Yes, that was my intention in making this post (to direct applicants, I mean). I am sorry I came off as too condescending, this board was frustrating me quite a bit. The amount of people here who are clearly only defined in terms of their test scores is staggering, and I was sort of venting.
Classy.
And actually, it isn’t easy to fake interesting at all. It’s next to impossible to fake interesting. If you don’t have any personality there is no way to completely cover it up.
The sad thing is is that most people have personalities, they just get it ground out of them in their quest to get into top schools. I went to a school ranked #1 in the state. It was filled with the kind of people who are on college confidential making posts like “Help! I have a 2360, how do I get a 2400!”. You could make the argument that most of them are only like that on here because it’s a college specific forum, but from my experience most of them are actually just as obsessed with college, to the exclusion of all else, offline.
I concede that point. A lot of people here are fairly pompous (I think it’s a side effect of weighting the SAT into college decisions, you need to be fairly pompous to know all those obscure vocabulary words).
I’ll guess MIT. You sound a lot like my mom, who was also accepted at Harvard and chose not to attend. I’d guess that you applied to NE probably as a safety because you wanted to be in Boston, Cornell as a sort of Ivy safety (that’s apparently in vogue, a lot of people at my school did that), and Yale because it’s Yale. The smoking gun is RPI. RPI is really only good at engineering; if you had no interest in engineering you wouldn’t have applied. You probably dismissed the ivies for being too pompous and NE and RPI because MIT is practically the best in the country for engineering.
That’s a lot to infer out of one post made mostly in frustrating.
As for the rest of your point, you’re absolutely correct. No top school can accept everyone. My original post only applies to a large fraction of applicants who, thankfully for the admissions counselors, make their choices a lot easier.
It’s completely true that top school admissions is a lottery. I even mentioned it in my original post.
Ouch. Thankfully for me I know myself well enough to know that I don’t actually have an inferiority complex. I probably have a bit of a superiority complex though.
Anyways, that wasn’t what I was saying at all. The problem I was addressing was exactly that people put too much of their self worth into top college decisions, and subsequently work their asses off to do what they think will impress the reader. In the process, most of them become boring drones and then end up not even getting into the college that they want. It’s very sad really.
Sigh. Are people even reading my post? I was trying to explain why these people with extraordinarily high SAT scores don’t get in. It has less to do with luck than people think (but yes, in the end it does come down to nothing much more than a lottery).