<p>None of us has access to the accepted applications at top schools, but I would like to point out that 100% of the classmates my older kids knew who got into the elite schools had all AP’s and honors classes, not to mention summer classes, self-study AP’s, and things like a Saturday science program at an Ivy. In others words, they were the “top” students with high level academics that everyone expected would get in to those schools. They may have been cloud gazing, but if they were it was not using time saved by leaving an AP or two off their schedule. (It was probably due to robbing themselves of sleep>) Now, not all the perceived “top” kids got in to elites, perhaps due to inferior essays or EC’s or a lack of that something interesting, but no one who got in was an academic surprise like Olivia supposedly was (which I doubt), with the exception of some Penn admits which tend to be unpredictable…</p>
<p>I think that lookingforward’s post provides very useful perspective on admissions.</p>
<p>Still, I have to say that I am concerned about the emphasis on “proving out” and “doing what it takes”–which often involves getting out into the adult world at an apprentice-type level–if that is a de facto requirement.</p>
<p>In my opinion, if a student really wants to be a physicist, or an astrophysicist, or a mathematician, “what it takes” is actually a whole lot of study, very far beyond the level required to get A’s in AP courses in most high schools. Often, this does not show up in any interesting accomplishments. “Oh, you worked through all the problems in Goldstein’s Classical Mechanics?” Uh, great, kind of, but what did you <em>do</em>?</p>
<p>As a faculty member, I would be no more interested in hiring an undergrad student research assistant who had washed glassware than one who had not. I think it might be possible for a high-school student to have some “ownership” of a science project in some fields. I’ve seen a few good projects in genetics, for example. But from what I’ve seen in the physical sciences, the projects are generally closely guided, and don’t involve a lot of student input. With one local Intel-recognized project not that long ago, as soon as I saw the title, I could identify the professor with whom the student had worked, and I could trace its intellectual provenance back to 1956. </p>
<p>My colleagues in mathematics tend to have a very difficult time sponsoring undergraduate researchers, let alone high school students. A former math chairperson remarked to me about undergraduate honors students, “What? I’m supposed to send them to the library to prove the easy theorems that are part of the project?” There is an element of “let’s pretend” in that. Admittedly, a few types of mathematics do lend themselves to student research, but usually an experienced adult has to identify the fertile grounds in terms of topics. </p>
<p>What we encourage high-school students to do, by setting the criteria for admissions to the “top” colleges, plays out in many ways in the society. I would like to see a higher proportion of well-qualified American students in the entering graduate classes in the physical sciences at American universities. Currently, the fraction of Ph.D.'s awarded by American universities in physics and chemistry that go to foreign students is roughly 1/2, and I think it’s higher in engineering. It seems to me that this might be connected to devaluing simple scholarship in STEM fields at the high school level.</p>
<p>Since PG is on this thread: I am not arguing for STEM “uber alles,” nor am I suggesting that people who are not particularly interested in STEM subjects should go into them. I have deep respect for the humanities. I just think that encouraging future STEM students to go in a direction that is actually off-track for them is not in their best interests. </p>
<p>My high school kid is currently doing work with a university professor but the research involves media, teaching methods and programming. I do not know about heavy science or math research but anything involving media and programming I can see teenagers having a generational advantage…
This is my kid’s hobby anyway and he would tinker with it no matter what. I have not idea if it will be helpful or not in college admissions. I come from a traditional, strictly academic background and if you asked me I would prefer he hit the books instead and up his gpa. But I need to love him the way he is:)</p>
<p>I’m wondering how my kid can make his absorption in playing Magic seem interesting…he certainly spends enough time on it, and the conversations he and his friends have about their decks, and their strategies, and the storylines, indicate total immersion in another language.</p>
<p>Don’t disagree with you, QM. My advice is the simple starter, yours layers on top of it, perhaps for another point in time when the rubber hits the road. CC kids talk about the “importance” of authoring a study, “curing cancer”- that’s unrealistic. At the other extreme are kids who simply “want” to do something- study astrophysics because it sounds neat. In between, they need kids who somehow pursue their supposed interests in ways that matter. That leaves a lot open. </p>
<p>I have been thinking a little more about the preference for students who get out there and <em>do</em> something. I think that this is likely to sweep up people like the founders of Microsoft, Google, Spanx . . . and all to the good of the universities’ endowments, probably.</p>
<p>Culturally, the preference for <em>doing something</em> makes sense to me, because I think that Americans on the whole tend to be pragmatic. On the other hand, a heavy focus on <em>doing something</em> is not the only route to excellence for a high school student–nor even later on. Francis Crick, in his book “What Mad Pursuit,” remarked that he thought that American scientists worked too much and thought too little.</p>
<p>Suppose that a student is really interested in how epigenetic factors influence gene expression. She reads a lot in that area, and has learned that one of a woman’s two X chromosomes is turned “off” in each cell. Then she thinks about the trisomies (e.g., Down syndrome) and wonders whether it would be possible to turn off the extra chromosome in each cell. Then she gets really serious about the idea, and pursues it through the literature, perhaps keeping a notebook on the papers that she has read. But this has not reached the Intel project stage–not nearly. If this is the student’s “stealth pursuit,” rather than something more active, would the student be recognized with typical American college admissions screening? I am essentially certain that Oxford/Cambridge interviewers would pick this up and be positively impressed, even if the student had not done volunteer work with individuals with Down syndrome, nor washed glassware in a lab.</p>
<p>Is it necessarily the case that the extra-curricular activities that make the most sense to a thoughtful 40-year-old are really the most sensible for 16-year-olds to pursue? All of the 16-year-olds with high aspirations?</p>
<p>Totally off topic, but I thought that marysidney would appreciate this story: At the local high school, there is a major premium on “creative” invitations to the school dances. For the Sadie Hawkins Day dance, one of QMP’s friends planned to invite a young man who was very interested in Magic, the Gathering. So her friends suggested that she take some of his cards and cut them into letter shapes to spell out “Will you go to the dance with me?” This was a joke, obviously, and not put into practice! </p>
<p>"one has hit all the traditionally safe activities, Key Club, student government, volunteering at the food bank, one parent is a teacher, the other in business. Summers are spent at camps held @ Brown or Rice, thinking that will give them an “in”.</p>
<p>^^^ Is this a real scenario? (With strong numbers and essays) the applicant you describe is a shoe-in at the top 10-30 universities in the country. Or is this one of those hyperbolic forum comments?</p>
<p>“You think some paid college adviser is going to sit down with a HS sophomore and tell them the key to getting into HYP is to start baking for the firefighters???”</p>
<p>^^^ I think they’d honestly tell you it’s a little weird and not in the “unique” weird way that you think it is. Some of these things people try to frame as “unique” are so ridiculous. Why is there this abandonment of tutoring inner-city kids? Because it’s blase? It’s an incredibly noble thing to do. Some of you (or your children) are probably getting rejected because you’re overthinking this “game”. If the application and essays don’t appear authentic, i.e., manufactured, that’s likely why your child is getting rejected. Nobody is holding it against them for driving to the ghetto and teaching disadvantaged kids the scientific method. I can assure you.</p>
<p>@linden14, that kid with the “safe” activities is in no way a shoe-in at the top 30 universities, though they’ll have a reasonable chance. My top 1% kid, with strong activities (though all in science) and fabulous SAT scores got rejected from half the school he applied to and he had two safeties on his list. That was not a result that surprised us - he had two excellent choices, but it could have turned out that he was choosing between two safeties.</p>
<p>I don’t disagree with you that the activities have to be unique. I think tutoring inner-city kids would be looked highly on, especially if a kid had something to say about what they learned from it.</p>
<p>As for Quantmech’s laments about sometimes doing research is not really the best way to advance yourself academically I agree. My older son was lucky in a way, that comp sci is a field where you can teach yourself a lot on your own. He also had a bunch of academic things he’d done - Saturday class at Columbia one year on Quantum Physics, lecture series at IBM on a variety of scientific topics. Other communities may have similar opportunities. I can’t speak for other colleges but Harvard says that they pick 200 or so kids purely for strong academics, they aren’t necessarily interesting otherwise. </p>
<p>lookingforward, I am not quite sure what you mean about students “pursuing their supposed interests in ways that matter.” In particular, if I were advising a high-school student who wanted to become a theoretical physicist, then I think the “ways that matter” to that specific pursuit would involve learning as much math and physics as possible. Layers upon layers of inter-related ideas have to be learned, and analytical capabilities have to be acquired before the student can start real, self-directed research. It’s great if the student wants to pursue volunteer activities, science-related or not, but they are not likely to “matter” much in the context of becoming a theoretical physicist. I have the impression that the logical activities for a proto-theoretical-physicist (i.e., just study) would be uninteresting to admissions people, in your view–since the student would not likely be having any real-world impact. Yet simply studying is essential to laying the groundwork for later research. But perhaps I am misinterpreting your view.</p>
<p>Not unconnected to the activities encouraged by top school admission preferences, in my opinion: At my university, the admissions standards for American graduate students in mathematics are set lower than the admissions standards for foreign graduate students, in order to maintain a balance of about 50/50 domestic/foreign in the graduate student body. This also has the effect that the weakest students in the incoming grad class are all American. I see this as a problem. </p>
<p>Q- trying not to get back to our long term chat about the value of individual kids (or a handful of kids.). </p>
<p>My examples were engineering and pre-med. And remember, I’m assuming this is about highly competitives, where the list of applicants is long and filled with 4.0+ kids with APs. </p>
<p>So, a more general question: Are the selection criteria well matched to the proposed fields of the applicants, or are they more generic? Given that a lot of students do change majors, is there not much of an attempt to match the proposed major and the selection criteria? Presumably, in a field such as music, there would be a rather close match.</p>
<p>The only school that required either kid to name a major was Carnegie Mellon - and even at Carnegie Mellon, I think the requirement is that you choose one of their sub-schools, and the School of Computer Science only has one major. My older son put his major on all his applications, my younger son was undecided everywhere but Georgetown.</p>
<p>^^^ Is this a real scenario? (With strong numbers and essays) the applicant you describe is a shoe-in at the top 10-30 universities in the country. Or is this one of those hyperbolic forum comments?</p>
<p>Add in AP courses, and you would certainly think they were a strong candidate, but limit your apps to only Ivies, the state flagship & a school in a rural part of the other coast, & your choices may be the state flagship and the other school.
They also weren’t accepted at any of their graduate school choices, but they have an excellent job in a field that they never even thought about before, so it worked out in the end.</p>
<p>@QuantMech, I agree with you. It’s difficult for a high school student with perhaps a year’s worth of study of the subject matter to make any meaningful contribution. They are generally being told what to do, supervised extremely closely, and there’s someone to pick up the pieces when they don’t show up or have to leave before the work is done. Not to say it can’t be a good experience for the student to see what the field is like. </p>
<p>But to answer your question about the budding theoretical physicist, that kid can distinguish themselves with focused study. I’m not talking about the kid who takes a post-calculus class at a local cc. I’m talking about the kids who are so obsessed with math that they are several years past that point when they apply to college.</p>
<p>I appreciate quantmech’s posts. I have a sneaking suspicion that the lower stress/study less/cultivate interestingness method of gaining admission to the elites is the mediocre American students’ possibly misguided strategy to compete with the more academically dedicated students, which in my town are the first and second generation Asian immigrants. Don’t want to study your brains out night and day like your Chinese and Indian classmates? Chill, gaze at the clouds, and then go study horseshoe crabs or something! Interestingness is conveniently holistic and subjective too, isn’t it? If this method is actually working, could this be how the schools plan to maintain ethnic diversity? </p>
<p>I actually think it’s the kids who get A’s in their sleep who then have time to do other things. At least that was my older son, and why I really, really, really wanted him to get into a college where he’d be challenged all the time, very single day. (And believe me Carnegie Mellon gave him that.) My younger son’s grades weren’t quite as good as older brother’s but he still managed to be in the top 6% of the class and have inordinate amounts of time for playing around. He was taking lots of SATs, but unlike older brother didn’t have the extra academics via summer programs, weekend lectures or being double accelerated in math and science compared to most of even the bright kids at his high school. </p>
<p>In reaction to TheGFG’s recent post: Well, and once the students have read about Amy Chua’s <em>interesting</em> philosophy of child-rearing, who could blame the multi-generational American students for deciding to opt out of that mode of being?</p>
<p>I’m not actually advocating for frenetic studying. Also, to reassure lookingforward, I’ve stopped re-hashing the one particular situation, and I don’t intend to mention USAMO qualification.</p>
<p>lookingforward’s advice, which I think is very likely spot on, seems to me to be that students should validate their “supposed” interests by getting away from the high school environment, out into the adult world, <em>doing</em> something. It doesn’t have to be something major–at least, it doesn’t have to start out that way–but it should be something real, where the student has an impact.</p>
<p>Just my opinion, but this seems to me to sell short the years of learning new things that are required (with very few exceptions) to master fields in science or mathematics. If someone wants to head in that direction, I think that advanced study is actually the better choice for most of the spare time in high school. I mentioned the example of trying to learn as much as possible about silencing chromosomes in the case of trisomy, as an indication of major contributions that could result if a student followed a study-path, as opposed to pursuing various volunteer work. (Another disclaimer: volunteer work is great, especially if the student feels drawn to it, or enjoys it. I am not in favoring of mandatory “volunteering,” however.) </p>
<p>I’d actually give quite a few students a twist on George Balanchine’s classic advice, namely “Don’t do, dear, just think.” </p>
<p>For very competitive colleges, you have to have the academics. Of course. And of course you, QM, would like to see extra time put into advanced study. It’s good when they can identify and do this. But aren’t you saying it’s impressive when a gal digs into Goldstein or another pursues an interest in epigenetics? Out of thousands of kids applying, wouldn’t you hope the uni captures these sorts? That’s more than just, I want to be a physicist, I enjoyed my physics class. Or I have always wanted to be a doctor. There are many ways to take interests further.</p>
<p>My youngest had to do a career exploration project which involved interviewing adults in her anticipated field, which was physics. One question they were required to ask in the interview related to advice for high schoolers interested in pursuing that field. The advice both PhD gentlemen gave was simply to work extremely diligently on her studies, particularly math.</p>
<p>As to the talk of getting A’s in their sleep…while I understand what was meant in the context of the post above, I also feel that these sorts of comments are precisely what convince American young people they aren’t cut out for STEM fields. The work is not easy for them, and that concerns them. They think that if they were smart enough, they wouldn’t have to struggle and exert so much effort. It seems to me that the work in these fields IS very hard for most people, and that the value of persistence and elbow grease outweighs that of innate talent. I have a hard time believing the one ethnicity is so much better suited to engineering, for example, than another. Yet the enrollment in the engineering dept. at our flagship would lead one to believe that the genes for math and science ability are underrepresented in the North American continent…</p>