<p>No major awards whatsoever. The most significant thing I have is just a nomination for the Presidential Scholars Program</p>
<p>@cortana</p>
<p>Why on Earth would I brag about being waitlisted at Carnegie Mellon???</p>
<p>@wavelet</p>
<p>Of every school I’ve been accepted into up until this point, I would probably choose Northwestern. UChicago was my top choice but that didn’t quite work out.</p>
<p>I know that Caltech has higher prestige, but as I said before, it wasn’t actually my choice to apply to Caltech =(</p>
<p>@Confucian</p>
<p>I’m sorry, I don’t actually know what Tufts/WashU syndome is
Would you mind elaborating??</p>
<p>@isk82live</p>
<p>That makes sense I guess. I just would’ve figured that the effort I put into each individual application would’ve had some degree of effect on the outcome, but that doesn’t seem to be the case.</p>
<p>@Ohiomom, siliconvalleymom, onmyway</p>
<p>Alright, thanks for the feedback. But even if it is just luck, shouldn’t there at least be some level of correlation between schools?</p>
<p>I’m sorry, the latter comment wasn’t directed towards you. It was for onmyway who said it was a matter of luck.</p>
<p>The earlier comment of “Thanks for the feedback” was for you and siliconvalleymom, since I guess the entire essay situation is plausible, although I never would’ve imagined that my writing would’ve had an inverse relationship with the time spent on it and get worse and I put in more effort :</p>
<p>OP, my friend’s kid got admitted to MIT, rejected by Northwestern and got wait-listed at Carnegie Mellon last night. SO I do think that there must be some luck involved in each decision. :)</p>
<p>Assuming there is a mild degree of correlation between successful admissions into Caltech and Carnegie Mellon, a 2-sample proportion test for admission to Caltech (.12) and Carnegie Mellon (.21) yield a P-Value small enough such that the Null Hypothesis can be rejected, and statistically speaking, the chances of a waitlist from Carnegie Mellon should have been extraordinarily small given that I was admitted to Caltech.</p>
<p>Of course, that “extraordinarily small” percentage actually happened, so either:
-I’m incredibly lucky with Caltech (which I think might be the case),
-I’m incredibly unlucky with Carnegie Mellon,
-I overestimated the correlation between the two,
-I should not have used such a test to begin with because I did not check conditions correctly (which could also be somewhat likely)</p>
<p>(Or it could always just be that I chose the wrong test to use for statistical comparisons since I still have 1 unit to finish in AP Stats, but personally, I thought that a 2-Proportion Test was appropriate here)</p>
<p>Tufts Syndrome basically is where a school waitlists or rejects candidates it feels either haven’t expressed enough interest in attending or are “overqualified,” ie probably won’t attend because they’ll have a better offer somewhere else. It’s a strategy to protect the school’s yield rate of how many ppl accepted actually enroll. I said WashU because WashU actually seems to be the most notorious practicer of “Tufts Syndrome.” Of course, I’m just speculating, but based on your stats, admission to very selective schools, and even Momof2happyboy’s anecdotal evidence, it seems that CMU does do this at least to some degree.</p>
<p>Eskielover, No need to impress anyone on CC, Lol. My point is that with acceptance rates <10-15%, you can expect to receive acceptances to some and rejections (or WL’s) at others. As you can see, it is not predictable.</p>
<p>These great colleges all reject some great applicants. You’re one of them. </p>
<p>The fact that you think that it’s possible to make sense of this, suggests that you don’t really understand how holistic admissions works.</p>
<p>You get lumped into a pile of people with similar stats. For your pile, there is a certain percentage of people who get in. That means that there is a certain percentage who don’t. None of the piles have a 100% admit rate. You seem to think that your pile should. That’s not how it works. </p>
<p>At each school, individual, imperfect, biased, but well meaning people read your application. Where you got in, you resonated. Where you didn’t, you didn’t connect with the human at the other end as well as others did. Maybe the day they read your application, they got cut off in traffic and were in a lousy mood all day. It could really be as simple as that.</p>
<p>I guess you could call it a likely letter, although it came in an e-mail and for a different reason (I don’t know what a likely letter looks like since I didn’t get one from anywhere else)</p>
<p>Last week, I received an e-mail from the Amherst admissions office telling me congratulations on being accepted, and then it went onto describe that I could view my official results on the 30th, but they send an e-mail early because I was invited to a Diversity Open House on the April 14th Weekend that I had to respond to by March 29th.</p>
<p>I guess I qualified for the Diversity Open House since I’m a minority? But the early letter was probably just sent because they needed a response before the actual decisions came out.</p>
<p>Chicago was likely practicing some yield protection this year; look at their admitted students thread, and you’ll see tons of students who were waitlisted.</p>
<p>CMU also uses its waitlist extensively because it has such a low yield (30%) - waitlisting nearly as many students as it accepted in the first place. Last year only 12.6% of those offered a spot on the waitlist accepted it, and that’s probably the lowest among the top schools that have given statistics on their waitlist (most are 40-70%). That suggests to me that CMU is waitlisting tons of students that it should be admitting, and most end up not bothering to accept a spot because they’ve gotten into an equally good or better school.</p>
<p>Indeed your case is a very interesting one.</p>
<p>Yeah, Chicago has probably been modifying its practices with such a large jump in applications so it has been a tad unpredictable. I would agree with others in calling out CMU for “tufts syndrome.” And I have observed that CalTech is pretty strange with who they choose to accept. That was some amazing luck though. In the case of Amherst, being a small liberal arts college, Asians actually have an advantage. If we look at Amherst’s student body, only ~10% are asian compared to ~20% at the ivies. They want to attract people like you.</p>
<p>To address sarayale, the discrimination policy is for the UCs, but CalTech doesn’t seem to discriminate against asians nearly as much as say Stanford. While ~40% Asian compose CalTech’s student body, only about half that (20% of the student body) at Stanford is Asian. Obviously there are other factors that influence the discrepancy, but I think it may reflect CalTech’s less discriminatory policies.</p>
<p>I think another useful point you prove is that essays don’t matter as much as we think they do. Many people are wrapped up in thoughts that their essay was a significant reason for an acceptance when, as you prove, it may not be. Of course I can’t make any assumptions about the quality of your rushed essays - they could have been great; but, it is ironic nonetheless. Hopefully you’ll have some more good news in one day, 15 hours?</p>
<p>I am currently a 2nd year student out of Pasadena City College. I will be graduating this June with 2 AA degrees in Soc Sci and Humanities. By the end of this semester I will have completed IGETC (I just need to finish my stats class). I currently have a 3.5 GPA. My first year I finished with a 3.8, but this past semester I was working 30+hours a week and my GPA dropped to a 3.25. By the end of this semester I should be able to pull it back up to a 3.65, maybe 3.7. My extra curriculars include volunteering at a museum and VP of anthro club. I am applying to all 3 schools as a history major and want to see what you think of my chances are of being accepted to UCLA,UCI, and UCSB as a transfer?</p>
<p>Here is some of what I’ve learned from browsing this forum way too much.
[<em>] The quality of an essay does not always increase with the time spent on it
[</em>] Admissions committees at different schools will sometimes be looking for different things
[<em>] Among the factors that admissions committees at top schools consider important is fit - fitting in at Caltech does not mean that you would fit in at, say, Chicago
[</em>] Carnegie Mellon tends to waitlist many, many applicants, most of which are quite qualified and have a good chance of making it to another school as good as or better than CMU (this is similar to the behavior of Tufts or Wash U, earning this phenomenon the name of “Tufts Syndrome”)
[<em>] In terms of admissions at top schools, the acceptance rate is not a good indicator of the likelihood of one’s acceptance (admissions tend to be unpredictable below 20%, maybe 25%)
[</em>] The subjective nature of a reader or committee’s response to, say, an essay or a roster of extracurriculars decreases the utility of evaluating the quality of an essay (for example) to predict admissions
Using a statistical model to attempt to predict admissions will not always produce accurate results, especially because of the subjective nature of many aspects of one’s application. Maybe Caltech and Northwestern really liked your essays, while Chicago and CMU thought they was trash. There is no way of telling beyond somehow becoming a fly on the wall of the Chicago or CMU admissions office at the time they were discussing your application. (That’s pretty difficult to achieve.)</p>
<p>In addition, statistical results tend to work as generalities - obviously, MIT and Caltech will prefer applicants more as their SAT scores and GPA increase, but for individual candidates with high and mostly indistinguishable scores and grades, there is no predicting what the result will be. You also failed to account for the fact that the majority of CMU’s applicants probably did not apply to Caltech, and vice versa. Even if you really wanted to see whether CMU and Caltech admissions decisions are related, you’d have to get data only from those who applied to both schools for an analysis to even approach validity.</p>