<p>ok so im ONLY a sohpmore in high school but at my school they make us take PSATs and SATs every year from 9th grade so that we can get used to the test....anyway so i took the PSAT in october and got like a 216.....now i get about 5 letters from colleges EVRYDAY (ive gotten some from ivies 2.....columbia harvard yale brown upenn and MIT)..they all say the same thing : that i should consider there school when i start applying to college.. but i really wanted to know if this is a good sign.....i have good grades and all good ecs etc. but if i do apply to one of those schools (UPENN MY DREAM SCHOOL) will this help any.....or is this just a good sign that im actually performing well in high school???????????</p>
<p>no it will not help at all.</p>
<p>Yeah it sort of doesn't matter all that much. I had horrible SAT scores (1100) and Johns Hopkins and Cornell and Brown were all sending me mail telling me that I should apply to their schools. I think collegeboard basically sells your address to schools across the nation and than you just get tons of mail.</p>
<p>By the time you are actually admitted to college you will have received 10,784 letters, brochures, and other fliers from no less than 985 colleges. At least 500 of those will come from Washington University in St. Louis. Even more will come from some college that is actually near where you live that neither you nor your friends have ever heard of. The glossy brochures will all have beautiful pictures of their campus and smiling students. Those with cold weather will have nice early fall or late spring pictures, those from hot weather states will have pictures of fresh looking students walking about in February. If there is a beach within 50 miles, it will be in there. If they have large dorm rooms, a picture will provided. if they have small dorm rooms, you will get a picture of the students in the dining hall. If they have many classes with 500 students, you will get a picture of 14 students in a class for some obscure course that few ever take. If the area around the college is nice, you will see an aerial picture; if not, you will see pictures of the main part of campus that don't show the huge security fence and wall that surrounds most of the campus. Ninety times out of hundred the materials sent will not tell you how much it costs to go there except that they sometimes provide some small print that mentions tution that existed before the last two 25% increases. And they will all say essentially the same thing: they believe you are a unique student who would be very happy attending their college, so please apply. If you keep them all, you will be able to fill a basement from floor to ceiling and start a paper recycling business. You will then eventually be accepted to a college that you may actually want to go to but which forgot to send you anything.</p>
<p>agree with drusba..........now anytime I see a college brochure, i feel like burning them down</p>
<p>oh man, that was a fun time. i have a huge box with oodles of college mail in it. come to think of it, i can throw it all out now haha</p>
<p>yea same. i have a huge ass thing of letters and stuff.</p>
<p>"By the time you are actually admitted to college you will have received 10,784 letters, brochures, and other fliers from no less than 985 colleges. At least 500 of those will come from Washington University in St. Louis. "</p>
<p>haha that totally made my day. I've saved every single one of those letters, for god knows why. Maybe I CAN start a paper recycling business. That'd be a pretty kick ass EC, anyway.</p>
<p>Akybaky, the colleges you mentioned don't send mail to just anyone. They likely contacted you because of your high PSAT and your self-reported GPA. Sure, there are a host of colleges that send out tons of mail to just about anyone who takes the PSAT, but not Harvard, Yale, Brown, MIT. I imagine your stats must be really high. If these are your dream schools, it certainly wouldn't hurt to send back the reply cards to get further mail from them.</p>
<p>dabost does have a point. There is some meaning to what junk mail you are getting. If you brought a BMW lately, you are probably getting junk mail from the Mercedes dealership. On the other hand, if you have a bad credit rating, you are probably getting junk mail about consolidating your bills. Not all colleges send out a ton of mail to absolutely everybody. Each college will decide what its criteria is. HYP probably mails to URM's with SAT's of 1100+ or 1200+ (1600 scale) or something like that. However, getting the mail still means almost nothing.</p>
<p>sorry to burst your bubble akybaky...but getting tons of mail isnt any indicator at all of colleges caring about you...</p>
<p>To figure out sending lists for colleges...basically they just buy lists from the collegeboard of people who scored over a certain point level (say 190 points or above for the psat) and then the colleges proceed to spam mail to them...colleges will even send mail to people who would obviously NEVER be competitive in their school...lol...my friend got a brochure to harvard and he has a 2.9 gpa...</p>
<p>why do they do this you ask? IMO its so they can boost the # of applications they recieve so that they can reject more people so they can get a better selectivity rating for the USWNR rankings...</p>
<p>the only time you can consider yourself "special" is if they send you a letter that either
a) was handwritten (no, a handwritten signature on a standard letter doesnt count)
or b)was obviously written after the writer truly researched who you are (like if the writer references things that are unique to YOU only...things that cant be replicated in letters to thousands of other people)</p>
<p>"At least 500 of those will come from Washington University in St. Louis. "</p>
<p>LOL! I <3 this comment and it's so true!</p>
<p>Agreed! I have so much mail from colleges it's not even funny... and I just realized (like others in this thread), that I can throw it away! It's been sitting in a huge box (there's a lot of mail) since I started getting it last year. Being a National Merit (Semi)Finalist didn't help much, I got even more once I got that. I can't tell you whether those schools send all that crap to lower-scoring test-takers also, but I can tell you that as a fellow student with a high PSAT score, they sent em to me too.</p>
<p>I only keep the letters from the top tier, good, potential schools...
like
Brown,
Duke,
WUSTL,
Emory,
Columbia,
Caltech (not so much anymore, cause I'm NOT a techie),
Tufts,
etc.</p>
<p>It's even less significant if the letters are asking you to apply to the school's summer programs...
like Stanford (I kept that one cause it was Stanford stationary, sad I know, yet, it's my dream school, what can I say. Maybe it'll bring me good luck or something this fall/winter/next spring, w/e).</p>