@bfedwards Thank you (although my kid will not thank you as kid will have more work to do soon!)
So if the Director of Admissions speaks to the junior year tour group and then some random staffer speaks to us, my kid should send an email to each? If it is just random staffer A who speaks to us, that is who the email thank you should be sent to.
If we go to one of those college night things and she meets representatives from 10 colleges she MAY be intersted in she should email them as well I would assume.
This is very relevant as we will go on many tours in the near future.
If there were some full-proof reason to write thank you notes to everyone with whom your student interacted, believe me, you would know about it before now.
Thank you notes are never too much, but I think it is too much to attach the weight of a thank you note to every person and point of contact your student has.
Perhaps this is what @bfedwards did along the way inside of the application process, and they tie the notes to the push given to their childâs application. That is, you should know, not a cause-and-effect situation.
@OnlyBerkeley2020, I am just curious - was your college counselor someone who you saw in person, or worked with purely online/remotely? Also, how were you able to speak with former admissions counselors? I think that would be very enlightening and Iâd like to know how to go about it.
And by the way, thank you SO much for making such an in-depth post on this topic. Iâm sure it will help other people who have experienced something similar.
@Hope4567 She was somebody I saw in person. Former admissions counsellors were people who I had gotten in contact with through the events I went to such as college seminars.
@OnlyBerkeley2020 I respect you for owning it but honestly you are being EXTREMELY hard on yourself. After reading your post, the only thing I can think of that could have gotten in the way of more acceptances is probably your essay. An essay must be personal, non generic, and non contrived. My advice for any aplicant would be to have your essay reviewed by more than one counselor wether it being a private famours one or not and then follow your gut instinct. I went to a highly sought after counselor in my town. I could barely get an appt with her. While she gave many useful tips, she also gave tips that made no sense to me. For example, she wanted me to delete a small opening paragraph that she deemed is not as serious as the rest of my essay. I felt that the paragraph was building up a climax. Showed my essay to 2 other counselors and my English teacher who all thought I should keep it. I went with my guts and kept the paragraph and got into many great places.
Also, read the essay of the girl from Oregon who got accepted into 5 ivies and Stanford. I didnât find it passionate in any way, she didnât even answer the prompt. You never know what the admission officers are looking for and at the end it is their loss. Congratulations on your acceptances and youâve got some great places to choose from. UCB is great not only for computer science and engineering but in all areas.
You did the equivalenet of research by self teaching yourself coding and interning at a cloud computing company and then you programmad a G code generator! Not everybody needs to have a patent to be accepted case in point I know many people who on paper are less qualified than you and were accepted into few ivies but they wrote a passionate essay.
I absolitely doubt the Quora post being truthful, Harvard, and most of the other top schools, do not allow their professors to recommend any high school student unless they have done substantial research with them. Few of my brilliant friends did a Summer at Harvard and the professors they studied with were super impressed by them, yet they declined to write any recommendations. 2 of the students were rejected from Harvard and one was wait listed. It happened with another friend at Brown too.
Another advice, is that the trend has changed: colleges are looking more for specialization and less for a well rounded student. They want someone who takes one or 2 interests and focuses on them and goes in depth into them.
Just another opinion: I have never heard of writing a thank you note to the random admissions officer who happens to read the spiel for the info session that day. If you have an appointment or interview with one yes - but I honestly donât think the admissions officers wants, needs or cares about a thank you note from the thousands of students he or she addresses every admissions cycle. In fact, if asked, I think most would tell you to please not do that - they donât need their inboxes swamped with thank yous when students are trying to contact them with genuine questions. It goes without saying - if you bothered to show up for the info session - you have some interest in the school !
Sounds like Tufts syndrome, most of them thought you were so good you wouldnât attend if offered. Are you Asian? Hard to imagine such tough results if you are not.
Your post is good advice, but I think youâre beating yourself too hard.
â1. I was not passionate enough in my essays.â
Ok, I agree that this was a mistake. Given all your skills, though, it sounds like you are genuinely passionate about learning.
â2. I did not improve throughout high school⊠I was never able to make it to the next level. I never made it to USAMO or camp for USAPhO.â
Not that important. You qualified for AIME. Thatâs already pretty difficult to accomplish.
â3. Going into a STEM field, I did not do research.â
Meh.
If the top schools only used class rank to admit, the vast majority of valedictorians would not get into the top 30 because there arenât enough spaces for them all.
There are 40,000 high schools in America. If you fold in the thousands of high schools around the world that send students here (do not forget Canada, Mexico and other nearby places!), let us take a conservative view and say there are 20,000; that gives us 65,000 valedictorians. Then take the home schooled kids. If there are 5 in a class, isnât #1 the valedictorian? Start doing the math, and you will see that each of the top 30 schools would need to have over 2,000 students per class for all of you to be admitted. Most of the top 50 - if you fold in places like Amherst, Reed, Swarthmore, Bryn Mawr, Williams, etc. only take a few hundreds each class. And recall that some schools have more than one valedictorian. If you start folding in salutatorians, you get at least 130,000 kids. The top 60 schools would not have room for most of them. And heaven forbid that #3 rankers are given any consideration! Now we are talking over a quarter million students! The top 100 schools would need to have 2500 per class for the top 3? Where would that leave #4âs? #5âs?
It is not a surprise that a valedictorian or any other rank for that matter doesnât get in. Are the top two students really better than #3? What if #20 is smarter than all of the higher ranked students by far? And has won the Intel? or the Van Cliburn International? Or has published chemistry papers in respected journals? Or has won the National Spelling Bee? the Westinghouse? Should they be rejected because they are not #1?
It is a big bad world out there. Many students have a very parochial view of the world because most have not seen much beyond their neighborhoods, towns or local metro areas. I believe that is why people are so shocked by rejections.
I will never forget a kid that came out of a suburban high school outside of Akron, Ohio years ago. He was considered a god. #1 in his class, and president of a bunch of orgs, all kinds of awards⊠(I should add that his dad was an attorney and mom a teacher.) Well, he went off to Princeton and transferred to Ohio State after one semester. He told me that he struggled to get âCâsâ at Princeton, and was surrounded by people âwho were more talented than I ever imagined people could be.â No matter how hard he tried, he realized that his peak performance was not going to result in anything higher than a 2.5GPA. He never should have been admitted. But I bet that had he been rejected, everyone in that high school would have been outrage.
There are a lot of applicants with high stats applying to those schools. I am not convinced that the reasons you listed were determinative. It only takes one and you got into a great school. Congratulations. Give yourself a break. By next October 15th, you wonât care a thing about any of the schools you didnât get into. You will get a great education and make friends for life. You win.
I wholeheartedly agree with this advice. Though my GPA is subpar, I was able to be admitted to Penn because I showed a lot of passion for the school (I continued to send update letters even after being deferred ED) and made an amazing connection with my English teacher, whose husband is an alumnus of Penn and he ended up writing me an amazing letter of recommendation. Passion and connections can take you further than you would expect.
Ummm, âCs get degreesâ, so it looks like he was solidly passing his classes (and he had to have been doing well enough to earn a high enough GPA to transfer to Ohio State). I.e. he was capable of doing the work at Princeton, although he was not among the top academic performers there (at every school, someone has to be in the lower half of the class).
Most 4.0 GPA high school students are not going to earn 4.0 GPAs in college.
@OnlyBerkeley2020 Great post. Very helpful/cautionary to upcoming students, Iâm sure.
A few things Iâve noticed watching my D and her friends go through this.
You have to pick a couple of âsafetiesâ (and in CA the UCs are not âsafetiesâ anymore unless you are willing to take whatever campus you are given.) There is no âsingleâ school you can assume you will get into. Itâs a drag to spend the time and money, but you need a couple that are not <20% admits. Those <20% have to pass over great students all the time - and you might just get unlucky and be passed over by a number of them.
Second, demonstrated interest really does seem to matter. Yield is becoming more important. Schools want to spend less resources chasing students. If you can seem like you are really excited about a school, it seems to me, from observing a whole slew of applicants this year, that it can make the difference in more competitive schools.
Lastly, you can only attend one school. The âacceptanceâ collections will go under the bed with the swim trophies and debate medals, never to be used again⊠One great fit school acceptance is worth 13 not-good-fit acceptances.
@Fijiblu I applied EA to MIT, UChicago, Caltech, and UIUC early, but was deferred to RD from all of them. Ended up being rejected from all of them in the end.
@OnlyBerkeley2020 happy for your acceptances, but with your stats I wonder if you had âbadâ letters of recommendation? I wonder if your the teachers used tepid terms recommending you?
You will shine in college, you willingness to evaluate yourself critically (perhaps too harshly) will serve you well.
I think that would be very enlightening and Iâd like to know how to go about it.