That is exactly the kind of comment I was referencing and is exactly what I was talking about.
In order for you to have a chance to go to Ivy League, you definitely need a score of 2300+ on the SAT and 33+ on the ACT. Also, awards are the next big thing which can increase your chances. I’m not talking about small awards; these awards should be state based. Also, leadership is a huge thing too. Enroll in bunch of clubs and try to gain a position in them. Everyone in my grade is so smart and literally people are taking 4 AP’s, getting all A’s in the class and getting bunch of awards. I literally cry inside lol.
@AnniiT, don’t cry inside. Don’t care that much what other people do or go or what not. Concentrate on maximizing your own development and potential.
In fact, right now, getting in to this or that college isn’t your most important goal (despite what people around you may think). Figuring out your own strengths and weaknesses, like and dislikes, and how the world works is.
Why should it matter to you what or how well other people do?
http://www.poetryfoundation.org/poem/175772
Change the gender. Point’s the same.
@Purpletitan It’s just since when I was little, I’ve always wanted to go to an Ivy League School and wanted to show others I can do it. So many people discourage me and say that I don’t have a chance because of the other Asians at my school. I understand that I have so much competition in my race and that I have to continue to work hard in order to succeed. It’s just I feel like so many people are ahead of me. I’m only taking 2 APs and stressing out over it while others are taking 4 and 5 APs and getting straight A’s in the class. Some have won so many awards and play sports and all while I don’t have that in my favor (I do sports but am not that good so it wouldn’t help me at this point). The one thing that I have over the others is that I am very social and have good leadership skills. Hopefully, this and my SAT score in the future will help me reach my dreams.
Oh, I agree wholeheartedly. Those kids are great, but that is not the issue, in my eyes. The issue that is “annoying” is the burning desire to herald an accomplishment and ignore plenty of others because of the name Ivy League, and present the unusual collection of applications (and admissions) as a laudable path to be emulated by others.
@AnniiT, I would advise you to pick some more substantial hopes and dreams. Success in adulthood and how you are as a person is what people will remember you by and what you will reflect upon on your deathbed. College and life up to it is just preparation for that; a preparation that can be gotten at many places and is more dependent on your mindset than your school.
The document at http://irp.dpb.cornell.edu/wordpress/wp-content/uploads/2014/08/Profile2014-Freshmen.pdf mentions that the mean scores of the entering class at Cornell are 1415 M+V or an expected total slightly over 2100, so it seems most entering students do not have the scores that “you definitely need.” Even among the students who were accepted to all 8 ivies, a good portion do not meet your minimum threshold.
Enrolling in a bunch of clubs is also bad advice.
Most ivies and other selective colleges have a description of what they are looking for in applicants on their website. That can be a good place to start.
@AnniiT, my current HS senior was admitted to Penn with less than a 2300 SAT.
Re. getting admitted SCEA and then applying to more schools:
Just because someone applied SCEA and is admitted, doesn’t mean that will end up being the best fit school.
My oldest son was admitted to Princeton SCEA, but applied to 9 other schools. When he had applied to Princeton, MIT was barely a blip on his radar and Caltech wasn’t on the list at all. MIT was clearly a much better fit in the end. He would even have chosen Penn and Mudd over Princeton for a number of reasons, but he needed to visit Princeton again to really understand that.
AnniiT, if you are admitted, then what? What’s your next dream?
Going to any particular college is a means to an end. It’s not an end it itself. You want “to show others [you] can do it”…meaning what, exactly? That you are intelligent or hard working or lucky or top of the high school heap?
You’re dreaming too small. Your classmates are dreaming too small. Dream bigger! You want to write great novels, or create new companies, or find ways to remove mines from war-torn countries, or help negotiate nuclear peace deals, or defeat malaria. Or you want to help educate children or create unique pottery or cook really great food or expand park space within inner cities.
OK, back to our regularly scheduled discussion.
What I heard a senior admissions person at a single-initial school say, once upon a time, was something like this: “We are very confident that we can identify the 4-5,000 most qualified people in the admissions pool. But the problem is we can only admit somewhat less than half of them. We really have no confidence that we know how to make meaningful distinctions among that group, but we have to try so we do our best. That might not be any better than picking by lot, who knows? If we sent admissions offers to our wait list and waitlisted our admission list, no one on the faculty would ever notice a difference.”
That’s a lot different than saying that the process is random. It’s also manifestly a fiction: Even if the faculty didn’t notice a difference (it probably would), the coaches would be going ballistic. Of course, at the margin – the last couple hundred kids in vs. the first hundred out – that’s probably not so different from randomness. I’ve participated in enough selection processes to know that’s true; it’s basically axiomatic. The bell curve is never a horizontal line at 1.
^ Princeton President said something very similar at a local dinner recently. I think he said they could admit about 6-8000 qualified kids.
It was also interesting to hear how crushed he was that he didn’t get into Stanford and so HAD to go to a school 3000 miles away from Oregon. 
@Data10 There are definitely other factors that play a role in increasing your chances, but I believe in my position, getting that score on the SAT is the first step I have to take. Apologizes for saying “you definitely need” because there is so much more than just that score in order to get accepted. However, many of the people that get accepted into the Ivy Leagues that I know of have scored VERY high on the SAT and enrolled in many extracurricular activities.
I’ll admit it … I usually do not read past the line “Since I was little I have always wanted to go to an Ivy League school” Where did this insanity come from? Are you sure it was YOU or were you a product of your environment. When I was little (or young) I wanted to do many things, but I can assure you that attending an Ivy League was not on a list filled with playing sports, having fun, wanting to be a fireman, or any of those things KIDS think about for a few minutes.
The focus exhibited in your post should indeed make many cry, but not because they agree about the difficulty of gaining admittance to such a school. It is all about the misguided notion that attending such a school is a life changer, a safe path to a rich life of untold riches and respectability.
One should indeed strive to find excellence (and balance) but the focus on placing little checks on a bucket list that is purported one rewarded by the “Ivy Adcoms” is nothing else than a fool’s errand. It is not abut joining clubs (most are pure BS) and hope to show leadership through winning an election. It is all about BEING a leader and leaders tend to be … different.
If you really want to increase your chances at admission (despite what I wrote about the IL as an objective) your path should not be one of getting more As, collecting APs on a willy nilly basis, and getting that super high SAT scores. Those are helpful but hardly essential. If you successfully get all of “that” you will still be one of the Stepford kid applicant … entire undistinguishable from all the others who were victimized by what I call your environment --something that is ever so common on this Lake Wobegon on steroids.
What should it then be? Be different … project a picture of Asian who happens to think like a non-Asian. Pursue activities OUTSIDE your school that show a real person who thinks about … others, and not for the sake of getting credits. Look into what peers consider unworthy: art, sports (even if you are not that good) as a helping hand, drama (if you need a club after all) and most importantly, look at group activities over singular activities. Think about what you will write in your essays (which should NOT be about academics, difficulties as an immigrants, but about what makes YOU tick) and work them to death.
Students with great scores and plenty of APs do get in, but way more with similar scores are rejected. Not because they are Asians, but because they never understood clearly what it meant to be an Ivy League student, and why it is so wrong to want to be one when your were … so little!
PS I did not know anything about the IL when I was growing up. It was not a subject of discussion around our kitchen table. When the time came to look into colleges, not much had changed as I developed zero interest in attending a school on that east coast. There is a LOT more than those 8 schools. Do not sell you … short!
Note the difference between correlation and cause. Many of your Ivy League friends may have had a 2300+ SAT and joined a lot of clubs, but that does not mean either criteria was required for their acceptance. I realize MIT isn’t within the Ivy League, but I’ll quote their website anyway, as they explain this well:
@Data10 yes, and that’s why the acceptance rate is relatively low for the Ivy League and I can understand that.
Has nothing to do with it. The highly qualified student was the same before and after he submitted his application. There are going to be a few stellar applicants that are in demand at nearly every university.
People can’t seem to get over the 5% selectivity thing. It doesn’t mean that each student has a 5% chance. It means that the entire pool consists of applicants with varying chances. Some will have essentially a zero percent chance and won’t get a single point or make the first cut. Others might have an 80% or 90% chance based on their qualifications. There might be several hundred of those applying to Harvard and the other Ivies.
That’s the kind of thing which yields 8 Ivy acceptances. Well, that and the need to apply to all 8 to begin with.
@JustOneDad, very likely not several hundred of those tippy-top candidates who can get in to everywhere each year.
Probably a hundred or so. Some will apply ED somewhere or go somewhere non-HYPSM because of costs concerns. Almost all the rest will get in to all of HYPS(&M for the STEM kids).
@JustOneDad I understand your thesis and agree with it (for the most part). I have a hard time thinking that anyone has a 90% chance of getting in, but what do I know.
Looking at a list of people who were rejected from Harvard is interesting. You would think Warren Buffet would have had a really high chance of admission by virtue of the successful companies he had already founded, along with high stats, but nope.
@TV4caster ???
I almost certain that Buffett hadn’t founded or acquired any companies when he applied to HBS.
@PurpleTitan This is from Biography dot com.
When he applied to HBS he already had 140k (again, in today’s dollars) in profits from selling his businesses.