@londondad I would add that colleges are not even that impressed by sports other than at a very elite level. True it is a common denominator for small talk but beyond the hype of the youth sports industrial complex, the reality is that the number of truly great athletes is fairly finite and the real amount of scholarship dollars is even more finite.
Agree with @pantha33m about the small number of students recruited for athletics. It is a significant hook, but only for the very few.
Rejections can be strange. My S14 was accepted by Olin, RPI, Vanderbilt, but rejected by UVA. My S17 (with 36 ACT) was accepted by Tulane, RPI, but waitlisted by NEU, WPI, and denied his first choice major at VT.
But maybe that’s what you take away from a thread like this, the level of competition and complexity of the process has created a randomness in results that’s very hard to gauge. My daughter’s results don’t make any sense, I’m well aware. How did she get in here, yet not here? Gone are the days where you pick 3-5 schools and assume you’ll get into to most of them.
It’s hard to draw any conclusions from D17s rejections since MIT and Brown reject most applicants but I thought her best Supplement Essays were for Brown but looking back at them I see how she lost focus from her Personal Narrative with that particular application. I recommend coming up with a Personal Narrative(Google to find the College Admissions Help site that talks about it) that will be the framework of your application as it makes writing essays and highlighting ECs easier. Pick 3 characteristics of your child - 1 Academic, 1 EC, and 1 Personality. For my D17 it is:
Academic: Scientist/Researcher
Extra-Curricular: Global Citizen/Languages
Personality: Collaborator
Use the Essays and EC/Awards spot to highlight those characteristics and drive them home. It makes it easier for an AO to see where your child will fit into the class.
@Dolemite makes a very good point. The personal narrative is extremely important. My 3 kids all did a version of this. They focused their entire application, essays, recs, and EC’s to focus on their story. First child, D09, focused on her involvement with a teen suicide prevention hotline, and how it shaped her. Second D focused on how dance team and passion for dance help her overcome her feelings of insecurity due to involuntary tics(tourette’s). S17, focused on his leadership as 4 year ASB and class President. Most essays and recs tied into each of their focus. Consider it like branding. How do you want to brand your kid. Once you have the focus, stay on message. Good luck to all
My son has committed to the University of Vermont, Rubenstein College of the Environment. Here is his information that can hopefully help someone (esp those in the B+/A- range) in the future.
Stats
[ul][]Unweighted: 3.47. School does not weight, weighted estimated at 3.70.
[]Class rank: School does not rank, only provided data to colleges show him well above the previous graduating class average gpa.
[]ACT Superscore: 25C (E 28, M 24, R 23, S 24) W 26 (ADHD, no accommodations, terrible test taker)
[]3 Honors Classes, 5.5 AP’s, scores 2-4 (APES and AP Lit TBD)
[]Senior courses: AP Calculus AB (the .5, sigh), AP English Lit, AP Environmental Science, Theater Tech, Wind []Ensemble, Senior Civics, Yoga/Walking, Jazz Band.
[]Essays: Decent, but more importantly echoed the person represented in his EC choices and in the LOR’s.
[]Recs: Were absolutely wonderful
[]Major: Environmental Science (at application, now moved to Policy/Studies)
[]Applied for financial aid: Yes (for student loan purposes and at privates due to 2 kids in college)
[]Family income: ~$200k
[]Home state: WA
[]Race: Caucasian [/ul]
Extracurricular Activities:
[ul][li]Jazz Band, Marching Band, Concert Band, Community Bands - all four years[/li][]Theater Tech/Stage Crew- various positions, all performances, all four years
[]Founded Political Club, officer, 2 years, involved in local politics, some national
[]Member Environmental Club, spearheaded and implemented new composting/recycling initiatives on school, interacted with district on long range planning for solar
[]Community Service – 2 Presidential silver awards, over 400 hours at application time. Combination of youth group community work and theater work.
[]Work – Theater Assistant for the district performing arts center 2 years, Sales Associate local hardware store, 2 years.[/ul]
Accepted: note - applied to ALL schools EA
[ul][]UVM (Presidential Scholarship) Attending
[]University of Puget Sound (Alumni Scholarship Theater Tech Scholarship, offered Music School admission
[]Ithaca College (Harcourt Scholarship)
[]Ursinus (Merit Scholarship)
[]Allegheny (Merit Scholarship, Music Scholarship)
[]Goucher (Innovator Merit Award)
[li]Western Washington University (Emerging Scholars merit award) [/ul][/li]Rejected: None
My D also focused on her personal narrative. She didn’t do anything during high school with the goal of building her resume for college. Her essays were all about her journey over 4 years and self-discovery.
And to put more bluntly the subtext (or at least what I think the subtext is) of what @Dolemite and @itsgettingreal17 have said, it’s that people really need to stop looking at college admissions as some sort of purely rational process whereby teenagers achieve advantages in a zero-sum game of academic and social prowess—and both of those points are important.
First, college admissions is not a rational process. From the choice of which colleges an individual chooses to attend to which colleges admit any given applicant to the whole question of affordability (both in terms of what the applicant and their family are willing to pay and in terms of how affordable a college chooses to make itself), there is some rationality involved, but it’s not something that can be boiled down to simple, easily parsed patterns.
Second, college is not a zero-sum game. Yes, any given single college’s admissions may be zero-sum—if Well Known College has decided it’s going to extend offers of admission to 1,000 applicants, someone will be applicant 1,001—but overall? No. Even limiting ourselves to the United States, there are thousands of colleges. There are at the very least hundreds (but I would argue it’s actually in four digits) of colleges where someone can get a quite excellent education. With very, very rare exceptions (like if someone’s after a military academy, or is desperate for something like the Saint Johns great books curriculum), there are hundreds of colleges out there that will fit any applicant’s general preferences, whether it’s for a big state school, or a small LAC, or whatever in between.
So no, there isn’t a lot here in terms of “Here’s how to guarantee I/my kid will get into HYPSM!” There is, however, a lot embedded in here about the need to figure out what you’re after, take off some of the blinders that come with some of CC’s obsessions, and move forward with maybe a bit less stress than those in preceding application years.
Sorry, but I don’t buy the whole personal narrative and branding story thing. Most kids who are applying to top schools are middle-class kids with good grades/scores a few activities but no significant hardships or setbacks along the way. Most of these kids can also write at least decent essays along the lines of the three categories that Dolemite mentions. These kids are generally not on a journey of self discovery during high school. This whole college essay nonsense is a big part part of the randomness factor. Whether or not these essays grab the adcoms reading them has more to do with the mood the adcom is in at the time or whether there is some detail about the applicant (e.g. being from Alaska) than the actual content of the essays.
@londondad Well I disagree. Just like anything presented having a cohesive framework is going to make it more effective. And secondly, I think it really helps the child focus and makes it easier to decide what to write about in all the numerous Short Answer/Essays associated with selective college applications or top Scholarship applications.
@londondad You are quite cynical. Why cant a middle class student experience hardship or set-backs or grow as a person during high school? My D definitely did. Her essays were very authentic. Her consistent results is, imo, some proof that it isn’t all that random and about the adcoms’ mood while reading students’ essays.
@londondad - I disagree with what you say about essays grabbing or not grabbing an adcom depending one his/her mood. While there is an element of that, it’s not as random as you think. I have edited dozens of kids’ essays here of CC, and can truthfully say that there are only a couple that stick in my mind – and those are the kids that did the best in their admissions.
Can most of the kids applying to elite schools write well? Of course! Are most of the essays that these kids write truly memorable in comparison to the 1,000 other equally well-written essays in a given stack? Doubtful…Do that matter much? Absolutely!
Essays and recommendations are the only way that adcoms can distinguish among scores of equally talented and equally deserving high-achieving kids with stellar scores and a host of extracurriculars. It’s where a kid’s personality can really shine through, how an adcom can see what makes a kid tick, and it can give an adcom something upon which to hang his/her hat (or his/her recommendation to the committee).
It’s not necessary for a kid to have overcome great adversity in his/her life (although it can help, overcoming adversity alone won’t do it without a compelling narrative), nor is it a matter of describing a journey of self-discovery. It’s about creating a narrative that will show – not tell – the reader who you are. Self-discovery does not have to come from a grand adventure – it can come from the most mundane experiences (e.g., whilst shopping at Costco – the “Costco Girl” swept the ivies, if memory serves).
The essays that work are the ones that you can say “Let’s admit the Costco kid” or “I really like the one with the peanut butter sandwich” or "How about that kid that compared him/herself to a “Gogi taco?” Heck, my kid talked about wearing a Shakespeare t-shirt every day since 5th grade and she got into every school she applied to, including Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford – receiving top merit awards at U Chicago, Wash U, Vandy, etc., etc. In her essays, she not only talked about her passions – both directly and indirectly and always as part of a concise, well-written narrative – but she let the adcoms see her quirkiness and her wit. And her teacher recs backed that up.
I’ve been through the journey with @BigPapiofthree, @Dolemite, and @itsgettingreal – they know what they are talking about. I daresay that adcoms could probably pick their kids’ essays out of a stack.
Like it or not, a large part of college admissions in this country is about “branding” yourself and creating a compelling narrative that will stick with the reader. It’s not about the kid presenting his/her ideas for research nor describing his/her accomplishments, but providing a window into who he/she is.
I tend to agree with @londondad and am also skeptical of an adcom’s ability to make fine distinctions among thousands upon essays from similarly situated kids. Yes, they can weed out the really poorly written or grating ones, and I’m sure there are remarkable ones written by kids from extraordinary situations, but beyond that I think they are overrated (like ECs other than elite athletics) and mostly just confirm what was already thought about kids because of their actual accomplishments.
It’s a nice thing to believe, because it validates student effort, gives hope to those with lower stats and fuels a very large and lucrative industry of essay-writing consultants and counselors, but it defies logic to think that these things can matter so much at the application volumes we are talking about.
As for the experiences of those on CC, I suggest googling “Survivor Bias”.
I am sort of in between londondad poster and others.
Regarding essays, I found out from my kid (no hooks of any kind) who got into Stanford REA that the applications/essays reviewer in his region read 2,000 applications and “fought” for 60 kids, meaning the reviewer recommended 60 kids out of 2,000. Now, I have no idea why my kid was one of those 60 kids the reviewer chose to fight for – because I don’t think he will be a billionaire or be the next Ghandi – except maybe he came across as a genuine and humble kid who would enjoy learning from other students and teachers and be helpful towards others. When I mentioned this to Stanford adcom person (of course after my kid got in), he said all aspects of my kid’s application meshed well together to create a strong impression of what kind of person my kid was. That’s as close as I got to learning the mystery of what makes a strong Stanford application/essays. By the way, my kid did not dwell on any hardships he encountered during high school. I think he mentioned it in just one sentence and moved on quickly onto how he tried to improve in this weak area.
I am being very honest when I say I don’t think my kid was exceptional academically. He did not excel in music or athletics, although he was 5% of his class GPA wise and barely made it to NMF status in CA. He did receive some outside scholarships to participate in Humanities oriented programs though. Please note I am not saying my kid is not unique since I am proud of my kid for whatever he did. But the funny thing is after getting into Stanford REA, my kid did feel like applying to other top schools just to see and also because he thought he could get into other top schools but quickly decided against expending additional effort on additional applications for the schools where he probably will not attend.
For our kid, this early admission thing with Stanford really worked out well for him because he used additional time and energy to participate in many volunteer activities, apply for interesting summer job (paid) and obtain a great gap year opportunity about which I think my kid is even more excited than going to Stanford after his gap year activity.
My D received many personal responses to her essays. One adcom said her essays showed a level of self awareness and maturity far beyond her years and was one of the most memorable she’d read in almost a decade. Since she got similar feedback from many adcoms and made it to the semis, finals, or won almost all of the competitive scholarships that she applied for, I’ll take the adcoms’ word for it that essays matter and matter a lot. Also, at one private event for scholarship recipients, including my D, I was able to talk to a dean of admissions one-on-one about how they selected so few students out of a very large pool of competitive applicants, and personal narrative was a big part of his explanation.
I am sort of sympathetic to those who argue that essays should not matter so much vs. people who say since most applicants are well qualified, essays is the difference maker. However, I am well aware that had the adcoms interviewed applicants personally, they might have selected different students.
I agree that essays matter but I don’t agree with the concept of essays being the deciding factor for college admission 
may be they should screen kids based on some stats and do interviews to find out if the kid is going to be a serial killer or next Bill Gates.
Many, many kids and parents interactions with AOs after the effect will mention essays. The Smith Likely Letter thread had a number of students that said the AO hand wrote a note referencing their CA essay. My D’s Likely letter from Smith had a hand written note referencing her divergent thinking and collaboration. The schools and Scholarship Committees aren’t asking for all of these essays as some kind of gauntlet to pass, but as a way to learn more about your child so they can make these very hard decisions.
I am sure some kids’ essays show a great deal of maturity and perceptiveness etc., but I am also for those kids who may not show all that in their essays but are kind and community oriented. My point is that just because your essays are very perceptive and show maturity beyond one’s years does not mean THAT kid will be a nice kid to be around with. It’s like picking workers for important jobs without actual interviews. I think ADCOMs should invite applicants for interview instead and conduct 40,000 interviews! lol