@JHS Analysis is dead on. People probably under appreciate the fact when chancing that at the most elite admissons there is a greater emphasis on applicants strength in humanity subjects.
I agree that service trips within the US are possible for most students. They can travel by bus (cost covered by the sponsoring organization), sleep on the floors of host churches or on gymnasium floors in host schools, eat fast food plus (perhaps) potlucks organized by churches in the service locale. Students who don’t have sleeping bags can probably borrow one from a friend. These can be very good trips and can be taken on a “shoestring.” The church in my hometown organized them, though our church here does not.
I don’t see service trips outside the US as a realistic possibility for most lower SES students, however, as I think of that group. Perhaps other posters and I have different cut-offs for the lower socio-economic class. I am thinking about students who have free lunches at school, and packed food sent home with them over the weekend and some arrangement for food in the summer, or students who have reduced-price lunches, but whose accounts are in the red. Not all of these families, but some of them, need food from the Food Bank to make it through the month; they have trouble paying the bills for electricity, gas, and water, and sometimes experience service shut-offs. At Christmas, several local stores have “Angel trees” with very modest requests from people (like a crock pot for an adult, or a relatively inexpensive toy for a child). The schools, churches, and one department store collect winter coats, gloves, and hats for people in the area.
Please note that I am not stereotyping here. The situations I mentioned come either from publicly available, current statistical data, from direct personal knowledge, or from requests from the electric & gas companies to add a donation to our own bill, to help people in the service area who have difficulty paying their bills.
As valuable as a trip outside the US could be for a student from a “lower SES” family in this particular group, personally, I would have a hard time seeing a trip outside the US as a good use of money the student might earn. But a church trip would be manageable, and would offer some of the benefits of the more expensive trip. It is possible that donations from the community might be earmarked exclusively for students to go on a trip outside the US, and the money would not be available otherwise. In that case, by all means, all of the students should go!
But, overall, this is probably just a difference in what is considered “lower SES.”
To connect this with the main thread topic: I am sure that the students have some fun on these trips, as well as doing some good work. I hope that they are credited appropriately by admissions. I think they probably are, except that it is possible that they are not weighed quite as much as they should be, because the students are giving up greater comfort, fun, ease, and probably sleep, to go on the service trips.
Like the service trip to Greece? Not. (That’s a real example, a toney prep school. Have also seen them to Paris.)
It depends on the work done.
And it doesn’t matter if they raise funds through car washes, performances, auctions, whatever. The point at some of these hs is to cover all costs.
Ideally, this kid’s vol efforts also include in his or her local community- the animal shelter, not so much. Adcoms can look for consistency.
My kids did a vol trip via a hs teacher’s church, worked all 5 days, building, repairing, etc. Grunt food, slept on cots in some Y (or similar.) Maybe $60 each, plus the tools I had to buy them. I was rather proud that they signed up before even asking us.
Another was through our church. Maybe $100 each. Again, hard work. Great experiences. You have to realize that, on many trips, there are no local downtime distractions or pizza runs and that interacting with those they help is key.
Lots of kids are still doing work in New Orleans and more. The year the church group went to a reservation, they did need to fundraise as it was further. Many domestic trips include a contribution toward supplies for the projects they’ll work on.
These kids who say they went to their parents’ home country and also worked in an orphanage or tutored English sometimes don’t offer enough to show substance. Same with many of the expensive trips. There’s the ream of FB photos I saw of a hs friend’s “service trip” to Africa: her at the hotel pool, sightseeing, on an elephant, etc.
How a kid places and describes a service trip on their app is often very revealing.
And some “church trips” are more proseletizing than leaving physical improvements.
@JHS,
You are reading something that in my message that I explicitly avoided saying. I did not say that humanities are not valuable. I said that over the long view, if one subject is perceived to become more valuable and another less, than more should be invested in the former and less in the latter. That could apply equally well to various forms of STEM as to the humanities.
You also assumed that I don’t understand the power of faculties in these colleges. However, that can be the cause of the problem in that the establishment is in most favor of the status quo. This was best explained by Clayton Christensen about 20 years ago in “The Innovator’s Dilemma”. The establishment thinks in terms of 1) Preserving their power (and for private companies profits), and 2) Incremental improvements.
It usually takes an upstart to upset the status quo. It was about 40 years ago that Stanford, already a fine school but certainly not what they are now, decided that they would excel in both tech and the humanities. That is why many consider Stanford to be #1 rather than Harvard, which has only recently realized that they need to catch up in tech and is investing heavily now.
What is the right decision for 50 years from now? Don’t look solely to current faculty for guidance.
Such as going to a poor Islamic country for a week and making starving farmers read bible for food, and then leaving them at the mercy of local religion police afterward. True story too often.
I was really addressing the value of service trips within the US in my post, where the costs are very low. In my opinion, a trip to Greece or Paris would be completely out of the question for a student who qualified for free lunches. Yes?
Service trips within the US might be free to the student participants. The cost of $60 to $100 that was quoted by lookingforward might be manageable from a minister’s benevolent fund, or from funds that the school has to support participation in school-sponsored events by students who could not afford them otherwise. So, great! I am on board with that.
C’mon, though, earning money through auctions? I don’t see that happening in a lower SES community, as I would define lower SES. I do see that a number of the money-raising methods (car washes, performances) involve group money-making, as opposed to individual earning, so that a student whose family cannot cover the electric bill or the rent could not separate out her/his contribution to give to his family.
Could you provide a link on church trips to “a poor Islamic country” where the people on the trip are proselytizing, SculptorDad? I tried Googling it and the entire first page is about Muslim countries where proselytizing is illegal. There was also a link to an old NPR report of people from Assistance Mission being “gunned down” in Afghanistan. People would have to be extremely poorly informed to try it. In many countries, Christian medical missionaries who provide medical services exclusively are regarded with suspicion, and medical or food aid to the local population can be viewed by the governments as “proselytizing,” just because it improves people’s lots.
I find the suspicion about proselytizing on church trips troubling. It would trouble me even more if I knew of a current applicant who had gone on a church-sponsored work trip, and was going to have the work discounted, just because it was sponsored by a church and that fact raised suspicions. The small numbers of people (mostly adults) who go out from our church just do work, in the places to which they travel.
Actually, the discussion about fund raising methods reminds me of a satirical column that ran in one of the newspapers I read. The fund-raising dinners being organized by the students or PTO’s were all listed with dates. As an excerpt:
Jonesville: chicken dinner
Smithville: chicken dinner
Johnsonville: spaghetti dinner
Harmonyville: spaghetti dinner
Berglette: chicken dinner
Coopville: chicken dinner
Collarton: spaghetti dinner
Snootsville: filet mignon. Valet parking will be provided.
@QuantMech, it’s not open to public because it’s illegal and dangerous. It’s organized by an evangelical church with its members. At least I don’t think they list it in college application. am sorry I was going off topic.
Few years ago a Korean youth group was held hostage while doing that and its government paid ransom. It brought public awareness in Korea. Some people thought that we should have left them executed for their extreme stupidity and the harm they have caused to the locals, instead of wasting precious tax money.
The practice has mostly stopped in Korea after that event. People did care their own safety even though they didn’t care locals’.
You can’t see the forest if you focus on one tree. There’s speculation and minimizing: but *this * tree… It doesn’t matter what the onesie examples are. Some hs do arrange fundraising to make trips available. And some of those are cultural, some are work.
So citing a difference, chicken dinner vs a car wash, distracts.
No one seriously posits “a church trip” automatically means less. Why do you worry a work trip might be confused with a mission trip? Hypothetical? A side venture into a whole lotta what-ifs and “for shame?”
Kids can stretch- some do, some don’t. Or won’t. That’s more than academics. And much more than being some nice kid you know, that *you * think he would benefit from a tippy top.
They need to show what the top holistics want. You can’t chance a kid without a larger picture from him. The app is key. It’s contents, all of it, the thinking it reflects. The full record, as well as the choices in how to present, what to “show.”
Why do I worry that a work trip might be confused with a mission trip? Well, it’s probably because of the earlier comment, “And some ‘church trips’ are more proselytizing than leaving physical improvements.” I worry partly because my church uses the term “mission trips” for the trips where adults work in an area of need (construction in hurricane- or tornado-affected regions and now fire-regions, for sure; packing up blankets, clothing, and canned goods at regional distribution centers, etc). So if a student accompanied the adults, and called it a “mission trip,” that might inadvertently reduce the student’s chances. My church’s “missions committee” provides food, medical supplies, structural improvements, and infrastructure for communities in impoverished areas (mostly overseas, though some in the US), but not in Muslim countries and not in North Korea (or any locale where it is forbidden). Members of this committee do not preach nor distribute Bibles.
This sounds to me as though a trip would fall under some suspicion unless the claimed physical improvements correspond to the number of person-days of the trip. Assisting at a health-care site (e.g., with a visiting dentist or health team) would not leave any permanent structural improvements. If it is a construction trip, the conditions at the work site could affect how much can be accomplished. Organizing sports for kids at a site–that could be just fun, or it could involve “work.”
I think members of the Church of Jesus Christ of the Latter Day Saints are basically required to proselytize, sometimes overseas. That involves stretching, too. Perhaps they mainly want to go to school in Utah (or in Hawaii, where there is a very pleasant LDS church-afflicted college), so the issue of evaluating these activities doesn’t arise most places.
My own church has no tradition of proselytizing, but I would not consider it questionable for a student of a different denomination or religion to do it.
The difference I was citing (#186) was chicken dinner vs. filet mignon, to illustrate what the financial resources of the community might permit (a bit snarky of me, I admit). As far as the paper that published the “dinner” list views it, we live in “Snootsville.” But it’s not very “snooty” by most standards.
That brings me to the question of auctions. In my experience, auctions are only held by rather expensive private schools–of which there are none around here–as fund-raising ventures. (Oh, and by public TV stations.) It might be possible for a student from a lower SES school to organize an auction with entirely donated items. If the items were being auctioned to the school community, then the items would definitely need to sell for less than the face cost of the item, and also for less than perceived value to the buyer, which might be considerably lower than the face cost. I suppose the lower SES school might invite the people of “Snootsville” to come to the auction in support of the lower SES school. Incidentally, I think that would be a good idea–nothing like it has happened yet in my area. A student who organized an auction like that would be showing a great deal more initiative, leadership, and organizational capability than a student who organized the nth annual auction at a school that always has them. The student might need to rely on the GC or teachers to explain what the student actually had to do. (Good luck with that.) Maybe the question would arise in an interview, which would be good!
My work inclines me to focus on specifics–I understand the general pattern by accumulating a lot of specific examples. One can also differentiate various circumstances more accurately if one has specifics to illuminate the differences. This might be annoying to some, but it is how I figure things out. It could potentially enable me to provide more accurate advice to students who may ask for help in the future.
I should add: I am convinced by multiple examples that lookingforward’s views are more aligned with the “top” colleges’ views than mine are, in terms of admissions. This includes her statements about what you need to know, in order to be able to chance a student accurately (things that are often unknowable on a forum like this).
I sometimes act as a “foil” to lookingforward (as you may have noticed). This is not personal! In the current context, mainly I am trying to improve my accuracy in chancing when I do know more about the student. Additionally, I disagree with part of the prevailing wisdom about admissions, and CC seems like a reasonable forum to bring that up, as opposed to sending fruitless letters to multiple Directors/VP’s of Admissions. (I support affirmative action; please don’t misread me. Also, most of my comments are grounded in specifics, rather than stereotypes.)
Quant, these are just words and phrases. My church and plenty of others call it a mission trip. But one looks further than the phrase. And I think you miss that the kid has a chance to describe, in the Activities section. There are very few preconceived notions, no "Uh-oh, this kid is involved with a church" or other religious institution. C’mon.
But it is an application for a limited number of seats. (You don’t like the word “competition,” but that’s what it is.) After stats and rigor, the holistics look for certain qualities and thinking, partly as expressed in actions (choices.) That includes actions/choices through hs and then choices how to present in the whole app package. “Nice” isn’t one, by itself. Compassion is valued, but what’s the kid actually doing? (Often, little.) Intellectual vitality matters, but isn’t just taking courses.
It helps if a kid is open to learning what the targets want to see, then processing that, and making adjustments. Good real-world skill. That’s more than what makes you top of the heap in a high school (this is about the leap to college, not 13th grade. In fact, the openness in trying to appropriately understand is a valued quality, in itself. Not just asking, certainly not just going on hearsay. It is certainly more than pursuing your own narrow interests, staying comfortable.)
The top colleges aren’t “highly selective” because it’s a game. And they aren’t filling slots based on throwing darts. They are combing through apps, looking for what they want, what makes them tick. It’s not a gentle, inclusive, “You want to go to college, let’s see if you have the stats,” as many rack-and-stack state publics do.
Glad your community isn’t snooty. Nor is mine, despite demographics, and a big reason we chose the church was for its record of service. Doesn’t matter, in admissions. What matters is what we do, the nature of that.
Here’s an example. Lots of kids want to be doctors. I don’t doubt many will continue to pursue this. But many express it as a dream (I’ve wanted to be a doc since kindergarten." Literally.) Is that convincing? Is it enough the kid claims he has a “passion” for helping people- then no record of that? (I’m skipping concrete examples, for now.)
One of the differences between my views and lookingforward’s, which is very useful to know if you are chancing a student or looking to improve a student’s chances: lookingforward is aligned with the views of a lot of top schools in that they want to see what the student has done, which means action.
This reminds me a little of Balanchine’s famous direction to the ballerinas, “Don’t think dear, do.” Well, of course lookingforward is looking for thinking, too, but it appears that there has to be a record of actual action connected with the thought.
This makes me uncomfortable for at least two reasons. First, many of the opportunities I had pre-college to do things have been foreclosed for the next generation. For example, the summer after my freshman year of high school, I was a Head Start teacher’s assistant, as a Red Cross volunteer. To the best of my recollection, this program ran on the same schedule as a normal school day. I know we had morning activities, ate lunch with the children, and had afternoon activities after that. For a group of 18-20 pre-kindergarten students, we had a kindergarten teacher, a parent aide, and me. I often worked with a whole group of 6-8 students in the class while the adults were working with others. Now, it is impossible to be a Red Cross volunteer before one is sixteen. It is simply not permitted. I don’t know that there is any connection between Red Cross and Head Start locally, even if one could volunteer for the Red Cross at 14. On top of that, positions as Head Start assistants are in such high demand that they are mainly filled by college seniors majoring in education.
As another example of opportunities I had: I had a biology project that I selected myself, did the background reading, and conducted the project for several years. I was permitted to work on it alone in the biology lab after school. The teachers were very rarely in the lab. During the school day, at times I was permitted to work alone in the lab prep room. This is not happening anywhere now, I am pretty sure.
I anticipate that lookingforward will comment in response about some utterly fantastic things that the “winners” of the competition are doing now, getting out into the community, etc. And admittedly, there are some new opportunities. But it seems to me that very few of the new opportunities include actually independent scientific work that is driven by the student.
The second reason why lookingforward’s emphasis on “action” makes me uncomfortable is that it seems to me like the wrong advice for a budding theoretical physicist. For someone who really wants to go into theoretical physics, the kinds of science projects on offer are mostly in the “let’s pretend” category, with a very few exceptions. For a budding biologist, there is accessible work where a student could have some actual choice in the direction of the project and the interpretation of the outcomes. For a budding theoretical physicist at high school level, not really. For a student with this interest, taking more advanced classes (beyond AP) is the right choice. Years of patience are needed until the student can build up enough background to be involved in research in that field in a meaningful way.
Perhaps a student with this interest could get by lf’s barrier of “Intellectual vitality matters, but isn’t just taking courses,” with reading outside of the advanced classes? Is that active enough? It seems less active to me than taking challenging post-AP classes.
Just a request from one of us on the sidelines who are still interested in the discussion: Can we have a bit less armchair psychologizing of/imputation of motives to interlocutors?
It’s been ages since we adults were applying to college. About 20 years ago, Harvard had roughly half the apps it gets today, for about the same number of seats. Colleges have to filter more strenuously. Even in five years, things shift.
How do they pick based on what the applicant wants, if not prepared, academically and other, when there are so many who are and can show that? These discussions sometimes turn into, “But Johnny didn’t have a chance to do independent lab research.” But the point is, there are other good moves he could make. Lab research is not a pre-req. Nor does it substitute for other EC’s.
To some extent, one’s choices are a manifestation of their drives.
More hs today have robotics and other tech opps, math and/or science teams, Olympiads, many do allow independent study, many have DE opportunities and more, for stem kids. Adcoms aren’t looking for publications; in fact, it’s easier today to get a mention or some credit and they know these kids weren’t primaries.
Yes, there are Red Cross opps for kids from age 14. Not exciting, perhaps.
There are zero Red Cross options for students who are under age 16 in our area. The web site stipulates that the volunteers must be at least 16. It’s not a phony, unenforced rule.
Good pre-theoretical physics is different from the pre-engineering STEM possibilities, and also different from most of the pre-science career STEM possibilities. Robotics is fine for STEM in general, but the intellectual orientation for robotics is actually rather different from theoretical physics. The only event in the Olympiads that seems to me to be remotely like theoretical physics is the “Fermi questions” event, and going anywhere with that requires a whole team. That’s not even to get into the fact that in our state, the same school teams have been winning the State Science Olympiad since before the current competitors were born. There is a lot of carry-over advantage in terms of the team advisor’s knowledge; and with some of the events, even the component parts can be recycled from year to year, if a team has them.
In some areas of science currently, it is quite true that a student might be acknowledged in a paper, or even be a co-author, but I have never known this to be true in the theoretical physics literature, where it is quite rare even for a college senior to be acknowledged or to be a co-author.
DE–I assume that’s college courses beyond AP. Are those actually credited by admissions, or are they just considered to be “taking courses”?
Actually, the math Olympiad would not be bad for a pre-theoretical physicist, and the physics Olympiad might be okay (I don’t really know about the questions and activities in it). The hitch is that the students advancing in either of those competitions tend to come from a relatively small subset of high schools.
These are hs kids, not college students. Would think not many kids identify theoretical physics by start of hs senior year. My issue isn’t those who do, and go out and get valid experiences.
But if I saw a chance thread and there he or she was, I’d expect rounded ECs, some with peers, some with greater substance, including math-sci, some outside school (incl some service.) And some sense the kid understood what TP is. Not the vague comment that they like math, have loved Discovery Channel since a wee tot, and no LoR from a physics teacher, maybe not even advanced math or physics classes. See?
More common are the engineering wannabes.
DE typically refers to dual enrollment, or college courses that are counted for both college and high school credit.
DE courses may cover material that is at a lower level, the same level, or higher level than AP courses. For example, in math, a DE course can cover precalculus or calculus-for-business-majors (lower level compared to AP calculus), calculus (same level), or multivariable calculus (higher level). Of course, what courses are actually offered as DE varies from one school to another.