<p>There was a parent on this site whose S was admitted to Pomona and Yale and chose Pomona. His sibling attended Yale so he and the family were quite familiar with it.</p>
<p>Sean, all ya need now is a goat and no natural athletic ability and you are in. ;)</p>
<p>Curmudgeon - but the CC legend lives on: A girl raised goats to get into Yale! </p>
<p>Hope she is happy at Yale Med.</p>
<p>ProudmomofS - What number was Duke in the choice list? Brown seemed pretty hard this year. A local student got into Duke, Chicago and several top 20 schools but not Brown despite doing ED. Another went to UT Plan II after getting into Harvard.</p>
<p>Bay, the funny thing is that – as a mom – I absolutely hated the town of New Haven, and would have worried about him the entire time had he been there. I just thought it was a yukky place to be.</p>
<p>And as a mom, I felt very comfortable in Claremont CA…and havent worried at all about the safety/security of his surroundings.</p>
<p>But HE wanted Yale…so of course I wanted for him what he had determined to be his #1. Why/how kids determine their #1s is as individual as they all are. Some we as parents find as excellent reasons, some we find stupid. (Love the thread on “stupidest reasons your kid crossed a college off the list”).</p>
<p>@texaspg…amazingly Duke wasnt that high. You will recall I posted earlier that he was denied Yale & Stanford, WL’d (no avail) Princeton & Brown. So it was Pomona next. After that, the next order would have likely been UNC (they gave him a full ride scholarship offer in their Honors program), then maybe Duke. His interest in Duke at the end of the day (decision time) was less than I thought it would be, likely because he had spent 3 summers there in their TIP program throughout high school, so it probably had a “been there/done that” feel to him at the end of the day.</p>
<p>Truthfully I dont know how he would have teed up between UT Plan II/ Davidson/ / Boston U. … we were waiting on pins/needles hoping for a WL call, and beyond that the conversations focused on Pomona & UNC. </p>
<p>I know that UT Plan II is extraordnarily well regarded in certain circles. I also know someone who was admitted Harvard, denied Plan II. But the thing about my kid–he may have been born in Texas, but he is decidedly NOT a Texan. He fancies himself a citizen of the world. He really wanted to leave Texas, spread his wings. UT is also football crazy as you know, not his thing. It was always a backup school, and one his CG was pushing him to apply to as much as anything.</p>
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<p>Well I have two dogs that are the size of goats and I live near a pig farm! I played JV Tennis for two days! I’m a lock :)</p>
<p>
Thanks. She is loving her life as a MS2. Enjoys her classes and her classmates, and has found a research mentor!! Her own little goofball heaven. ;)</p>
<p>As to “the Have”- when you go to UG in Memphis, you learn how to deal with “gritty urban”. She enjoys it up there in Yankee land.</p>
<p>@texaspg…meant to also say: I also know a kid who walked away from a baseball scholarship @ Stanford after 1 year, to come back to Texas and go to Plan II. Had a brother a year older there, and he missed Texas. Just didn’t like StanfordCali.</p>
<p>Proudmom - Does your school send kids to Europe? Lot of Houston private schools’ kids end up going to Europe, predominantly those doing IB but it is not unheard of at regular private schools too.</p>
<p>For some reason I thought Pomona is a girls school. Girls that go to all girl private schools around are always talking about Pomona!</p>
<p>Scripps is the girls college that is part of the 5 college Claremont Consortium, along with Pomona, Harvey Mudd, Claremont and Pitzer.</p>
<p>@texaspg…My son went to an all boys private school in Dallas, and no one in his graduating class has gone to a European college that I am aware of. Class of about 90, I can’t quote all their destinations off the top of my head, but I do know that none in the top 15-20 graduating in the class did. One of his buddies is waiting a year before starting college in 2012, and is spending this year in Israel. </p>
<p>Pomona stats by gender are pretty even…51% male, 49% female. Maybe the girls are thinking they like those odds? (Hopefully they wont be majoring in math, haha).</p>
<p>To return, as promised, to the question raised by epiphany in posts #970 and #971:</p>
<p>Here is a statement by Mikalye, post #77 on the thread “Why was he rejected?” on the MIT forum:</p>
<p>“I have met the brilliant student who was only vaguely human, who spent spare time reading textbooks, had not made any friends per se in school, and was happiest when he did not have to interact with other human beings. There are quite a few of those folks out there. Many of them do very well in some of the exams, and indeed in things like the most important mathematics qualifiers which are essentially solitary pursuits. Most, but not all, of these students do not get into MIT. . . . Someone who has not managed to make one identifiable friend in all of high school, is highly unlikely to have much impact on campus and may struggle on their lack of social skills alone, regardless of how brilliant they are.”</p>
<p>As background information Mikalye has stated that he/she interviews international students for MIT. While this is a volunteer position, it does give Mikalye an official tie to MIT, and the role has not been disputed on the MIT forum, as far as I have seen.</p>
<p>I find it alarming, really, to have a person described as “only vaguely human.”</p>
<p>The people so distressingly categorized by Mikalye were not the “he” of the thread title (“Why was he rejected?”), so the comment was not directed at a specific individual. Still this is the sort of rhetoric that has been used historically in campaigns of oppression, so I think it is best avoided even in jest, to put it mildly.</p>
<p>No one officially connected with MIT repudiated the statement. Mikalye did not apologize. I seem to have been the only one who called him on it directly, although others (including collegealum314) did argue that people skills could be developed over time, and that students might mature unevenly.</p>
<p>This is not directly to the point, but here is part of the next post by Mikalye on the thread mentioned above, post #83:</p>
<p>“If I meet a monosyllabic kid, whose eyes never leave his shoes, and who seems to have never encountered soap, I will report this to MIT, but I do not know about their 5 patents and 3 solo articles in Nature written while in high school. Similarly I have had the experience of meeting kids who I thought were wonderful, without knowing about their dire SAT results. That being said, if you cannot communicate socially and have never encountered soap, then you better well have stunning achievements elsewhere.”</p>
<p>A few aspects of this post also bother me: first, the phrase “who seems never to have encountered soap.” Mikalye interviews international students, and the interviews are in their home countries to the best of my knowledge. The possible difficulties of the students’ journeys (within their countries) to the interview didn’t seem to be acknowledged.</p>
<p>In the US, there has been a history of difference in the rules of polite eye contact in different ethnic groups. The prevailing mode is something that one can observe and adopt, when one is in a different culture. I think one needs to be sensitive to this, even at the same time that I understand that it’s disconcerting to talk with someone who is looking at his shoes, and there could be a reasonable worry about how fast the person would accomplish the observe/adapt adjustment. Still, it’s a little reminiscent of the joke that you can tell an extroverted engineer/mathematician because he looks at <em>your</em> shoes in a conversation.</p>
<p>Then there is the question about how monosyllabic the student really is. It is not clear to me whether the interviews were conducted in English or in the students’ native languages. I am able to read one language aside from English, and could write up the solutions of problem sets, or even write papers (a bit laboriously, with a dictionary at hand). However, my ability to get my personality across in that language is sadly limited. This probably wouldn’t continue if I were immersed in the language, though.</p>
<p>Here is another comment from the same thread on the MIT forum, this time by a student (seems likely anyway), so I will include the post numbers, but not the username:</p>
<h1>35: “Perhaps to many they would like MIT to turn into such a place, but I know I speak for many of the students that we cannot imagine what this place will become if all we had were academic geniuses and test-taking machines that churn out 2400s.”</h1>
<h1>40, by the same poster:</h1>
<p>“And when I mention machines, I mean students that were literally pushed to produce 800s on every section of the SAT who did nothing but study in high school.”</p>
<p>Here is another, from a thread in the Parents Forum, “Another applicant rejected from all the Ivies.” The student had scored 2400/36 and had strong science-related EC’s.</p>
<p>Post #80: “The student comes across as someone who probably was a grade grubbing, score grubbing, resume polishing robot with the controls held by Dad who was overseeing the student’s every move, and probably would have been visiting teachers who gave any grade less than an A. I don’t know the student or his dad, so clearly this is conjecture. However, I think that admisisons officers for places like H and Y and interviewers would read things the same way.”</p>
<p>This one was a post by Northstarmom. Generally, I respect her posts. Some of the earlier posts on the thread may have “pressed her buttons.” That certainly happens to us all. I didn’t see the indicators of grade-grubbing or robotic behavior in the descriptions of the student, his own statements, or the newspaper article about him.</p>
<p>QM,
I agree that some of Mikale’s descriptions are unfortunate, but maybe this is where the missions of public v. private universities part ways. I tend to think of public u’s as existing for the purpose of educating all of its residents, regardless of their social skills, to the extent possible. On the other hand, private u’s look for students who will make a special impact on campus and contribute positively to the u’s reputation. I can understand how a student who cannot carry on a conversation with eye-contact or bathe sufficiently would not be attractive to private u’s, when there are thousands of other applicants who can do this easily.</p>
<p>In summary, I would particularly like to draw attention to the characterizations “only vaguely human,” “machines,” and "grade grubbing, score grubbing, resume polishing robots . . . "</p>
<p>There are other threads with the “machine” and “robot/robotic” characterization. In a number of cases, the disappointed students have drawn negative commentary by criticizing affirmative action. So the negative characterizations are occurring in a context where they are more understandable. Similarly, Jian Li’s lawsuit against Princeton certainly drew a lot of flak; the lawsuit was pointless, in my opinion. </p>
<p>In the recent thread started by a group of Asian students who were asking whether there was discrimination against Asians in admissions to top schools, I thought that the OPs started out by focusing on the treatment of Asians. At least initially, they were not pointing at students in any special categories, just questioning whether Asians were treated on an even footing with others. This also raised hackles and quickly drew fire as a probable sub rosa attack on affirmative action. I’m not sure whether that was justified. By my reading, I thought they felt that they would have been better off applying as “white.”</p>
<p>When I try to search for “robot” or “robotic,” I also get all the items about students participating in robotics–of which there are many! So I haven’t found an efficient way to locate them, but Northstarmom didn’t coin the description.</p>
<p>Note: Cross-posted with Bay.</p>
<p>Just to add complete trivia to this…
My husband and I met working in the Dean’s office at MIT as undergrads. We used a primitive, card coded system to match incoming freshman with advisors. Freshman could identify 5 codeable entries- we suggested categories related to academic or extracurricular interests, but these being incoming Freshman at MIT- the answers could be a bit ‘random’ at times. We had a great time coding things such as ‘goat keeper’, for example. </p>
<p>But, the most priceless was the freshman who asked for an advisor we could match with his ‘hygiene optional’ approach. Fortunately, we knew just the faculty person to match him with… </p>
<p>By the way, what is this thread about?</p>
<p>Hi, robyrm2: I have been posting a few comments from other threads, to illustrate my remark that students with top stats who have been rejected from “top” schools are characterized as “robotic” or worse, since epiphany hadn’t observed it, and asked for examples.</p>
<p>Perhaps I should not have included the “soap” comment, because it’s serving as a distractor from the main point. However, it would not surprise me if an applicant with a severely limited budget, who had to travel several hundred miles across India by train/bus when it’s hot, and who perhaps had to cover the last part of the trip to the interview locale on foot, might not arrive in the best of shape.</p>
<p>I’d like to keep the focus on “only vaguely human,” “machines”, and “robots” as characterizations.</p>
<p>There was a thread started on 04.22.08 on the Parents Forum entitled Another applicant rejected from all Ivies. The boy, Navonil Ghosh, had a SAT score of 2400 and a number of other accomplishments. He was rejected from MIT, Harvard, Stanford and several other elite institutions, although he also gained admission at a couple of other fine universities, including Caltech. The boys father had gone to the local newspaper expressing his disappointment about his sons rejections.</p>
<p>Below are a handful of descriptive quotes, mainly from parents, about the boy:</p>
<p>featureless drone;
robot like;
a Stepford applicant;
no life, just a resume;
boring Indian science geek;
the student comes across as someone who probably was a grade grubbing, score grubbing, resume polishing robot with the controls held by Dad
</p>
<p>This sort of attitude towards a 17 year-old boy was displayed by only a small minority of posters. At the time it seemed to me as if there was a gang leader, and re-reading parts of that thread, confirms my initial impression.</p>
<p>That thread made a huge impression on me at the time. We had just realised that our youngest son was serious about pursuing an undergraduate degree in the US and I was exploring the admissions procedure.</p>