<p>First off, this is really long. But if you read it all and respond, maybe I’ll send you a sandwich or something (might take awhile, I’m living in Japan right now.)</p>
<p>I’m a rising senior and I have a couple questions about my application, and I would appreciate any responses because I’m a little bit unsure of what to do at this point.</p>
<p>I’m applying to Harvard EA, Yale, Columbia, Princeton, Stanford, MIT and Tufts (preference is undecided but most likely in that order.) I’m not going to repost my stats; they are good enough and wouldn’t keep me out of anywhere–they might even get me into a few places. I’m more concerned right now with one of my extracurriculars (maybe co-curricular would be a better term)–teaching physics at my highschool, a competitive but not exam-focused public high school just outside of Boston which sends about 10-20 of its 350 kids to Ivies annually.</p>
<p>Basically, as a sophomore I took my school’s AP Physics course, which is a first-year physics course for seniors who are taking AP calc (which I was taking at the time.) The course, since it’s the first time any of them have studied physics, just preps for C: Mechanics. I decided that I really liked physics, so I attempted to prepare for E/M with my friend, but I started two weeks before the exam and I got through about half the course before I decided that it was too much and that I liked this little thing called sleep.</p>
<p>The next year (Junior), I tried to get my old physics teacher to do an independent study in E/M with me, but he was already too busy. So I asked some friends if they were interested in independent studying it as a group, and they agreed. I organized the group, got administrative support, figured out a curriculum/timetable, and we started meeting an hour before school once every week. Well, eventually, as I read ahead because I was enjoying the material (and some of them were slacking off>>; (they were mostly seniors, about half of whom were done with calc like me)) it turned into me lecturing and them taking notes–essentially, me “teaching” the course, giving tests, quizzes and grades, etc. etc. I ended up starting a Thermodynamics course for 2nd semester, which covered some pretty hefty material (at a level slightly above the C exam, not the Q=mc*dT stuff from AP Physics B) but avoided calculus so Juniors could take it. I ended up with a total of 11 students (some did both courses), one of whom a Harvard '09er EA and another of whom is a freshman (no sophs). All students take the course for credit and it goes on everyone’s transcripts.</p>
<p>I THINK (not completely sure, but fairly sure) that everyone who took it got a 5 on the E/M AP, which is probably due more to their own effort than to my own inept attempts at teaching (which included the deaths of numerous markers as I tried to draw magnetic stuffs in 3D on the whiteboard.) Anyways, next year I’m teaching E/M again, at the request of many of my Junior friends who are taking calculus this coming year; I think I might have over 10 people in that class alone (as opposed to 4 in E/M this past year.) I’m also going to teach Waves and Optics (without calculus, which will be tricky when we do the wave equation… if anyone has any tips on how to explain to a pre-calc student why the second partial time derivative of a wave’s equation is the acceleration of the particles, and the second partial displacement derivative is the curvature, let me know.)</p>
<p>I got a 5 on both sections of the C exam, and an 800 on the SAT II. This coming year, in addition to teaching, I’ll be doing a Quantum Mechanics independent study at the same level of a Sophomore college course for physics majors, with the aforementioned teacher who is less busy this year (or maybe just more interested in QM than in E/M.) My math level (in terms of the courses I’ve taken) is frankly a little low, since I took the year off to take stats and am not taking linear algebra/multivar until next year (at Harvard Extension), but I’m hoping to complete the same textbook a number of schools–including Columbia–use for the course and am self-studying linear this summer (already self-studied the necessary mvar.)</p>
<p>I did all of this with the administrative assistance of the head of the science department, whose name is in the “teacher” slot for the course (for a variety of obviously reasons, most importantly that I’m not a real teacher, my own can’t be there.) Both of the courses I taught are on my transcript, but next year neither of the courses will be because I’m already doing two different independent studies (Quantum Mech and AP Chem). I’m not doing any of this for college; I just am really interested in this sort of thing, and teaching is a great way to learn more, especially when the students are smarter than me and ask good questions.</p>
<p>I have two questions about this.</p>
<li><p>Would this be a good thing to write about in the “extra stuff” section that a lot of apps have? Should I get the science department head to write a letter that explains what I did?</p></li>
<li><p>Is this at all a “unique” thing? In some senses I don’t feel like I did too much–honestly, in my view, I just read ahead, studied hard, and explained it to my friends and a couple other people; that’s neither unusual for someone who’s applying where I’m applying, nor does it require any sort of special ability or talent (the last bit is not what I’d tell to colleges, just how I view it; in terms of what I tell colleges, I was thinking more along the lines of the long stuff beforehand.) On the other hand, I haven’t heard much about people doing this sort of thing (only a little bit, and that was vaguely different), and it sounds vaguely interesting (and more significant than it actually was :-p).</p></li>
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<p>Anyways, I’m sorry that was so long. Thanks for reading, and thanks in advance for your response.</p>