<p>my school does not send a lot of peeps to HYPMS etc</p>
<p>but this year, our Valedictorian got into Penn, I got into MIT and one of my friend ( a girl) got into Harvard out of nowhere.</p>
<p>her stats according to her </p>
<p>
[quote]
my test score for spanish was 740/800...
english 740/800
ecology bio 700/800
act 29
sat 1270 & a 1300
I think my spanish descent did it. The % of Spanish descent that go there is less than blacks!
[/quote]
</p>
<p>anyone care to give me any explanation? i mean, seeing how very qualified students get rejected.</p>
<p>I'm not trolling around. you can see my post histories and see that I got into MIT.</p>
<p>P.S. can't wait to put a prank on the next Harvard-Yale game.</p>
<p>Are her SAT scores out of 2400 or out of 1600?</p>
<p>If there out of 2400, there’s no way she could be being honest.</p>
<p>Anyway, I’d assume that there are parts of her app of which you are unaware that helped her to be accepted. Stats are hardly the only factor in decisions.</p>
<p>Is she Puerto Rican or Mexican? Those are the most prevalent Hispanics in the U.S. (and remember that Hispanics now are the largest group of URMs), yet have very high drop-out rates from h.s. This particularly is true of females.</p>
<p>Very few have the stats that would qualify them for top colleges. Your friend, however, is among the small group of Hispanics that do.</p>
<p>I assume that your friend’s SAT scores were out of 2400, which would put her in Harvard’s range, though at the low end. If she got her scores without, for instance, having educated parents and taking expensive review courses, she may have more potential and intelligence than do students with higher scores who had the benefit of highly educated parents grooming them for years to go to Ivies, including by spending thousands on tutors and prep courses.</p>
<p>These days, it is also a plus coming from a high school that rarely if ever, has sent anyone to these schools. If you read “The Gatekeepers” about admissions at Wesleyan, colleges are actually putting a lot of effort into finding these kids.</p>
<p>Your friend also may have overcome challenges that you don’t know about. For instance, I’ve taught students who had been homeless or raised in very violent homes or had a parent in prison, but for obvious reasons didn’t share this info with their friends.</p>
<p>her race is not Hispanic (such as PR or Mexican)</p>
<p>it’s Spanish. as in Spainard. Spain. Europe.</p>
<p>she joins in AVID programs though. but i don’t think her family struggled though. she has a pretty good home to face challenges. in addition, her dad just donated $500 to our ModelUN club earlier this year. but she has not legacy at Harvard though.</p>
<p>I’m not trying to take away anything from her but I was just wondering because I’m pretty sure there are ppl who face greater adversities in life and have better stats but got rejected. and, she said she pretty much bombed her interview. it was a lawyer to did that and apparently “that lawyer” got “cocky” with the questions…she was pretty much crying after the interview…but one thing that stood out was her character, because she said something along those lines, “that interviewer is not the one that’s going to decide, it’s the Ad com. and God will make a way for me”.</p>
<p>“apparently “that lawyer” got “cocky” with the questions…she was pretty much crying after the interview…”</p>
<p>You don’t know what the interviewer said about her. Ditto your teachers and high school counselor. Maybe her interview report said, “She was so amazing, I decided to test her with some tough questions, and she handled it better than the partners at my law firm who’ve been doing cross-examinations for 20 years.” Maybe her teachers said, “I get up at 6 a.m. every morning for a salary of $45,000 a year because of students like this.” That kind of praise can transform an application, especially if it’s uniform and comes from many sources.</p>
<p>I agree with Hanna. The student may have thought she bombed the interview after being asked tough questions. She may have, however, done an extraordinarily good job and have gotten an awesome recommendation from the interviewer.</p>
<p>Back when I taught college, I saw students in real life who thought they had great or bad internship interviews. Often I got to hear from the interviewer about the students’ interviews and the interviewers’ impression of how the students did was the opposite of what the students thought.</p>
<p>Anyway, the student you’re describing may have wowed her interview (a great interview can revive the living, but can’t raise the dead) and also may have had exceptionally strong recommendations and essays.</p>
<p>Sometimes there also are things that an applicant thinks are inconsequential that actually are very impressive. For instance, I’ve seen students posting on CC that they don’t have impressive ECs because they have to spend their summers working some kind of ordinary job. Meanwhile, having an ordinary job like being a cashier, babysitting , working on a family farm or in a family business is a far more impressive EC than are most of the activities that students on CC salivate over.</p>
<p>Northstarmom, I don’t get this. If they were out of 2400, that’d give her an average around 430 on each section. That’s fairly distant from Harvard’s range.</p>
<p>“Northstarmom, I don’t get this. If they were out of 2400, that’d give her an average around 430 on each section. That’s fairly distant from Harvard’s range.”</p>
<p>Oops. Meant to say “out of 1600,” not “out of 2400.”</p>
<p>Now that I think about it, when I was applying for judicial clerkships, out of my first five interviews, I felt that one went badly and two went fantastic. No offers there. At my sixth interview, the judge asked direct questions that forced me to tell her about flunking out of high school. We spent the whole session talking about that and I felt like I was doing damage control the whole time…what federal judge wants to hire someone who didn’t do her homework? Called my mom, cried, the whole business. That’s the judge that hired me.</p>
<p>thank you guys for your input!
They are very invaluable and taught me something I was missing.
I will definitely be aware of that when i apply for internships and grad school.
once again, Thanks!</p>