<p>I was just looking at Andover's Welcome to Newly Admitted Students Page last year. It is kind of intimidating, but I'm just keeping my fingers crossed.</p>
<p>" An outgoing young woman of Iranian heritage currently living in Plano, Texas but attending boarding school in France. She speaks Farsi, French, and English and has studied Spanish and Arabic. She hopes to add Chinese to her list when she gets to Andover! Truly a citizen of the world, she is making a documentary on the humanitarian work she has done in Mumbai, India, where she helped establish an eye clinic. "</p>
<p>"An intellectually curious young man from North Guilford, Connecticut, who has competed in the Discovery Channel Young Scientist Challenge and recently completed a year-and-a-half-long independent science project. It involves exploration of the use of extremely powerful neodymium magnets and electromagnets to assist the rotation of an automobile flywheel. His initial trials with this magnetic assist attained an increase in rotational efficiency by up to 250%. He hopes to enter his project in the Connecticut State Science Fair, and ultimately to create a way for a standard automotive internal combustion engine to have improved gas mileage, i.e. to create an environmentally-friendly, gas-mileage-efficient car. "</p>
<p>oh man…
what is a neodymium magnet…?!</p>
<p>I feel stupid and ignorant now… Wow, this is beyond depressing.</p>
<p>oh, don’t worry … i’m sure we’ve all founded eye clinics in india and explored the use of electromagnets to assist rotations of an automobile flywheel, haven’t we??</p>
<p>Don’t worry. I know kids that go to Andover and, though bright, they are not THAT accomplished. :)</p>
<p>Please avoid depression. Who do you think they are going to profile to try to get kids to come? Remember, having selected a class, they really want everyone offered admission to attend. The schools switch to “sell mode” after admissions, and will select the most interesting of the entire class to profile.</p>
<p>I don’t think I had anything going for me other than having spent a year in a school in Austria before attending Andover, along with good but not spectacular grades and good recommendations. I remember meeting classmates who were well beyond me (I probably was “average” for the class, I would guess, on admission), including a kid who loved physics and had scars on his knuckles from having put his hand through the beam of his home made electron accelerator. He ended up going to Cal Tech; I ended up going to MIT.</p>
<p>Yet I believe I’ve had more impact on the world than this friend has had since, and probably a large majority of my Andover classmates.</p>
<p>So chin up. Don’t let those pages get you down. What matters is what you become, not what you’ve had the good fortune to achieve so far. Circumstances govern what you have the opportunities for much more when you are young than when you are grown up, where it is you who have the most to say about what you can accomplish.</p>
<p>Schools such as Andover are looking for potential, which is only partly judged by what you’ve already had the chance to achieve.</p>
<p>Thank You very much! Your post truly helped me feel better. I’ve never been a kid to do projects or get really involved in stuff and often feel lacking behind these kids who’ve already achieved so much.</p>
<p>You are welcome. Best of luck to you (and my daughter…).</p>
<p>Are these living, breathing children? (just wondering)</p>
<p>Good Luck to your daughter then! I really do hope everyone on CC and their children ge ts into a school :)</p>
<p>heh. My daughter hasn’t posted here to my knowledge (though she told me about this site and may be watching). She’s waiting for March 10 to come just like all of you. She’s a better student than I ever was (until I’d been at Andover for a year, anyway); but the competition is harder now, a combination of the baby boom’s babies growing up, and BS’s being out of fashion in the era I attended.</p>
<p>My son is two years away from this point, if he decides he’d like to go to BS.</p>
<p>Andover’s last year welcome page is very intimidating I must admit. Thank you BusterDad for your reassurance, I feel much better now. After all, the kids who are selected on Your Potential Classmates are only a tiny portion of the whole class.
Totally second BusterDad. During my interview with a 1990 HADES graduate, the interviewer told me that admission to top boarding schools is much more competitive now than it was 20 years ago.</p>
<p>Heh. I wish it were only 20 years ago… The hazards of not meeting the right person to marry until somewhat older, however.</p>
<p>I’m just wondering what kind of people would attend BS(or how they heard about them) before the Internet era. (there weren’t many internationals, right?)</p>
<p>We just need to believe that they put the most unbelievable kids on their website. </p>
<p>[I haven’t done anything THAT special. How did they have those oppotunities?]</p>
<p>I often wonder about that. How did people find out about BS pre internet. I guess it was through word of mouth and tradition in certain circles? The internet must have greatly increased the diversity of applicants.</p>
<p>Haha BusterDad. Good luck to your children!
I’m not sure how international students before the internet era received timely admission information. I guess boarding schools granted deadline extension for internationals back then? Anyway, my interviewer told me that he was a roommate with a student from German during his freshman year!</p>
<p>Andover was already very diverse in my era. I don’t know the relative statistics between then and now. Learning that there were other kids better and brighter than I was who came from modest circumstances was one of the most valuable lessons of Andover.</p>
<p>Believe it or not, we did get along somehow before the internet, which, at times, my kids (and I expect you) find hard to believe. I’ve been involved in the Internet myself seriously since 1983, having first touched an ARPAnet host in 1972. There really was such a thing as life before the internet.</p>
<p>So I would say that the most common ways people would know about BS in my era was either: parents were aware of them from college, school guidance councellors, or that quaint thing, called a library ;-).</p>
<p>As for kids who have had opportunities (and exploited them as spectacularly as you find on those pages), part of what goes on is their parents, are able to enable kids to do exceptional things; they may be very high achieving parents as well (professionals of all sorts), with access to exceptional facilities and people. Building an electron accelerator, to continue my example of one of my Andover friends, for example, is something that is very doable if you have access to a machine shop and good vacuum pump, and hard to do otherwise.</p>
<p>Certainly money can help: right now there are things I’d love to arrange for my kids we don’t have the money or time to do (not that my kids lack good schools and opportunity by any stretch of the imagination); just that we don’t have the time and money (money often can be exchanged for time), to arrange more than we do. And it also requires desire on the kids parts, to really <em>want</em> to do those things. Different kids mature at different ways and times.</p>
<p>Schools like Andover look strongly for potential achievement and judge in good part on whether you’ve done well with the circumstances you have found yourself in, rather than judging strictly on achievement. This is where both standardized tests and recommendations play an important part.</p>
<p>So this summer, I am going to travel to antarctica and from an organization that prevents penguins from being harmed by global warming.</p>
<p>Next year, I will become the class president, school president, student council president, and play three sports at the varsity level. </p>
<p>For classes, I will be taking:
Discrete Mathematics with Computer Science Applications
Graduate Research Methods and Scholarly Writing in the Humanities
Intermediate Latin: Roman Elegy + Intermediate Latin: Cicero’s Verrines
The Emergence of Modern Economic Growth: A Comparative and Historical Analysis
The Biology of Stem Cells and the Emerging Field of Regenerative Medicine
Comparative National Security Strategies of Middle Eastern Countries
Engineering of Nanostructures for Targeted Drug Delivery
Western Ascendancy: The Mainsprings of Global Power from 1600 to the Present</p>
<p>and I will win a trillion billion dollars in the lottery + find the cure for cancer</p>
<p>Then I will surely be accepted to andover!!!</p>
<p>Hahaha BusterDad… Life without internet… Unimagineable!!! Although I most certainly do know about libraries seeing as my local library staff and I are on first name terms. :)</p>
<p>There was life before computers too, strangely. Though I had the privilege of working for one of the people who built what was probably the first working stored program electronic computer.</p>
<p>He’s still alive, BTW.</p>
<p>The change in one human lifetime is amazing.</p>