EA when another competent girl applies from your school

<p>i have everything ready and want to do EA for Stanford, but another girl from my school -- only 160 kids-- who's top 5% with me is applyign EA as well. However, she will be a recruited athlete while i'm a musician. would this hurt my chance to be compared side-by-side to her?
should i apply Regular instead</p>

<p>The same person who will be reading your app for SCEA will read it for RD. There is no harm to applying early together. Either you are both admitted, both rejected or one is admitted and the other is not. This is better than the reverse scenario, where your competitor is admitted early and then in the RD round, they have to make the decision about your app.</p>

<p>puremn, the admissions process for recruited athletes is somewhat different than for other candidates, and I don’t believe your classmate’s REA application would have any bearing on yours. (Recruited athletes–those who have been approached by a coach at Stanford to play here–have a major hook for admission, and if your classmate is also highly qualified academically, her chances are pretty golden.) Your own prospects for admission will have everything to do with your own qualifications, and nothing to do with hers. So you should go for it if you are ready for REA.</p>

<p>let’s say now… i’ve heard that now 2 people are recruited atheletes for stanford. are you SURE this wont hurt my chance, at all?</p>

<p>both crew(rowing)</p>

<p>There’s no such thing as a guarantee in this situation, but it’s helpful to understand that the recruiting of athletes is a different process than undergraduate admissions generally. Recruited athletes (as distinguished from other athletic candidates who may be excellent in their sports, but have not been directly recruited by a Stanford coach) are sought for specific spots on teams, and their admission process is typically initiated by the contact from a Stanford coach. The coaches will advocate for the recruited athletes they want most in the admissions process, though they definitely don’t always succeed in getting everyone they’d like to have admitted. It’s <em>extremely</em> unlikely that, if you present a very competitive application, the admissions committee would say “We’d like to admit her, but we’ve already recruited two of her classmates for the crew team.” That wouldn’t make any sense in the scheme of their objectives. If you’re concerned that Stanford would apply some kind of “quota” limiting the number of students it will admit from your school, I don’t think you need to worry. It really comes down to the competitiveness and desirability of an applicant in the context of the overall applicant pool. E.g., there are some well-known prep schools that send students here every year. Some years, 7 or 8 of the students from a particular school may be admitted, while other years, it only may be 1 or 2 from that school.</p>