more fair line than either MIT or Harvard use. It’s not only about EC’s and it’s not only about brains or edumication. Yet, we have no objective way to measure the soul, so this is what we get.</p>
<p>And my children might do what I have not.</p>
<p>
You don’t prepare to lead the world by winning at sports, being a concert violinist, or being president of a bunch of clubs.</p>
<p>At any rate, top universities shouldn’t just try to guess who the next world leaders are going to be. It is the responsibility of the most prestigious universities to pick people who SHOULD be the next world leaders, and then help and prepare them to achieve that. The world needs intelligent, intellectual leaders, and if colleges had thought about that a few decades ago we’d be in better shape now.</p>
<p>
My father went to Harvard, didn’t do me much good. I don’t think things like social position and legacy make as much difference as people think, anymore. While this has hurt me in this specific case, I am in general happy to see that that particular form of non-meritocracy is declining.</p>
<p>Let’s not talk about Harvard and Yale. Instead lets brood on how much we want to go to Princeton :)</p>
<p>
but then our schools will be filled with twitchy, amherst types!! haha juuuuuuuust kiddin
you cannot choose people who sit in their rooms studying all day over someone who actually has a life. its just weird. you know it.</p>
<p>u know leaders are good, but i think these places need some followers too. not everyone can be a leader. i have to say that i am proudly a follower. (not as in oh i do what everyone else does, peer pressure type way). but i generally don’t have problems taking directions from people or letting someone else take the lead if they want it. :)</p>
<p>yay for no clubs and no class office holdings!</p>
<p>The premise of “leadership” seems to be central to this debate. You propose that leaders can be trained, and maybe sometimes they can be. But for the best leaders, it is natural. I would like to cite Bill Clinton. The aura he has was one not taught by any teachers, but a product of a naturally given personality. The elite universities use leadership in high school as an indicator of the leadership skills of an individual. While the system is not perfect, it does in most cases choose the right people to fulfill these universities’ objectives: not to produce geniuses, but to produce world leaders.</p>
<p>A bit of generalization: The educational systems of China and India are very much meritocracies, driven by test scores. They produce intelligent hard-workers, not leaders. The U.S. economy thrives on these people not as business leaders, but as the workers that keep U.S. economy going. The U.S. system produces leaders who have a natural aptitude for politics, and so the U.S. has been very successful in generating spheres of influence around the world in no small part thanks to the educational system that encourages those who can manipulate others. So while we outsource jobs to India and China, the headquarters remains in the United States. (note, I am the son of Indian immigrants. and it IS possible for anyone from any background to gain admission into the elite universities, although it may be harder from some backgrounds than others. )</p>
<p>And the role of athletes: school spirit. It is a way of building pride in an institution and keeping campus life good. Perhaps they are not as functionally useful as intelligent students, but they play their own special role in college life.</p>
<p>Leaders are overrated. People should think for themselves. :D</p>
<p>I agree that academics should be the most important factor in determing admittance. Colleges look at ECs because they want to create an active campus with lots of clubs and groups, which are considered important parts of the college experience. Something about an active campus just draws in applications from the overachieving “I’m president of five clubs, valedictorian, and a world renowned violinst!” crowd, which is what colleges want. Also, a fair number of ECs are academically based, like math or science competitions, so they’re not as worthless as you might think.</p>