<p>Nosike: I just saw your status with Yale and I completely understand your feeling – if people are quibbling, why don’t they just leave Yale behind and open up more spots for the fully committed!</p>
<p>I can totally understand your stance! LOL</p>
<p>Best of luck to you</p>
<p>I think you’ll do fine, OP. I find it interesting that every year many of the Yale admits are remarkably humble and frequently question their worthiness. Could this be a distinguishing trait missing from the more-confidant but rejected majority, a predictable reaction to an unexpected admissions decision, or maybe I’m just tuned in to sincere confessions of self-doubt.</p>
<p>My wife was just like the OP (except not Asian). She came from a frankly awful high school in a depressed semi-rural community; only five people in her class went to college anywhere besides local public universities or community college, and less than half the class went to college at all. She graduated a year early, at 16, because she hated it so much. She went to Yale because it was the only place that accepted her but let her defer entry to take a gap year. (Her first choice, Smith, rejected her outright.)</p>
<p>Once there, she felt horribly inadequate. She had never written anything longer than five handwritten pages, and not so much even of that. Her SATs seemed lower than anyone else’s. Her high school curriculum was not even in the same universe as those of the top prep schools, or famous public high schools like Princeton, Scarsdale, or Stuyvesant – and back then graduates of places like that represented a much higher proportion of the student body compared to now.</p>
<p>So . . . she worked her butt off, but she still had a social life, and she had a ton of involvement in extracurricular activities because that’s what she was about. By the time she was a sophomore, she was a BWOC – on several important committees, a spokesperson for a significant organization. She graduated summa cum laude with a double major. She never really lost that sense of being educationally disadvantaged, of having to come from behind – she used it to motivate herself, mainly – but it was clear almost from the outset that her performance in classes at Yale was going to leave all but a handful of the exquisitely educated preppies in the dust.</p>