Asian rejected from everywhere POSTMORTEM

Applying to College
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Hi everyone,

Wow has it been a crazy month. As many of you know last month I only got a single acceptance, to my state school (documented in this thread: http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1876770-what-did-i-do-wrong-p1.html). The ups and downs have really been astounding and this has been one of the most turbulent times of my life. However, I’m really touched by the outpouring of support I’ve received from total strangers here on CC. I’ll copy my original post+stats below. I realize my situation is unique in many ways, but I hope this serves as a cautionary tale to future applicants. Sorry for major tl;dr - a lot of people have reached out by PM asking what I decided to do/what I’d learned so I thought I should do this properly.

As I already noted, I’m not actually from Arkansas but I do have some minor media coverage in my real state which includes my real name and address, which I’d like to keep anonymous. Where you see Arkansas, read “South/Midwestish state” and where you see UArk read “state school ranked at about #110 on USNWR”.

There was no one “red flag” or fatal mistake, but a combination of factors contributed to the admissions snafu that I faced. If this bores you, scroll down to Looking Ahead for my final decision.

Lack of outside advice
High school guidance counselors are not in general especially well-informed about admission to Top 20 schools, because it’s not their primary job. While some know more than others, the vast majority of students they advise at any school don’t even apply. My GC is a very well-meaning person who knows adcom members around the state, but that’s just it - most people he advises stay in-state/go state school, and for the vast majority of schools, SAT match+GPA match = match. He even thought it would be a waste of money to apply to schools where I was above their 90th percentile because they’d reject me for having scores that are too high!

Do seek honest outside opinions. I didn’t get an honest and informed outside opinion on my app. I talked to parents of kids who went Ivy, but Asian parents, always overestimate the achievements of other people’s kids while staying modest about their own children’s exceptional achievements. Even your interviewers, who only meet you for an hour or two, have a distorted view of the current state of affairs, as admission is a lot more competitive than it was 20, 10, or even 5 years ago. I had the opportunity to consult with a private coach who could have pointed a lot of these things out, but passed on it needlessly.

More isn’t better
Nobody wants to be a jack of all trades, bouncing between things but not getting deep in any one. I always thought it was no big deal that I did a lot of things because I did all of them well. However, psychologically it’s easy to conflate doing a lot of things to a high level and being a dilettante and only superficially touching on a lot of things without focus – this is true of the student as well as the admissions officer.

Don’t succumb to the temptation to put everything on your resume. You get a sense of pride and ownership of things you know you’ve put effort into and want other people to see that. But all they might see is that you don’t have a clear focus on anything. Leave stuff off that doesn’t fit into your narrative, even if this means you have to leave a couple lines blank in your activities section.

Longer isn’t better
We’re always told that colleges value commitment to something over a long period of time. This is true with a qualification – that you can show you’re getting better at it. Just doing something for four years without any advancement or leadership positions to show for it can hurt you. For me it was piano – I’ve been playing for 14 years but I’ve never won any national awards or even anything above the city/state level. I like how my dad put it: think about someone applying for a new job who has been in the same entry-level position for 14 years – the reaction won’t be “Wow he must be really committed” but rather “Why hasn’t he advanced?”

Like above, don’t list all your activities. Leave stuff off that you did lacklustre for 4 years without any leadership or awards to show for it. It’s better to have a few things in your activities that all relate to each other and that you really put your all into and have leadership and awards in, than to fill it up with random unconnected stuff. I should have left some non-relevant achievements (such as my tutoring work or work with HfH) off and concentrated more on the fact that I have done chemistry research at a university for two years and am taking junior-level college chemistry courses.

Half-measures are the worst
You can’t get judged on what you don’t do. I didn’t get rejected just because I didn’t do MUN past freshman year. However, you can get judged if what you do do is not the very best you can do. For instance, I did research for two years.

A family friend who is a professor at a Top 50 and sits on graduate admission committees said he doesn’t hold no research experience against otherwise qualified applicants, but a lack of journal publications despite research would raise flags - either it was suspected that I exaggerated the experience or I was only involved in menial tasks and not in creative or original research (which is to an extent true). We do have publications “in the pipeline” but unfortunately for various reasons they have not yet been published. I only worked full-time for two summers and didn’t have a project that was really “mine” until a month before senior year started. If I had done less random stuff, I could have been involved part time during the year as well and could have pushed my projects forward so I’d have publications by now. No half measures.

The Asian factor
I am an upper-middle class Asian male applying for a STEM major. Admission for Asians is harder, which I knew, but more importantly also a lot more unpredictable. My stats might have been an almost-sure admit (assuming good essay, LOR, interview) if I had a hook like URM or legacy, but being Asian, non-low income, and non-first generation is almost like an “anti-hook” that I had to overcome, but the rest of my app just wasn’t strong enough to overcome that. My regional Dartmouth rep said my essay was strong, but even so, indirectly reminding adcoms of the above points probably did not do me any favors.

Don’t be Asian? XD

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Hints of superficiality
This was the killer for me to confront because everything I did I was genuinely passionate about, but then again every high school student would say that. Looking back under a microscope, I now see all the subtle stress fractures, all the corners cut and a*es halved that killed me by a thousand cuts. For example,
-I chose Vice Captain in two sports rather than Captain—I justified this to myself because I didn’t have time, but spent as much time on both of them as the captain did xD.
-I *said I started a nonprofit districtwide tutoring program, but didn’t put any procedures in place to keep it growing after I left, never even bothered to get it registered as a real nonprofit even though it would have cost me all of $25.
-I was basically appointed Mathletes captain solely because of my USAMO qual, but I didn’t do anything with it – I could have started my own math competition, or trained my own varsity team, or organized a trip where I took the Mathletes with me to tutor math at the Boys and Girls Club. But I didn’t because I was so busy with other stuff. Despite being mathletes captain, qualifying for USAMO, taking real analysis as a senior, and wanting to go into a math-heavy major to boot, I didn’t mention math a single time.
-I did research in a lab for two years and spent an inordinate amount of that time pressing buttons and loading vials (and browsing facebook while waiting for experiments to finish) for other people’s projects and only started to get involved in the actual design of experiments a month before senior year. And this is what I said I wanted to do in college! If I had taken the initiative and proposed a project of my own, I’d probably be coauthor on papers by now.

I used to think I was sincere, but I have begun to question whether that’s true. This might not be the only reason, or even a major reason I was rejected, but changing these things definitely would not hurt me.

The Biggest Thing
But perhaps the biggest thing, was complacency. I thought just because I “matched” these schools scorewise, GPA-wise, extracurricular-wise, I didn’t have to worry, didn’t have to apply to more safeties. However that caused me to overlook all of the above, which should have been significant moments of pause during the application process.

The final nail in the coffin was when my dad and I sat down and worked out the hard numbers – each school has an acceptance rate of between 5-10%, which is a rejection rate of 90-95%. I applied to 10 schools, so the probability of this happening to me – and the probability of this happening to you if you do what I did – is (0.95)^10 – 60%. I had a 60% chance of getting rejected everywhere and a simple calculation would have told me that when I chose the schools to apply to. I suppose on some level I was aware that this was a possibility but I dismissed it arrogantly, preferring to believe that if I had a good chance at one of them then I had a good chance at all of them. Well it turns out I didn’t have a good chance at any of them.

Looking Ahead
I’ve been doing a lot of soul-searching on what’s next for me: for the longest time I’ve alternatively been hoping beyond hope that I’d get off the waitlist at Yale, thinking about taking a gap year and re-applying, or attending UArk with the intent to transfer.

I am infinitely grateful to my guidance counselor who has gone above and beyond the call of duty to contact admissions reps to figure out what went wrong and try to work something out for me. He has literally put his entire reputation and that of my school on the line for me. He has been quite dogged in talking with the Yale regional rep, and finally managed to get a concrete answer beyond the usual evasive elocutions: the rep and my GC went over my application together which I understand is atypical—a testament to my GC’s dedication!—and said I was an “exceptional applicant”, but because of “institutional imbalances” this year I most likely will not be admitted off the waitlist. I saw no point in prolonging it so today I sent an email to Yale thanking them for their consideration and requesting that I be removed from the list.

However, I’ve also come to the realization that while the abovementioned were avoidable weaknesses, these are not weaknesses that I can address in the span of a year. Therefore, I have decided not to take a gap year. If I had to do it again, I probably would have applied to some other strong state schools or liberal arts colleges. There’s nothing that’s sure in college admissions. Duke is far from a sure thing, or Grinnell, or Amherst, or Berkeley, or Tulane. If I apply again, more likely than not I’ll end up in exactly the same place a year from now, except I’ll be a year behind. Or I’ll be choosing between #110 on USNWR and #90 or #80—not worth a year of my life.

I have also decided not to transfer. Say I do get into a “top school”—unlikely as that might be—I’ll probably end up paying $70,000 a year, getting almost no credit and starting basically as a freshman, little better than if I’d taken a gap year. Plus I’d be holding out false hope and not putting my all in my classes here, which isn’t fair to my classmates or my professors. And again, there’s no point in “trading up” to #90 when I can get a perfectly fine education where I’m at. At Ark I’ll max out the 90 credits from APs and dual enrollment and could graduate in a year if I wanted to, paying literally nothing.

If any good has come out of this, it’s that I’ve been humbled. I have been thoroughly disabused of any arrogant illusions I ever entertained that I “deserved better”. The USNWR rank is just a number, made up by a random old guy in a room somewhere who probably went to college before “my kind” were even allowed to enroll. My education is what I make of it–UArk is a great school with plenty of talented people, and I’m grateful to have the opportunity to attend next year.

Go Razorbacks!

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Original post:

Accepted
UArk

Waitlisted
Yale

Rejected
Harvard
Columbia
Stanford
Princeton
Brown
Dartmouth
UPenn
MIT
Caltech

Objective:
SAT I (breakdown): 2400 (taken October sophomore year)
ACT (breakdown): 35 (only took once June freshman year)
SAT II: 800 Math II / 800 Chemistry / 800 Physics / 800 French / 790 Spanish
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 4.0
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): 1/500ish
AP (place score in parenthesis): BC Calc (5), Chemistry (5), Physics C (5), English CompLit (5), APUSH (5), Chinese (5), French (5), Macro (5), Micro (5). Self-studied for half of these.
IB (place score in parenthesis): [N/A]
Senior Year Course Load: WHAP, AP Bio, AP Comp Sci, AP Music, Advanced French (higher than AP), gym, philosophy (AP not offered, just a chill class). Dual enrolled at UARK for real analysis and Honors Physical Chemistry. Independent study with the professor I did research with over the summer.
Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): made the USAMO 10th, 11th, 12th grade, (scored a 1 and 3, third time the charm?). Won state science fair but gave up my place at Intel fair due to a schedule conflict. National AP Scholar. National Physics Olympiad. National Merit. Some state and city piano things, idk if “major”.

Subjective:

Extracurriculars (place leadership in parenthesis): Student Government (President). National Honor Society (President). Varsity Tennis (Vice Captain). Varsity Track (Vice Captain). Mathletes (Captain solely by virtue of making USAMO). Physics Olympiad (founded at my school, Captain of 4 people Played piano since I was 4, only some minor awards.
Job/Work Experience: [N/A]
Volunteer/Community service: Common Core tutoring for high school students and Boys and Girls club since sophomore year. Founded a districtwide college prep program to bring undergrads at UArk schools to talk to and provide one-on-one college counseling/test prep to students in underperforming public high schools. At one point had 20 college students and 100+ high school students. Habitat for Humanity (2 years). Charity drives through my high school to raise money for MSF in Syria.
Summer Activities: Did unpaid research in physical chemistry at UARK for 2 summers, have a paper “in the works”.
Essays (rating 1-10, details): Thought it was a 10? I wrote about how working at different Arkansas public schools helped me to come to terms with my privilege middle-class Asian male with parents who value education. The interwoven exempli gratia was learning Spanish on my own outside school to communicate with a lot of students whom I tutored who were immigrants, which I am independently very proud of, in counterpoint to my having chosen French as a stupid freshman because I thought it was a more “elegant” language. My English teacher told me it was the best she’d ever read.

Recommendations (rating 1-10, details):

Teacher Rec #1: 10 - aforesaid English teacher, who taught me in AP English as the only sophomore in a class of seniors. She LOVES me
Teacher Rec #2: 9-10 - Physics teacher, went to Columbia. He is more reserved but I got a really good vibe from him, like if no one in the class can solve a problem he mocks resignation and asks me to go up to solve it. He asked me if I wanted to help him start a Physics Olympiad team.
Counselor Rec: 10 - worked with him to start my program. Apparently the number of APs I took and how early I took them was “unprecedented” - he showed the rec to me and it was sincere but almost embarrassingly praiseful, to the point where I almost asked him to tone it down.
Additional Rec: Research supervisor at UARK. Honestly I don’t know how good - he seems to like me and was really surprised as a high schooler I knew what physical chemistry was and wanted to go into it, but compared to him I’m an idiot. He hasn’t had high schoolers in his lab before which could be a plus (I was very persistent) or a minus (no idea how to write a college rec).

Other

Applied for Financial Aid?: Yes
Intended Major: Chemistry and Physics
State (if domestic applicant): Arkansas
Country (if international applicant): US Citizen
School Type: Large public
Ethnicity: Chinese
Gender: Male
Income Bracket: $200,000-250,000
Hooks (URM, first generation college, etc.): Research in physical chemistry in high school, enrolled this year in a PChem class, started a volunteer program, started a club. However even though my Spanish isn’t perfect what I am most proud of is learning Spanish independently

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Wow, looking at your stats, and I am in awe. You had some incredible scores and I’m honestly surprised that you got denied or waitlisted from all 10 of your top schools. Looking back on your old post, and I see a lot of rather harsh worded comments coming from strangers behind a computer screen. I’m envious of your stats tbh (and I think it’s unfair how ethnicity and financial status puts you at a disadvantage…) I wish you luck for the future! I’m sure you will do great things at UArkansas!

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@rejectedlion2016 I’m glad you turned this into a learning experience for yourself, and I’ve heard great things about UArkansas. I’m sure you’ll do great there, and I hope you’ll enjoy college:) Honestly I was pretty surprised you got rejected from all of those schools given your achievements, but it is practically a lottery sometimes(unless you’re Bill Gates’ son or something). You should be proud of everything you accomplished, and know that it’s those schools’ loss, not yours. YOU determine where you go in life, not your college.

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Writing so well and being so introspective at your age, I have no doubt that you will do whatever it is you want in life. Just be a little flexible about the route for getting there and you’ll be fine. Congratulations on your achievements to data and good luck in the future.

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The cream ALWAYS rises to the top.
Knock their socks off at U ArK!

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Imagine all the money you and your parents are probably saving by going to school in “Fayetteville”. Now imagine how cool it will be to be debt-free at graduation, with (potentially) money saved for grad/med/law school or an easier time saving up for grad/business school if you wanted to put in a few years in the working world first. This could really be a blessing in disguise.

Plus, sports and fun!

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Don’t sweat it. Do well in undergrad and leverage yourself into grad school.

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OP, while you gave a fair assessment, seems that the assessment is still mostly focused on getting into those top schools. For example, your paragraph on research focused on getting published so that one can put it down as some “credentials” instead of satisfying and developing one’s intellectual capability. Too many students these days just want to get their names attached to some papers, and whether such “research” improves their academic capability is less a concern. Really, getting into a top school should be a mean, and not a goal by itself.

Your paragraph comparing being two vice captains with a single more “prominent” position of captain. I don’t see much difference. But again sounds like you would skip both had you know they were not useful for enhancing your application.

Now if you were that fixed on getting into Ivy’s, to me, then your biggest blunder was skipping ISEF for so called scheduling conflicts. That’s pretty much your highest recognition and you gave it away. And who knows had you attended, you had chance to win bigger awards that could improve your chance significantly.

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I’m a little unclear about how you drew up the list of what contributed to your “admissions snafu”. Unless your guidance counselor had extraordinary access to the admissions folks at each school, you can only guess at why you were rejected and will never know how your applications were actually handled. Perhaps you’ve identified some important factors, perhaps not. I imagine it’s somewhat comforting to be able to point to “reasons” for rejection rather than accept that there are some things in life that will remain a mystery, but in the end, you just don’t know. So while your comments on seeking advice and selecting safeties are certainly valuable, I don’t think the rest of your post is helpful to future applicants. I do commend you on being able to develop such a positive attitude after being so disappointed. Resiliency is a great trait that will carry you far in life.

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What do you plan to study?
Whatever you do, DO NOT graduate in a year. Take as many graduate classes as you can while on full scholarship.
See if 'uark ’ has exchanges with other us universities known for their math/science programs, where you can be study for a semester, and same thing abroad (like the Budapest program).
Study French and, if you can, Russian, as this is useful for math.

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You weren’t rejected from “everywhere”. You had an extremely top-heavy list with admission rates in the single digits, and no matches. One safety, which is where you will attend. One acceptance, one WL. And applying to more than one school with single digit acceptances does not increase your chance that you will get into any one of them. That is a false statistic.

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Great job OP, very good of you to come back and share your analysis and story. I hope at least one kid benefits from your experience. You will go far in life.

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I am glad you found some peace in the end. Congratulations on your upcoming graduation. Your university will be lucky to have you.

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To the OP: I appreciate you sharing your experience with others, and I’m sure you will go on to be very successful!

However, I feel the need to address one section of your post. I have seen the same fallacy in many other posts on CC as well. You state:
“The final nail in the coffin was when my dad and I sat down and worked out the hard numbers – each school has an acceptance rate of between 5-10%, which is a rejection rate of 90-95%. I applied to 10 schools, so the probability of this happening to me – and the probability of this happening to you if you do what I did – is (0.95)^10 – 60%. I had a 60% chance of getting rejected everywhere and a simple calculation would have told me that when I chose the schools to apply to. I suppose on some level I was aware that this was a possibility but I dismissed it arrogantly, preferring to believe that if I had a good chance at one of them then I had a good chance at all of them. Well it turns out I didn’t have a good chance at any of them.”

This calculation is only correct if the selections at each school were truly random; if each school drew from their applicant pool lottery-style. We know that this is not true. There will be some number of amazingly outstanding applicants who will be admitted to all or most of the schools to which they apply. There will also be some applicants that are not appealing to top schools, and they will have almost no chance of being accepted at any of these schools.

A student with a subpar application (I’m not talking about the OP here) will not appreciably improve his chance of acceptance by applying to a large number of top schools.

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Good luck. The school you will be attending is lucky to have such a great student. Everything will work out!

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OP your story is riveting – not only because of your stats (which are off the charts!) but because of your incredible maturity. I commend your resilience and thank you for coming back to post your thoughts.

I would encourage you to also focus on the financial aspect. As an upper income student applying to top selectivity schools, which are mostly need based, you would perhaps have gotten some aid but – and I am guessing here – probably not as much as at your state U? Grad school is obviously in your future. So congrats on finding an affordable option which will not saddle you with debt and which will open many many doors.

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Agree with @WISdad23…relax, enjoy the experience of undergrad and get yourself in position for graduate school. As your State U is very affordable, I would encourage you NOT to graduate in 1-2 years! Stay at least 3.
Study Abroad or do an exchange semester with another university in the US
Do internships, volunteering, research
Consider a double major

Explore all there is to offer at your State U and jump in!

Keep us posted. You will continue to do great things and I think will find that being a big fish at State U will lead to some great opportunities.

Good luck to you

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Definitely don’t rush through undergrad and take advantage of (in your case, free) opportunities there.

And you may not want to take a gap year, but schools like Tulane and others on that level (and above, even) definitely are not as hard to get in to as the tippy top and likely would have thrown major merit money your way.

Personally, I see no faults with anything you did except for the list of schools to apply to that you came up with and possibly complacency (which could have come across as entitlement in your apps) which is tied in with not getting outside advice. There’s a huge range and all sorts of different types between the Ivies and “UArk” as well as top unis in the UK who appreciate kids who are really strong in one area.