@tdy123 , it’s great that the adcom mentioned your son’s ECs. For another kid, it might be an amazing essay, and for yet another, recommendations. I personally don’t think ECs are more important than essays or recommendations, but it very much depends on the college. Harvard does not consider only four factors. Every other factor is merely “considered.” Columbia considers essays, ECs, and character as “very important.” U Chicago considers ECs as “important” but character and essays are considered “very important.” It all highlights the fact that there is no formula.
I found my post about an reply by an MIT adcom about EC’s that was truly memorable.
http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/discussion/comment/20526369/#Comment_20526369
I am reminded of it whenever I see fresh turnips.
The adcoms get it - they understand that kids are trying to do whatever they can to get accepted. They want to present themselves in as positive a light as possible.
CC clearly skews toward the wealthier than average crowd, and toward the higher-achieving students. A significant number of students and families who come here are interested in finding out how to get into an elite school.
EC’s can make a difference. But becoming valedictorian can make a difference too. Having an outstanding rec letter can make a difference. Perfect SATs can make a difference. Telling your story in your essay makes a difference.
It is easy to remember the stories told by the admissions officers, because they seem to think its important - every year the elite schools all reject kids with perfect grades and perfect SAT scores. They tell the students and families this to stress the fact that there are only a limited number of spots. But students and families instead hear that “there must be something wrong with that applicant.” They then think that since it’s not the grades nor scores, it must be their ECs…so how do they fix that?
@tdy123 I can’t imagine any adcom saying, “Oh I remember your kid. He got straight 800s on three subject tests in one sitting!” That would be a pretty dull conversation. I know that Harvard was impressed by my son’s computer science skills because the head of the CS department called him to encourage him to come. I know it wasn’t his school recommendations (because he took his one and only CS course there freshman year.) But he had two outside recommendations that talked about CS, he wrote his essay about how he was both self-taught, but also had had support from his community starting with family and going on to elementary school teachers who let him do programming instead of math, and once he had access to the Internet, how he found tools to teach himself more. He had the numbers to get in, but I’m quite sure the decision to admit him was not based primarily on the numbers. Did his character come through in the application? Who knows. The teachers who wrote letters liked him. The outside recommendations showed he could play well with others. He had two fairly academic school based activities, so even though he is pretty introverted he looked like a team player. His essay, while mostly a pretty dry presentation of facts, did show he had a sense of humor.
As many here have already said, I think ECs help make the difference once the student is in the pool with very similarly situated academic standards. In addition, I have found personally that taking leadership roles in ECs definitely makes a difference in scholarship offers. For a few scholarships my daughters received, it was not only academic based but also based on the fact that they had exhibited leadership qualities (kids with the same or even higher academic stats did not receive the scholarships because they did not have the same experience with ECs). Just my two cents.
Getting “in the pool” isn’t Everest. A few of us think about half of, say, H applicants do. Mostly 4.0/high stats/high rigor kids who didn’t have other blots on their records.
Ask yourself, “Then what?”
I don’t think people can fathom a tippy top looking at 20k kids who made it past first cut. Or even 12k, if adcoms are fierce about weeding. And for about 2000 slots. Getting the stats is just about being a good student. ECs and your ability to make a good self presentation show more about the individual you are. They reflect choices, which in turn reflects the level of thinking. Count on it: tippy tops want kids eho can think and follow through (on the right level,) with apparent social skills and concern for others.
You can’t show that in a 4.0 and retaking SATs ad nauseum til you convert that 1520 to a 1580. Where’s the thinking?
I am the OP. So this is what I think I am understanding from what is being shared. A million thanks to everyone who contributed to this thread by the way.
First, kids have to have good stats. A good GPA and good test scores. If they don’t have those, excellent EC’s might not save them if they are targeting tippy top colleges.
EC’s and recommendation letters come into picture when choosing among thousands of high stat kids.
The kids should do EC’s because they like them. If they don’t, adcoms might sense this and eliminate them.
Also, the whole application package should be coherent. Meaning, if the kid is doing an EC, the supporting documents like recommendation letters and essays should enhance this point. If the whole package isn’t coherent, even if you have high stats, most likely you will not get easy acceptance at tippy top colleges.
Am I about right or no?
Much is made of adcoms sensing “padding.” The reality is, for some majors, it’s more than just doing things because you “like” them. For some, you need to show the right experience(s.) And that’s a life thing; you need the right experiences for a job, too, regardless whether that particular activity rings your chimes. This is mostly about STEM. Imagine applying without math-sci activities. Just an “I like math” can’t cut it. And it’s not too savvy.
I do agree most kids can just choose whatever they fancy. But for a tippy top, expectations rise. Same with premed. Don’t claim all over the place how much you want to be a doc and save people, when you’ve done zip to help people (or it’s been at arm’s length or some hs club that has fun doing nothing.)
Same with poli sci. Get involved in the scene. Don’t just talk or expect MUN to be enough. Get outside the hs box.
Arden, not “coherent” if it makes the kid unilateral. That wannabe doc needs more than just a string of health related ECs. The app/supp needs to “make sense.” Breadth and depth is a safe bet.
And not a string of easy diversions. Who makes more sense, the premed who volunteered in health delivery of some sort or advocacy or whatever, or the kid who sings three times/year at the senior center.
A few years back, when Yale made it clear that they were trying to “grow” their STEM fields, I’m sure AOs had to weed out some applicants purporting to want to major in Physics and Math, but all of their ECs pointed elsewhere. Not that kids don’t change their minds, which is why they have 2 years to declare a major, but still.
@lookingforward - imo you’re placing too much emphasis on major, the most popular major on college apps is undeclared, now they may have to declare a specific school (say arts and science or engineering), but only a handful of majors (say CS or EECS) require applying directly to it. An adcom from a top school told me, major is optional, we look for people that can major in English or Chemical Engineering.
“But team captain and class president are not higher level than school participation (and are pretty dull).”
They’re actually not dull to the top colleges, getting voted to a position is more important than being selected for one. You can see a youtube video of a Stanford adcom saying pretty much that. If you’re going to change the world, you have to be an elected leader at least in the US, which means getting people to vote for you (2016 election jokes aside).
While “getting in the pool isn’t Everest”, the pool for the normal applicant without super hooks for the highly selective colleges that engage in holistic admissions has a high bar with observable benchmarks based on statistics published by the schools. For the most competitive schools with single digit admissions rates, the bar is set at around top 10% of a class (assuming rigor in courses taken) and somewhere in the mid to high 1400’s in the new SAT or 31/32 in the ACT. Even then, the pool is northward of 10,000 applicants, probably substantially more (we can also safely assume that a high proportion of those at the bottom of these ranges have some super or solid hook going for them). So of course the AO’s have to use other factors (hooks, essays, LoR’s, EC’s and in rare cases interviews) to whittle down the admit list to around 2,000.
What I shake my head about on this site is when I see posts (mostly by applicants, and maybe their parents) who are below one or both of these objective bars and believe that they are or can make themselves truly competitive by dint of a special EC or two followed by affirmations or advice on how to make their EC list even better. Absent this EC being a rare talent or achievement for which the school has allotted a limited number of recruiting spots (could be athletic or academic/artistic), this is wishful thinking.
Even for candidates that are in the pool, the advice and focus often strays to what comprises the list, not how you portray the list in light of positive attributes you and/your LoR’s writer want to highlight. How often do we see posts to the effect, “You need to add some community/charitable service work to show that you care about others”; look at me, “I started/founded some club/charity/business”; look at me, “I have a list of ‘20’ activities”. There are 10 spots for EC’s in the Common App; in fact I question the wisdom of listing close to 10 things because by definition anything at the bottom of the list means less time and effort for anything at the top (time and waking productive hours outside of school are finite). There are only 150 characters (about 30 words) to describe each EC. Unless the EC has an award or recognition attached to it, the only realistic way to give context and life to the quality of the EC is through the essays/short answers and LoR’s, and that is where I believe the majority of the whittling down occurs.
I think EC’s are sometimes overrated by parents and high schoolers plotting their college application strategy. Generally speaking EC’s may demonstrate a student’s talents and accomplishments. Awards and wins and competitions can evince a student’s commitment and talent in music, art, math, debate, writing, science, or some other area.
That said, merely devoting hours to activities without achieving awards and distinctions or wins of some kind don’t distinguish the plodder or social climber or serial joiner from the truly talented. Yet sometimes we see in discussions here parents or students counting the clubs a student participated in, or hours of voluntary service – activity without distinction.
I have a very different attitude toward EC’s from most contributors to this forum: EC’S ARE PRIMARILY VALUABLE BECAUSE THEY ADVANCE THE STUDENTS’ SKILLS AND ALLOW THEM TO DISCOVER THEIR TALENTS AND INTERESTS. EC’S SHOULDN’T BE VIEWED MAINLY AS INSTRUMENTAL FOR COLLEGE ADMISSION.
My kids were “active” in EC’s but never undertook them with college in mind. EC’s were ways the kids could learn new things and modes of expression beyond the school environment. Serial joiners they were not.
1 was fanatical about numbers and sports (as a fan, not a participant) from a very early age. His "EC's" were the things he learned to play with -- games, computers, statistics. He was a very early reader. And he was competitive and not especially "social." The one "sport" that allowed him to use his skills wasn't a sport, but it was a competition: debate. He debated because he was competitive, he liked strategy, he liked to read. An important SIDE benefit was that being a debater made him appreciate the value of teamwork. He was opinion editor of the school paper not to impress colleges but because this gave him a public voice (even at high school level).
2 couldn't be persuaded to attend Girls State or join any other club. She had a half-hearted commitment to gymnastics. What she wanted to do was art. She spent summers in high school attending pre-college art programs, not to earn credentials but to have good teachers and mentors and tools to work with. This was for her. There was a payoff, not so much in EC brownie points but in skill development; and those skills along with her classroom achievements got her into a top art college.
Theloniusmonk, my comments most often relate to top colleges. Not sure where the most popular applicant major is undecided. You don’t have to be applying to a specific college (eg, CoE) for adcoms to look at how your prep and activities follow your purported academic interests.
But I’m also referring to how kids think. Or not. What impression do you think it makes when a kid says, say, engineering, then has no related ECs? You think adcoms ignore that discrepancy because the kid isn’t applying to a separate CoE?
You can’t be a bump on a log, but you also don’t need the awards. You think a kid who spent years on a community project, advocacy, is working on a campaign or alongside adults in other ways, other responsibilites, needs an award or TT adcoms can’t figure out the effort and impact, the vision and energy?? Or you think district debate champ tops that?
There’s nothing wrong with being class president as a mark of leadership, but you had better be a class president who actually did something, or at least can write winningly about what you tried to do.
I don’t think the story has to be 100% coherent. My younger son played in the orchestra all four years even though he’s at best a competent player. He was thinking about IR, but the most obvious activity in his school (Model UN) was filled with students he disliked. He kind of applied “sideways” to use MIT’s term. He talked about origami for his main essay, he talked about a volunteer neighborhood historian job in another, he used a creative essay at Tufts (topic was to imagine what would have happened if the colonists had lost the Battle of Lexington), to throw in some foreign references and show some global thinking. He also applied undecided, so for all they knew he was a potential history major. His main awards were in the ecology events at Science Olympiad. Maybe fifth place at States? First or second in the regionals. He mostly got into the schools just off the tippy top (Tufts, Vassar), but he also got into U of Chicago EA.
Neither of my kids did ECs with college in mind. They both did do some summer volunteering partly because of that and partly because their parents thought it would be good for them. Each of them found ways to make that summer volunteering also somewhat related to their interests.
Mathmom, I’d bet your son showed the attributes many times over. Even your descriptions of him make him sound fascinating.
It’s not the origami. It’s who he is. That came through. Kudos to him.
@mathmom , re being a class president who actually accomplishes something, I agree with you.
I have on a few occasions mentioned the guy from our HS who was accepted ED to Harvard last year. He was class pres two years running, and he was really involved not just in the high school, but the community also. He was constantly pushing for things at school (often, but not alwya getting them), and government was obviously his main interest, because he spent time doing all kinds of stuff at the state capitol. He attended all the school board meetings, and gave reports about what the student council was trying to achieve. Plus he was well-liked by both students and adults. On the surface, it didn’t seem that he was doing anything that thousands of other kids weren’t doing, but I very strongly suspect that his letters of rec helped adcoms see below the surface. I am sure he must have also had a great essay. I would not be one bit surprised to see him at Capitol Hill someday.
@mathmom “There’s nothing wrong with being class president as a mark of leadership, but you had better be a class president who actually did something, or at least can write winningly about what you tried to do.”
You said it was pretty dull and it actually is not to adcoms, especially if you can be president two years in a row as Lindagaf points out. I don’t even know if they have to write about it as 750 words is not a lot to talk about how you got elected, what you did, what you learned etc… The achievement speaks for itself as adcomes know what it takes to campaign, get elected, influence voters etc… Those are things they look for.
Your essays don’t have to be about your ECs. If you loved being class president, or you did something interesting, or if you learned something about yourself through the experience, by all means write about it. But if there’s something else you’d rather write about, that’s fine too. My son was in two orchestras every year and took private lessons and did some volunteer activities involving playing the violin. But he didn’t write about it as being a musician for him was primarily about being with friends.
I don’t know what the Common Application looks like these days, but when my younger son was applying there was the main essay, and then a shorter essay about your favorite EC. I actually liked his EC essay better than the main one, and it was about an EC he probably spent the least amount of time on (because it depended on the availability of the adult he was working with). He’d tried making that essay his main essay and he felt it didn’t work, but somehow the wording of the question for the EC essay, got him pointed in a good direction.
How would someone know what it represents to adcoms? I think the point is, what some see as a big deal may not be. Adcoms don’t guess that someone elected (even twice) is therefore “special.”
The old expression is, everyone still needs to pull their pants on, one leg at a time. Just having the title means little. That’s why the wisdom is, “Show, not just tell.”
And when they go through thousands of apps each year, what’s a BFD at your hs can seem pretty commonplace in the pool.