<p>Pizzagirl, since you asked “so what?” about my remark, in #858, a point that I have been trying to make is this: When a top student is not accepted at a top school, many posters on CC (not you), fairly quickly start throwing rocks at the student as not really competitive, arrogant, elitist, poor at interviews, weak in essay writing, fixated on rutabagas–you name it. This would not make sense if everyone took your viewpoint about the rejections. </p>
<p>epiphany seems to me to be arguing that the admitted students are just better, in context, considering the mission of the school (etc.) Maybe I am misrepresenting her position? </p>
<p>At some point, I will mention a few qualms about admissions at MIT and Stanford, but perhaps I should save those for a non-Ivy thread.</p>
<p>And no, I think that an applicant’s trying to shape him/herself into what the admissions committees probably want is a bad idea, and lacking in integrity.</p>
<p>I remarked in several posts that I think that most people are complex and multi-faceted. It’s not dishonest to highlight certain aspects of one’s genuine character. [And anyway, a student apparently has to highlight something, since the Common App is short–and according to one of the posters, it’s recently become shorter.]</p>
<p>I would hope that Debi Thomas learned more about teamwork from her medical team than from her sports team. </p>
<p>But don’t you think she learned something about dedication from her team sport in high school or college, as well? I do. She learned about hard work and failures and accomplishments, how to work with others in a way that could help build her team. </p>
<p>Sometimes you win. Sometimes you lose. Just like in life. </p>
<p>Most of us would say that what we learned in college or high school merely set the stage for the rest of our lives. Even in STEM fields, none of us stand alone. Our efforts are improved by other’s research and hard work. Sometimes it’s a team and sometimes it’s an individual effort. One is not better than another.</p>
<p>When my STEM son was a robotics kid in high school, he learned a lot working with his team of peers and mentors. Not everyone had the same opinion on what prototype they should build for the type of competition they were to be a part of. They worked hard and experienced failures before they experienced successes. And when that sweet little robot went to competition, it outshone many others and looked a little like a running back on a football field.</p>
<p>I am not a football fan, either. </p>
<p>It was grace and elegance and lots of hours with little sleep to get that machine to do the task they wanted it to do. </p>
<p>Whether it’s a robotics team or a soccer team or a math team, the kids learn valuable lessons which will help them throughout life. </p>
<p>Each one of those kids has something amazing to offer a university. Thankfully, admissions committees know this.</p>
<p>What I interpret epiphany is saying is slightly different. It is that the admissions decision that seems “wrong” on the outside (Little Johnny 2400 didn’t get in, but Bobby 2200 did!! Life’s not faaaaaiiiiir, especially if Bobby is really Roberto!) may indeed be very “right” when viewed in the entire context of both the student’s file, AND what the institution itself is trying to accomplish. What LJ2400 knows about B2200 – or what LJ2400’s parents think they know about B2000 – is likely nowhere close to the full picture that the adcoms saw.</p>
<p>SamuraiLandShark, I was just making a limited point: epiphany suggested (in bold letters) that I didn’t understand about teamwork because I didn’t like sports. I was just remarking that there are other ways to learn teamwork–and your son’s robotics team is a great STEM example.</p>
<p>I think that’s a horrible idea, to grade 18 yo’s based on some presupposition that they darn well better know exactly what it is that they are going to do, and that they’re expected to predict the future of it in some way. I think that’s a very linear, in the box approach – you declared yourself interested in chemistry, you’d darn well better have researched everything about chemistry. No room for serendipity in life, no room for admitting that you don’t know everything. I grow more and more convinced every day that I don’t belong with my fellow math majors anymore. In. The. Box.</p>
<p>Pizzagirl, your interpretation in #864 seems to me to boil down to saying that the admitted students are “just better, in context, considering the mission of the school (etc.);” and the people who question it just don’t have the full picture. </p>
<p>That seems different (to me) from saying that an equally good admitted class or two could be composed of students who were not accepted–which is how I understood your comments (in #852).</p>
<p>(Quotation in the first paragraph comes from my post #861.)</p>
<p>Both of those things can be true. They aren’t contradictory at all. </p>
<p>At elite schools with highly qualified applicant pools, the students they admitted are the ones who *most captured their imaginations * and provided the interesting “soup” that consists of a bouillabaisse of the angular geniuses, the future leaders, the BWRK’s, the quirky whatevers, and so forth. However, if poof, all the admitted students blew away in a puff of smoke and they had to pick a fresh class from the remaining ones, that class would be equally qualified. It might not have the goatherder, or it might have the dolphin-trainer instead of the goatherder, but that wouldn’t make the class as a whole less qualified. </p>
<p>YK, if I go to a bar and meet a guy, and he turns out to be the love of my life, it is both feasible that he was best for me given everything I sought in a man at that point in time, and yet at the same time there were equally “qualified” guys in the bar who would have also been great for me if given a chance, except for whatever reason I didn’t notice or spark to them.</p>
<p>I love my career and I think it fits perfectly with a lot of aspects of what I enjoy doing. That’s not to say that there couldn’t have been other equally good career paths that for whatever reason just didn’t attract my eye when I made the decision to go get my first job out of college.</p>
<p>If there was a team in high school that I could have belonged to, it would have been the Sarcasm Team. I would have enjoyed that. Unfortunately, I had to stick with leadership as my hook. Thank goodness I got into college when I did, because I don’t think I would have, by today’s ridiculous standards. </p>
<p>Many types of teamwork out there. I do have an athletic kid, too, and I don’t see what she does as better, necessarily than a kid who is a STEM kid or a journalist or a musician or an artist. It’s something she does very, very well, and is a two sport athlete. I freely admit that she does have a boost in terms of admission, even though her grades and scores would help her, even without the sport. Her sport is a non-revenue generating one. Having watched and waited with my other kids for their admissions offers, I do understand how some don’t understand why athletes should have this advantage. If she wasn’t an athlete, I suspect she probably would be in a science/math academic club, although robots were definitely not her thing. Her passion is her sport and it’s a time consuming activity that she would love to play in college while pursuing a demanding major. </p>
<p>Also - with regards to building a class. It’s tough to understand how the Ivies and very selective colleges do it - but most of the colleges do insist that they could replace the entire class with another entire class (or two or three) and end up with roughly the same results in terms of diversity of class.</p>
<p>It was mostly a tease; I didn’t intend it as “snide.” I did intend it, however (which is why I used bold letters, which you objected to) to emphasize that sometimes we don’t think about what we write. Why could it possibly be called a committee with all those “ors” you interjected in your list? </p>
<p>Yes, you may “know” intellectually about teamwork (not from sports) but it is not apparent to me, in your total collection of posts on this thread alone, that you understand that an elite university administrative staff is collaborating on a joint mission to construct a composite class, out of hyper-qualified individuals who must nevertheless fulfill wide representation of majors, activities, personal backgrounds, and geographic representations, and that such a purpose is top of mind for that university as a community, regardless of the particular process used to reach those decisions. The people chosen to do this task, however many or few, are chosen because they understand the unified goals of the institution. Despite naturally having personal biases, they attempt (as I’ve said elsewhere, on a much longer thread) to become aware of those biases and to put them aside in service of the university’s mission, flavor, priorities. In fact, they are regularly challenged on their biases, by other committee members.</p>
<p>“better” is a loaded word – possibly implying better students, more intelligent, more academically capable— not something I have stated or implied, nor what college admissions personnel have stated or impied. They have reinforced what SamuraiLandshark just said, and it’s really more about ‘slightly more desirable in the entire mix for the incoming class’ than point-black “better.” “Contributing to a more optimum mix of students given who has applied this year” is more accurate, but much more wordy!</p>
<p>Those admitted are, by definition, “more qualified”. There is no admissions officer anywhere who will admit to admitting “less qualified” applicants above “more qualified” ones and expect to keep their jobs.</p>
<p>^ no, mini, but they will confess to admitting the equally qualified but “better suited this year” and still keep their jobs, because everyone knows how many equally capable there are, outside of the ones receiving offers.</p>
<p>I haven’t read this whole thread so I’m not sure if it is being suggested that Ivies are looking for “fit”. But if so, isn’t there a contradiction in that whole concept and the institutional goal of diversity? Doesn’t the latter mean that schools are seeking students with very different perspectives, tastes, mindsets? Is a kid who thinks that he would be happiest in the open curriculum, artsy environment of Brown necessarily a bad fit for Columbia? Such a student from our school was rejected this year from first-choice Brown and has now headed to Columbia after being taken off the wait list. I am convinced he will adapt, thrive and better contribute to the diversity on campus for being someone who thought Brown would be a better fit.</p>
<p>Is a kid that thinks the gritty urban environment of New Haven is more appealing than the scenic isolation of Ithaca destined to be rejected from Cornell? (or miserable if he ends up there?) If Cornell admissions could detect this preference would they eliminate him from the pool out of hand? and if so, wouldn’t they be missing out on the chance at a kid who brings a different mentality to share with classmates, thereby enriching the experience for all?</p>
<p>I feel that you can’t have it both ways if suggesting adcoms seek diversity AND fit among highly qualified students. It seems the second concept is greatly over-rated and what schools would expect and seek signs of in any top applicant is the ability to adapt.</p>
<p>Wildwood’s point is well taken. To that end, if (say) Oberlin indicates that it loves a certain hippie-liberal-green-tie-dye type of person and hippie-liberal-green-tie-dye kinds of people tend to love Oberlin back, then tons of hippie-liberal-green-tie-dyers will form the applicant pool, and you know who will stand out as the breath of fresh air? The kid who reads the WSJ and worked on the local Republican campaign.</p>
<p>The great majority of kids who go to top schools are highly qualified. But among that pool, there are going to be certain X factors that make one more desirable than the other. And this is not to say that the kid who didn’t get in is unqualified. Some colleges require a “Why ______?” essay, as my son’s school did. For schools he didn’t care about much, his essays tended to be bland and general–his heart just wasn’t in it. For the one school he loved, he wrote passionately about what he loved about their mission, the things about him that were in alignment with their mission, about how this school fit his academic personality, etc., etc. If you read a college’s catalog carefully and do other research, and listen carefully on a college visit, you can be attentive to certain words and ideas that schools use to convey what make them unique. When he went to his interview, he knew what those concepts were and spoke of them. I think that he presented a case not just for who he was, but about how he meshed with this particular school (as a mother, I found this fascinating to watch–especially since he was such a grump, annoyance, and beached jellyfish about so many other schools that we visited, and by the way, did I say he was a pain in the rear?). so yes, I think there are certain ways that certain candidates are going to be more appealing than others, and that schools CAN tell sometimes if a kid is really interested.</p>