<p>Stanford has a lot of respect for Intell/STS finalists. There are well more than a handful from each of the past 3 years attending Stanford. Harvard just about always has the most Intel/STS finalists enrolling and either Stanford or MIT is usually #2. </p>
<p>Keep in mind that....as noted in various posts on this thread...most of the Intel/STS finalists (the top 40) have a lot more that makes them attractive to Harvard and other top schools than just their Intel/STS status.</p>
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<blockquote> <p>I'm just commenting that one would hope colleges see the larger context that a kid comes from.<<</p> </blockquote>
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<p>I think the super-selective colleges do a very good job of seeing kids in context.</p>
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Intel finalists have attended Stanford. Not sure why that is.
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<p>Well, sure, it's called geographic preference. Since the data show that the vast majority of Intel participants are easterners, and the data show that nearly every kid prefers a college closer to home, Harvard wins the battle with Stanford, rather easily.</p>
<p>Most Stanford athletes are excellent students also. Maybe not the Lopez twins, but they didn't stay long anyway.</p>
<p>I've known the mother of a Stanford athlete (baseball). Stanford uses their graduation rate as a recruiting tool and the baseball coaches are very proactive to make sure their athletes keep up their %. </p>
<p>She said that her S would have to turn in his proposed schedule, the coaches would invariably add another class to it, the coaches would keep tabs on their grades and provide tutoring as needed. Between studying and playing/practicing baseball, her S didn't have a lot of time for other things. She described it as NOT what we think of as the typical college experience.</p>
<p>It is impressive that 17 yr old are willing to work very hard. However, most of them have a very capable mentor.</p>
<p><a href="http://www.sunysb.edu/simons/NYT_mentor.pdf%5B/url%5D">http://www.sunysb.edu/simons/NYT_mentor.pdf</a></p>
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It is sad to see so many people out their who wants to abolish the top high school science and technology competition.
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<p>I think that you will find a LOT fewer people who want to abolish the science and technology competitions than people who believe they should not represent a valid criteria in college admissions. The reason behind such positions are easy to find. For example, the article posted by Simba has been cited several times on College Confidential as yet another account of how the "mentorship" has become outright "gamesmanship." And that is a charitable qualifier!</p>
<p>Again, it would be easy for the competition organizers to remove the doubt by delaying the annoucement of winners until May of the senior year and not announce the semi-finalists publicly. Would this change anything as far as honors and scholarship?</p>
<p>And, as far as "Stanford takes in more 200 athletes every year and I don't see any complaints about that" perhaps this is because athletes find it difficult to earn their honors by proxy.</p>
<p>Question for the pro-crowd: </p>
<p>Would you support eliminating the individual state cutoffs for NMSF and making it a true national competition?</p>
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Your daughter was accepted to Cal Tech--a school that has produced at least 30 Nobel Prize Winners, is ranked by some methodologies as having the top chemistry and earth sciences departments in the country and in the top ten for engineering, physics and math, and has as its 25 percentile for Math SAT 1 a 770 (which puts the BOTTOM 1/4 of students as doing better than 98% of all test takers in the country)--and you are bitter about Stanford having decent athletics??!!
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We are proud of her early acceptances at Caltech/MIT and both were very high on her list and that was the reason for applying early. The point was to convey that Stanford seems to prefer sports over academics, which in my view is not proper. If you look at the graduate school admissions at Stanford it heavily favors international students because most of the sports quota under-graduates fail to make it to the graduate school at Stanford.</p>
<p>So I never understood reasons for Universities like Stanford to be NFL feeder schools. These are suppose to be feeder schools for graduate level professional schools.</p>
<p>I think somewhere down the line we missed understanding the main purpose of having undergraduate institutes of higher learning. Sports are suppose to be a part of curriculums and not the training/breeding ground for professional sportsman.</p>
<p>Wait--how do you know that Stanford prefers sports over academics? How do you know that those students also aren't excellent athletes? Isn't it possible to have maybe 50 kids in an average freshman class who excel at both? </p>
<p>Do you really think that most of the students that Stanford graduates go on to be professional athletes? Stanford an NFL feeder school? So how many NFL players do you know who went to Stanford? Or how many NBA players went to Stanford? MLS? MLB?</p>
<p>I bet you will find more Stanford graduates at top graduate schools than in the NFL.</p>
<p>I assume you think Harvard is different than Stanford, since you are worried about your D's application to Harvard. But realize that the Harvard soccer team made it to the NCAA soccer championship tournament. The Stanford team didn't. So Harvard isn't that different than Stanford in terms of how the University treats athletics.</p>
<p>If you really think that schools like Harvard and Stanford have lost their way, then why are you even considering applying to Harvard? Again, schools like Cal Tech and MIT, which do not play D1 athletics, would be more consistent with your values. Why apply elsewhere, since she is already in?</p>
<p>What is the allure of Harvard? It couldn't be the undergraduate education, because, as you state, schools like this are not graduate/professional school feeders, but NFL feeders.</p>
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<blockquote> <p>So how many NFL players do you know who went to Stanford? Or how many NBA players went to Stanford?<<</p> </blockquote>
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<p>I'm not much of a sports fan, but John Elway in football and Mark Madsen in basketball come to mind.</p>
<p>I don't think Stanford is trying to be a feeder school for pro sports. But having a good football team brings a lot of excitement to the campus, advertisement for the school, joy to the faces of alumni, and with luck, money to their coffers.</p>
<p>CountingDown, God only knows why I called you "CountingHouse" by mistake in my post on page 7! </p>
<p>My apologies.</p>
<p>Actually, ParentofIvyhope,Even Cal Tech , even though it's not Division 1 , cares some about athletics. My son got a really kind of funny letter from Cal Tech a few years ago(he graduated high school in 2005 so not sure if they are still doing this kind of thing or not).It was from Cal Tech's new basketball coach. The gist of it was that they were tired of not having any kids on the team who could actually play basketball and were hoping to at least find some kids who could actually play . It said, essentially (in Cal Tech fashion), that they had run some numbers with SAT's, SAT ll's, AP's and his name had come up. He didn't pursue it at all but I thought it was cute.</p>
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Do you really think that most of the students that Stanford graduates go on to be professional athletes? Stanford an NFL feeder school? So how many NFL players do you know who went to Stanford? Or how many NBA players went to Stanford? MLS? MLB?
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<p>I seldom says things that I've not verified before, you can look at the following links for NFL players and will be able to find one for all MLS, MBA, MLB etc.</p>
<p>NFL</a> Players who Attended Stanford University - databaseFootball.com</p>
<p>The difference between Harvard and Stanford is that Harvard doesn't provide scholarship to athletes buts Stanford does.</p>
<p>Seeing this makes me want to cry. Ever since I was in 8th grade I wanted to compete in the Intel Science Talent Search (even imagined winning it), every year I would read about the finalist and the winners with the hope that I could one day share in that accomplishment. </p>
<p>I just want to share the other side of the tracks:
To do so I started to research quantum mechanics in the 8th grade (well technically bohr's formulation). I did a two year study of how the properties of the electrons in Helium are changed during electron transition. I eventually got third in the state of Texas for the project in eigth grade. Then I went to high school and in my 10th grade I did a project that calculated the evolution of wavefunctions in an electrostatic field and discovered that the wavefunction decreased when electrons were exposed to the electromagnetic field. I did not win awards for that project, bc as a pure quantitative project there was no way to verify the results. Then last year in 11th grade I did a project that studied the probability for photons to undergo quantum tunneling and eventually developed a model to predict the probability which was chronciled in my 16 page research paper. I got awards from Jacobs Engineering, the American Physics Society, and and an article was even published by the Society for Amaetuer Scientists. I did all that on my own, by spending my summers teaching myself the work and I even have the Feynman lectures and display boards in my room right now. But that is not the point of my post. </p>
<pre><code> I live in Texas and go to a large public school, so there were NO resources at all for science. I literally had to fill out the forms myself and drive to the science compeitions on my own, bc no one from our school had competed in science fairs for so long.
So last summer I applied for science research programs (as I assume that many other future competitors do), but ALL the programs were based on the PSAT results and I only got a 197 (Don't think I am dumb though, I eventually got a 34 on the ACT-it is a much better test for me). So I never had the opportunity to finally complete a project to enter into Intel, bc atomic physics is a speciality that lends itself to expensive equipment that is simply impossible to attain independently. I did start a project on my own to study the effects different polarization types on anisotropy, but the materials became so expensive that I could not afford to continue.
I write this only to say that for every one of the winners and place people, there are thousands of people like me who would have loved if our schools have helped us, or if our teachers or parents had connections. Not to say that every winner does, but if you are not working in comp. sci. or math it is hard to produce any merit without a lab.
What these students do is absolutely amazing, resources aside, but I just hope that colleges reconigze that not everyone has the same opportunities regardless of how hard they work.
</code></pre>
<p>Some of these NFL players go all the way back to the 1920's.I would imagine Stanford is proud to have alumni that have distinguished themslves in may fields, including athletics.</p>
<p>Dbate, It seems like you have accomplished quite alot to be proud of . Schools will certainly see that.</p>
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I seldom says things that I've not verified before
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The point was to convey that Stanford seems to prefer sports over academics, which in my view is not proper. If you look at the graduate school admissions at Stanford it heavily favors international students because most of the sports quota under-graduates fail to make it to the graduate school at Stanford.
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<p>Could you share where you read --let alone verified-- the data that allowed you to offer such as strange statement about the undergraduate and graduate schools at Stanford?</p>
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Could you share where you read --let alone verified-- the data that allowed you to offer such as strange statement about the undergraduate and graduate schools at Stanford?
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<p>Please checkout the admissions stats at the stanford grad schools and then compare those to that of other schools and you will be in for a big surprise.</p>
<p>From 2006 faculty senate presentation on undergrad admissions at Stanford regarding faculty "recruiting" of admitted students: </p>
<p>"Outcomes for 2006:
Number of students identified: 61 Academic
Likelies; 60 Multicultural Likelies
Participation: 45 faculty volunteers across
disciplines (including many undergraduate
advisers) and 2 senior university staff members
Approximately 90 students received phone calls or
emails from faculty or administrative staff
(assignments based on academic interest)</p>
<p>Same faculty called all top academic
superstars (81) admitted during Early Action"</p>
<p>So...in 2006...142 (61+81) high performing academic applicants to Stanford were called by faculty or administrators, and encouraged to attend Stanford. Based on "reports" on CC and other places, Stanford has continued to try to "recruit" these so-called academic superstars.</p>
<p>I know this is not the same as athletic recruiting...which happens before applications are submitted....but Stanford continues to be interested in academic high achievers.</p>
<p>Believe it or not....there are high academic achievers who want that "big time" college sports atmosphere and nice weather....in addition to top notch academics.</p>