<p>i think my attitude will save me alot of heartbreak
plus i have one reach
more than enough</p>
<p>Why would you be heartbroken? Just apply and see what happens. Heck, just apply and assume you won’t get in. Then, on the outside chance that you do get in, you’ll be pleasantly surprised.</p>
<p>Consider the math. Suppose there’s only a 10% chance you’ll be accepted at each of your five dream schools (if you have that many). That’s a 90% chance of rejection. 90% to the 5th power is 59%. That means there’s a 41% chance you’d be admitted to one of those five schools, pretty good odds.</p>
<p>But whatever. It’s a shame not even to find out what might have happened had you tried. Your stats are good enough.</p>
<p>You are going to go to a worse school for the rest of your life because you want to avoid heartbreak? That seems ridiculous. I applied to most of the Ivies out of high school. I got rejected from ALL OF THEM EXCEPT Columbia. You only need to get into ONE.</p>
<p>Heartbreak? You miss 100% of the shots you don’t take.</p>
<p>mantori and slipper – If she’s perfectly happy with the colleges on her list, why should she load it up with “brand name” colleges just to see if she gets in? “Relative safeties” may offer her a truckload of merit aid, allowing her to graduate from a good college debt-free. Being at the tippy-top of her incoming class may be good for a lot of other perks as well.</p>
<p>A couple years back, our high school’s val was under tremendous pressure from all sides to apply to Ivies. She wasn’t interested. She enrolled at Arizona State’s Barrett Honors College on a full-ride scholarship (with a little left over at the end of each year). Her dad and principal gave her some flak, but she has thrived there and made wonderful career connections. And toward the beginning of frosh year, she met the nicest young man who’s still her boyfriend today; I’m betting they’ll marry when she finishes her undergrad.</p>
<p>This gal is incredibly bright, articulate, and accomplished. She had a credible shot at any college she might take an interest in. She just wasn’t into Ivy. And her rationale was, why take a seat away from someone else who might really, really want it?</p>
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<p>She’s not perfectly happy! She said herselftwicethat her goal is to avoid heartbreak. Well, if it’s going to break her heart not to get in, she must want to get in pretty badly.</p>
<p>We’re not telling anyone to apply to schools they have no interest in. We’re telling them not to give up on your dreams just because you might not realize them.</p>
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That attitude is fine and good if Smith is your first choice school. If I were to offer you admission to every college in the country which would you take? If its an Ivy or other super selective college, apply to them. A little disappointment never killed anyone. Failure is a part of life. If the time put into an application is worth a possible acceptance, then it is worth writing the application. If Harvard is your dream school there’ll probably be more what ifs if you don’t apply than if you apply and are rejected. I think that attitude has to do with this current generation being considered wimps who can’t take failure.</p>
<p>but why dream something you will never have? that just seems dumb</p>
<p>plus 8 ivies times 60 bucks a pop is 480 for something that probably won’t happen</p>
<p>i think the real problem in this country is that everyone thinks they or they’re little darling is more special than the rest</p>
<p>guess what, they’re not…most of us are mediocre and should set our sights accordingly.</p>
<p>If you have a 34 ACT and are applying to Smith, you’re probably competitive for some Ivies. I wouldn’t call you mediocre. It’s not like you’re 5’3’’ hoping to go to the NBA. You’re a bright kid applying to top schools. </p>
<p>Also, Ivies are better depending on what your goals are. They might also be worse depending on what your goals are.</p>
<p>I hope this isn’t a case of ■■■■■■■■ for compliments. “I only got a 34 on the ACT. I’m so mediocre!”</p>
<p>Go to Smith and be happy.</p>
<p>Just a note- applying to one/some Ivies does not equal applying to all Ivies. I wouldn’t suggest applying to all, because (surprise, surprise) they are very different schools. But with a 34, you have a decent shot if you apply to those which most interest you, especially if that doesn’t mean HYP.
Also, since you’re interested in Smith, why not look at more Seven Sisters schools? You’ve got a good chance there, and they might be a better fit if you’re primarily/largely interested in single-sex schools. Hey, you could always get the best of both worlds- maybe Barnard’s got a spot for you! ;D</p>
<p>Rocket are you a real person? If you are really top 1%, 34 ACT, statistically you have a shot at Brown, Columbia, Dartmouth, Amherst, Williams, Duke, Swarthmore, and Penn and you probably would get into Cornell, Northwestern, Rice, WashU, Middlebury, Bowdoin, and the like. Smith should be almost a safety.</p>
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<p>The math in the above post is really bad. Please ignore it. Lots of people try to use this type of math to ‘calculate’ their chances of being accepted into Ivies. It’s bad math, so save yourself the time and the disappointment when things don’t fall according to calculation!
The poster used a statistical calculation 1-P(!Harvard && !Yale && !Brown, etc) to calculate the chance a person gets into an ivy college. First off, you can only use that calculation when the relative probabilities are statistically independent. E.g, rolling a dice and flipping a coin.</p>
<p>Think of it like this: if I told you I rolled a 6 on a dice, would that affect your guess as to what my next coin flip would be? Hopefully not.</p>
<p>But if I told you I got into Harvard, would that affect your guess as to whether I got into Princeton, Yale, Brown, Columbia, etc? Probably, yeah. </p>
<p>Out of people who apply to 5 ivies, it’s not like everyone gets into at least 1. It’s not even like 2/5 of the people get into at least 1 (which is what the post I quoted suggests). You have a some who got into 4, or even all 5 they applied to, some who got into 3, 2 or 1, and a whole bunch who didn’t get into any.</p>
<p>
Bad example:
[Muggsy</a> Bogues - Wikipedia, the free encyclopedia](<a href=“http://en.wikipedia.org/wiki/Muggsy_Bogues]Muggsy”>Muggsy Bogues - Wikipedia)</p>
<p>Cripes on a stick, I’m just trying to encourage the girl to apply to better schools.</p>
<p>t-san, I’m pretty sure the math is OK. They are independent events.</p>
<p>Yeah rocket seems to have a really defeatist attitude. I’m with mantori, its almost sad. Especially given how strong she seems to be academically. Its losing before you start the game.</p>
<p>"I’m pretty sure the math is OK. "
the math is NOT ok! The chances of acceptance at one college have NO effect on your chances at another college.</p>
<p>What’s that book about being a maximizer vs. a satisficer? She’s a satisficer; y’all are maximizers.</p>
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<p>My math really was fine. As you said, acceptance at one college does not affect the chances of acceptance at the others. And as bird rock said, they are independent events, which of course means the same thing. And one of my assumptions is that the student is applying to five different colleges, each of which has the same probability of accepting the student (10%).</p>
<p>If there was only one college, the chances of being rejected would be 90%.</p>
<p>If there were only two colleges, the chances of being rejected by both of them would be 90% times 90%, or 81%. Hence, a 19% chance of being accepted at at least one of them.</p>
<p>And so on, until the chances of being rejected by all of five such colleges would be 90% X 90% X 90% X 90% X 90%, or 59%. Hence a 41% chance of being accepted at at least one of them.</p>
<p>The variable that affects the chances from one college to the next is, of course, the quality of the student. At each school there is a threshold below which the student actually has a 0% chance of being admitted, and so the odds calculation becomes meaningless. Therefore, if you apply to five different schools, each of which has a 10% acceptance rate, your chances wouldn’t really be 10% at each school. It would be more like 0% at one, 60% at another, 1% at yet another, and so on, depending on where the student falls with respect to each particular school’s threshold.</p>
<p>A specific example: Let’s say you apply to both Harvard and UCLA. Let’s say Harvard’s admission rate is 9% and UCLA’s is 30%. The way I calculated the odds, the chances of being rejected at both schools would be 91% X 70% = 64%. But now let’s suppose that the student’s qualifications are just a hair below the minimum requirement for admission to Harvard. In reality, the student’s chances of admission to Harvard are 0%, but at UCLA more like 90%. So, the student’s chances of being rejected by BOTH Harvard and UCLA is only 10% (that is, certain rejection at Harvard, but only a small chance of rejection at UCLA).</p>
<p>So, my calculation was based on unrealistic assumptions. But the math was right, based on the simplified assumptions that I used.</p>
<p>I agree with t-san.
College admissions are no “stochastic process” no matter they are independent or strongly correlated.</p>