<p>That’s not unbelievable, I think that’s a bit above average, with the exception of the second SAT subject test.</p>
<p>it is when the other asians (atleast the ones i know, and i know a tonne) got rejected with 2350+ sat 1s and all 800 sat 2s.</p>
<p>@cr_freak: </p>
<p>It’s almost as if SAT’s aren’t that important to us…</p>
<p>im finding that hard to believe ^^^, did you also build a nuclear reactor?</p>
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<p>I seriously doubt this. MIT is one of the more LBGT-friendly campuses, I’ve heard.</p>
<p>@frenchshredder:</p>
<p>since you mentioned Sharon Springs… I think I remember you from the MIT 2014 guestbook :D</p>
<p>^Um, how exactly did my post end up over here? I’m pretty sure I posted this in the decision thread. Maybe I wasn’t supposed to be posting there… oops.</p>
<p>Anyway, please disregard the last post.</p>
<p>I’m kind of fuzzy on the idea that adcoms like to use personality and personal background rather than solid achievement (MITChris has never said this, but it’s the implication I’m getting from a lot of posts).</p>
<p>So does that mean that if one person gets admitted over another, that that person is more interesting or a better person?</p>
<p>But you said I had the coolest application =(</p>
<p>I stand by that statement.</p>
<p>I understand where admissions officers are coming from when they say they want to pick people that they feel will be the best fit for the school. That test scores and grades aren’t everything and that most people applying CAN do the work at MIT</p>
<p>Yet, I find the stress on personal attributes in the admissions process troubling. Why? Well first of all it gives better writers an advantage (in the essays, where many if not most personal attributes are found). Those who can articulate their points better in the essays (perhaps… effectively exaggerating here or there) are at an advantage. How many English majors are there at MIT? </p>
<p>Let’s not act like people don’t treat a college admissions essay like a college admissions essay. Sure, they’re asking you pretty simple questions and telling you to “be yourself” but it’s natural to shape your answers in a way that makes you appear the best (in your opinion) to the admissions committee. From reading some of my friends’ essays, I can pretty confidently say that the picture of the applicant you get from essays is at the very best a vague idea of who that person is. Some of my friends who were much better fits for MIT may not have come across that way. Are you really expecting to get to know us well enough to justify admission or rejection from a few paragraphs, which may or may not be genuine, and may or may not have been extensively edited by parents/friends/teachers etc. </p>
<p>I think the picture of an applicant that you get on a personal level, from interviews (if you’re nervous, you’re at a disadvantage. should those who are nervous at interviews have lower chances of admission?), essays, lists of ECs (people do stuff JUST to get into college, not because they like it) is at the very best superficial and at the worst totally flawed. </p>
<p>I think if MIT were to pick a class of the highest scoring students it would “magically” find that the people it selected were just as interesting, just as passionate, and would fit in just as well at the school.</p>
<p>^ Good post.</p>
<p>I don’t think that choosing by test scores or anything would be a better option. But I think we’re kidding ourselves of we say that choosing kids based on short-take essays , 60 minute interviews (with an stranger adult rather than a peer), and letters their possibly clueless teachers wrote for them. They’re not substantially more correlated with ability and personality than test scores are (if we did statistical analysis, I think we would find the difference to be practically insignificant).</p>
<p>And I’m not saying that the current system is bad. I just think the idea that it is so much more enlightened than the traditional approach is an exaggeration.</p>
<p>Stix, I want to quote your entire post and just write “This.” but xkcd tells me that’s obnoxious.</p>
<p>Although to be fair, I’m sure the admissions committee makes sure the kid is academically suited for the school before looking at personal characteristics. Their applicant pool is so gigantic (esp. when compared to the number they can accept…) that it doesn’t surprise me that they can find people who are good essay-writers, smart, and awesome people.</p>
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Um? I didn’t understand that…</p>
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First, I think it’s abundantly clear that the admissions officers are using personality and personal background in addition to solid achievement. The trouble is that it’s difficult to sort high schoolers by actual potential for solid achievement, since only very few people have actually achieved anything of note. It becomes easier and easier to sort people as you go up the academic ladder, to the point that it’s likely that, for example, virtually all tenured faculty members actually deserve tenure. It’s not as trivial to sort eighteen-year-olds.</p>
<p>But anyway, if you want to date someone, and they decide they’d rather date somebody else, does that mean that your romantic rival is a more interesting or a better person? Of course not. This is a subjective process, and nobody has tried to pretend otherwise.</p>
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Science and engineering majors benefit greatly in their careers by being able to communicate clearly in written work and by being able to weave together a compelling story. In fact, I’d argue that it’s impossible to be successful at the highest levels of science and engineering if one is unable to write well.</p>
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This is a problem that you will have to deal with over and over if you plan to have a career in science or engineering – writing a grant, for example, is often a much more competitive process than applying for top undergraduate schools (both in terms of the percentage of applications funded and in terms of the qualifications of your fellow applicants). You will eventually learn that your job as an applicant is to present the most succinct, well-argued, on-point case for admission/funding/hiring, and that if you can’t present that case adequately, that is not the fault of the entity doing the selecting, nor of your peers who were able to present a better case.</p>
<p>I don’t mean to sound unsympathetic. But I was recently on the short end of the stick for a competitive grant. I could have shaken my fist and raged against the machine, but instead I chose to buckle down, deal with it, and write a better application, which succeeded the second time around. </p>
<p>It’s all about the grantsmanship.</p>
<p>@nikki I couldn’t really remember some parts of my application when I made the post so I just put that. The essay was actually about how I as a gay atheist etc. don’t fit in with most of the people at my school, how I made up for that, and how it formed me as a person.</p>
<p>I don’t have much experience with grant-writing, but I feel like there’s a difference between applying for a grant and applying for a college. Unless I’m mistaken, when you apply for a grant, you try to convince someone that what you’re working on is important and feasible. When you apply for a college, you’re trying to convince them that you’re an interesting/creative/all-around-awesome person (among other things, but that’s the big one that’s probably going to get me), and those are two totally different styles of writing. I bet I’d be vastly better at writing a grant application than I am at writing a college application. It’s just difficult for me to really reflect on myself and convince colleges that I’m unique and that they want me to be their friend, using just an essay. I’m sure if they spent a day with me, they’d be able to gather so much more (and so much more accurate) information than they can from my essays. You could put forth the argument that that’s what interviews are for, but I’m not sure that’s the same, as interviewers can only really report what their general sense of a person is, and there are probably a gajillion applicants who “seem like a good fit for the school, easy to talk to, [insert other standard interviewer comments here]”</p>
<p>So uh. In summary, college application writing doesn’t necessarily equate to grant application writing. I guess that’s what I was trying to say with all of that ramble.</p>
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<p>Yeah, I don’t really see the parallel either. </p>
<p>Even applying for faculty positions is not the same. It’s not like a university will look at two guys, one who is a superstar and another who is merely competent in the lab, and take the second guy because he wrote a heartwarming essay about how he kept trying even though he came in last in math competitions. This sort of thing sometimes happens in admissions. If you change the word “superstar” to “extremely intelligent,” it happens much more often.</p>
<p>BTW, what grant did you apply for, Mollie?</p>
<p>I have a problem with the zip code thing.</p>
<p>I just looked up the “census designated place” I grew up in on Wikipedia. It ranks 12th out of 500+ places in my state in terms of income. It’s 92% white, 4% asian, 3% hispanic, and 1% other. Judging by those numbers, it would seem like a pretty affluent place…and it is. However, I am a first-generation college student, and my dad was a union worker for his entire career. My family was definitely below average for my neighborhood. I got into MIT, but I resent that fact that admissions officers might think I’m overly-privileged based on numbers averaged over thousands of people. </p>
<p>Also, one of the top 5 highest-income zip codes in the entire U.S. (out of over 40,000) is Rex, North Carolina, which is 40% black and 9% native american. It’s an outlier, of course, but it shows that you should never judge a place based on a few numbers.</p>