Stanford SCEA? Good stats, but not sure about ECs.

cardfan
Sun, 02 Aug 2009 15:14:50 +0000

tanakeame: You are very articulate and explained your activities well. As you describe your long term interest in science, it makes perfect sense.

Working with a Stanford faculty member on a research project is very impressive. There will be few, if any, other high school applicants that will be able to make this claim.

Now that I see the elaboration of your EC’s, my suggestion is to ignore every bit of advice you receive on CC (including mine) and let your intuition make the decision for essay topics. Heck, my advice is to never come back to this website because it will probably muddy your clear thinking.

My son is a student at Stanford. When he applied he had never heard of CC. He didn’t know anything about URMs and ORMs. He had never even heard of the term “hook” as used ubiquitously here on CC. He had received no advice on what Admissions Officers are looking for and was really not interested in that perspective. My son simply wrote his essays in an honest, straight-forward manner about what he was most passionate about. Same thing for all his friends at Stanford that I have talked to about admissions. None of them thought in terms of trying to second-guess what the Admissions Officers were looking for.

Here on CC, everyone is trying to second-guess what an Admissions Officer wants to read. Everyone is looking for some kind of angle or special advantage.

I say that your best bet is to just be yourself and forget about CC. I predict you get accepted.