Aside from that, in my opinion, young people tend to learn what their environment teaches them. Eventually they branch out, but I would neither praise nor scorn a student for absorbing and reflecting the conventional “wisdom” from his/her background about college admissions. Some conventional “wisdom” comes closer to actuality than other forms, but I don’t see special virtue in having grown up in an environment that offers the better forms.
It’s a lot easier for a student to know “Jack,” if “Jack” and his family have been coming to their home for dinner, traveling with them, going to museums with them, going to concerts with them [or whatever it is that “Jack” and his family do–no clue here], . . . than if the student only knows that “Jack” is listed in the phone book as “John Smith.”
High school students “chance” each other all the time. In real life, not just here. Apart from whatever little corner of this site is occupied by parents and knowledgeable adults, I think most of what goes on is high schoolers (and recent high schoolers, and soon-to-be high schoolers) talking to one another. I don’t see any reason to stop that.
What people shouldn’t do is believe it when high schoolers chance each other.
@QuantMech – I always experience a little flash of joy when I see that you have posted something, because what you post is almost always valuable and interesting. Your post #60 here, though – I can’t figure out what you are trying to say. I get that there’s a clever play on the phrase “you don’t know jack,” but I couldn’t follow where the play was going. Could you try again?
My point was that I believe that the students who “get” it in terms of what the colleges are looking for are largely reflecting their environments, rather than being exceptionally insightful, with no relevant background to draw on.
The activities with “Jack” are probably largely irrelevant, really, which is why my earlier post didn’t make the point as well as it might have. It’s the communication with “Jack” or having “Jack” for parents or friends’ parents that is helpful in becoming sophisticated about college admissions.
High school students for the most part reflect the culture in which they have grown up. Their local groups may have many misunderstandings about college admission, but I don’t think it is right to look down on students if they don’t automatically “get” it. Nor do I automatically have a high opinion of someone who has grown up in an environment where most people understand how to put together an effective application.
Indeed, most students, parents, counselors, and teachers are unknowledgeable outsiders as far as how holistic and subjective admissions evaluations are done at highly selective colleges. Most admissions factors other than courses, grades, rank, and test scores are not very observable, or there is no way for an outsider to know how they compare with those of other applicants beyond a few in the same high school (i.e. how does one really know if a given student’s essay and recommendations are “good” in the context of a college’s entire application pool?). Hence, the result is that most people can only make estimations based on the observable factors (courses, grades, rank, and test scores), with everything else appearing (to the eyes of admissions outsiders) to be “random”, “black box”, “lottery”, etc…
I don’t know why some high schoolers couldn’t be at least as adept as any parent at the “chance me” game. It’s much simpler than HS math. One of the tricky bits seems to be that subtle distinction between “passion” and a laundry list (for the relatively few colleges that care).
A parent’s most useful contribution to a “chance me” sometimes is to steer it toward the family budget and cost-management strategy. Ew. But somebody’s gotta do it. @mom2collegekids, take a bow.
Agree with @JHS . Kids chance each other all the time IRL. Having a (somewhat) objective observer comment on a kid’s stats can help calm the nerves during this stressful time. Just imagine being a HS senior right now. All the unknowns, all the uncertainty, the insecurity. It’s tough. When D18 was admitted by her safety she was very excited, far more than we expected. We knew from the stats that she was lock and she “knew” she was a lock … but it was a tremendous relief to actually get admitted somewhere.
“When D18 was admitted by her safety she was very excited, far more than we expected.”
We had a similar reaction, for a very good school that we knew for sure D18 would get into.
I think that the “chance me” threads fall into a few categories. There are nervous kids who are going to get in but want or could use some reassurance. There are kids who feel bad that they are not likely to get into an Ivy but are in fact going to get into a very good school which will be a great fit who also can use some reassurance. There are kids who ignore the price of university and need to be guided to think about price. There are some kids who messed up big time for the first year or two or three of high school, who are actually quite smart, and who want to know whether their life is ruined. I think that these can gain from hearing that there are others who did the same thing and ended up doing well (sometimes using an extra year or two, but that really isn’t a huge issue if it is affordable). There are kids who are just showing off (1600 SAT, all A+ grades in AP classes, …). This last group I have less sympathy for than the rest.
I think that us old folks can do some good in guiding kids in a reasonable direction.
Well, I guess we’ll divide on whether a kid driven to get admitted to a tippy top should just be himself, hang, dream, or do some digging to learn what matters, so he or she can adequately match him/herself, fine tune, and present in a best light, in the app. I’m in the latter camp.
In short, how hard is it to read the MIT blogs?
Or, you wanna just assume It’s a crapshoot? Which gets you a better shot? Which is the mindset, awareness, and energy the TTs look for? The thinking?
Again, passion alone isn’t an “it.” Nor unilatetal. And no relevant ECs leaves little to show. You don’t get in for dreaming and not for solely indulging your interests. (Same as the adult world.)
Diverse activities, done well, isn’t a laundry list.
@DadTwoGirls “Too many kids think that they want to go to an Ivy League school but actually have almost no clue what it means to wake up and find yourself in an Ivy League school, with an Ivy League sized list of homework to do and Ivy League paced classes to attend.”
This^^^! And it isn’t just the kids. It is also parents, teachers, counselors and other relatives.
“Diverse activities, done well, isn’t a laundry list.”
Or “spun well.” Not in a bad sense. My daughter spun her long list of ECs ( in which she had some nice leadership positions) as being about “the girl behind the events fair table” and started the essay with a story about moving from one of her clubs tables to another in the middle of a fair while slipping on a sweatshirt ( because she was cold) and a freshman asking her if she had a twin. There are many things that universities who are holistic look for. The main thing is to let them know what you bring.
A person with experience at close reading can read the MIT site and the MIT admissions information on CC and figure out pretty well what MIT (specifically) is looking for. (I won’t go back to the issue of whether that is what they should be looking for, at the current time.) I give MIT credit for very high relative transparency.
Some high school teachers do teach close reading. Most students will have to wait for college for that.
I have known a few students who “didn’t know jack” at the time that they were applying for college. If they were aiming for a top school, I don’t believe that any of them were just “hanging and dreaming.” They were uniformly working very hard and succeeding, at something or other that most high school students (anywhere in the US) do not do. I don’t mean just acquiring high standardized test scores or a high GPA in the AP courses “everybody” takes. But in some cases, it appears that their hard work was devalued by the “top” colleges–by some of those colleges more than others. In some cases, the students had everything the colleges were looking for, but they did not know how to present the best picture of themselves, because they grew up in an environment where hardly anyone “knew jack,” adults included.
Harvard did seem to respond favorably to national awards, so I could understand how the mythos that one needed a national award to get into Harvard might spring up. “Doesn’t know jack” + significant national award did seem to be okay for Harvard admissions (locally). Harvard also took a few students that I would identify as “movers and shakers,” without national awards. But my ability to predict which students Harvard would take has been relatively weak (aside from the high odds of “no” being the correct prediction in any case). And this is despite knowing someone who had worked in the Harvard admissions office and who told me explicitly what (she thought) Harvard was looking for. Even close reading of their web site will not really yield very useful information, in my opinion. If someone else can discern Harvard’s admissions philosophy from their public information, with the same specificity that one can deduce MIT’s admissions philosophy, I would be interested and I imagine that quite a few people on CC would be as well (with higher odds of some practical application of the information, for others).
I just want to add that it is my impression that there are students posting “chance me” threads who are just trying to punk the whole thing. Recently there was a poster wondering whether he should go to Stamford or Princeton as he claimed he was accepted at both, in November. Im not going to say that there is no possible way for that to happen but its highly unlikely. I find it even more unlikely that such a student would come to the CC chat boards in order to make that decision. This is not an isolated case.
Quant Mech- MIT’s admission process is much more straightforward than almost any other low-probability university. I don’t think you can blame Harvard et al for having much more complex missions than MIT.
MIT’s mission is pretty straightforward- which makes it easy to communicate, easy to tweak (i.e. when the U put more emphasis on admitting women who could be successful), AND easier to predict.
And I think that ALL the low probability admits are aware of and sensitive to the “don’t know Jack” applicants. I think they go out of their way to find and cultivate these diamonds in the rough. The problem is that the kid in Winnetka or Atherton or Chappaqua (all tony suburbs with many highly educated professional parents) think that they’ll get the same consideration as the kid from Camden or Trenton NJ.
Being a good tennis player, having high stats, and a 4.0 average when dad is a surgeon and mom runs a hedge fund and you have been hauled around to extracurricular activities since you learned to walk is NOT going to get you into Harvard, all things being equal. Hence the “national awards” myth, mover and shaker business, etc.
Why is hard to understand that when Mom drives a bus, dad is disabled from a construction accident 10 years ago, and you take care of your siblings after school, the admissions process is different for you than it is from the affluent suburban kid who gets a Jeep for his birthday when he turns 17???
I agree that MIT’s mission is different from Harvard’s. But I think that Harvard is more opaque about what they are looking for than they need to be. An applicant who knows “Jack” probably is more likely to be able to target an application correctly amidst the nebulosity.
Is the comment about affluent suburban kids vs. kids from New Jersey directed at me? I am pretty sure that we don’t live in any place like Winnetka, Atherton, or Chappaqua. Of those, I have only seen Atherton (breathtakingly beautiful, by the way), and I can say that our area is nothing whatever like Atherton. I have no way of estimating the net benefit to a student of having a surgeon dad and hedge-fund mother. I know that the combination exists, but don’t know any such families personally. So I would have no idea of how to adjust an application from such a student to form an idea of how it would look on a more level footing. (Presumably it was the nanny who was hauling the child around, since I don’t see the parents having time or opportunity to do that.)
I do think the benefits of having dual STEM Ph.D. parents may be over-estimated in some admissions offices. No one can learn differential geometry by osmosis, and tennis lessons do not help with it.
In our area, based on the data set, I am actually not so sure that the “national awards” requirement for Harvard admission is a myth, in those cases where the student “doesn’t know jack.” Among that group, it appears to be 100% accurate locally.
I recognize and respect the difficulties that students from tough backgrounds encounter. That circumstance is relatively rare around here, though it is far from non-existent.
I posted once, somewhat obliquely, about a friend who had to take care of a younger sibling with a disability, and got accused of thinking “poor them” and not recognizing what amazing things students from difficult circumstances could accomplish. I was just being objective about the actual limitations that my friend faced, with regard to engaging in a number of possible ECs or out-of-school activities. I am not sure whether the GC or any of the teachers had any idea about it (and in that era, the student would not have mentioned it in an application).
Quant- I wasn’t directing the comment at you personally- but noting that in the “don’t know Jack” pool of applicants there are two sub-pools- the kids who really don’t know because they may be first Gen college, or low income, or come from a place where most kids go to community college and a successful grad of their HS is a pharmacy tech or MRI Assistant. And then the kids who don’t know Jack because even though they’ve grown up privileged surrounded by people who are ambitious and went to college and know influential people and all that stuff- they CHOOSE to ignore the data which suggests that they aren’t getting admitted to Harvard or Yale with just good grades and a solid backhand.
I thought that second pool is who YOU were referring to- kids who don’t read the blogs, kids who don’t bother to find out whether their profile matches what a college is looking for.
I don’t think Harvard is opaque at all and I think they are pretty candid about their process as well. In my kids HS during all the years my kids were there and I either knew well or knew somewhat or knew casually a bunch of seniors, I was only wrong once about Harvard admissions. And that was because a kid who was a double Princeton Legacy (and a phenomenal kid in his own right) applied to Harvard early (the buzz was that he’d applied to Princeton which of course made sense) and he got admitted to Harvard. I called that one wrong. When someone asked him “where did you apply” his answer was always “Where do you think?” with a smile. So that was a nice surprise.
I’m no genius. But at least in my neck of the woods, the “striving” overachiever who has been buffed and polished to a fare-the-well does NOT get into Harvard. The kids who do get in don’t always have national awards but they sure don’t end up exhausted senior year from all the grade grubbing and tutoring and the “I founded my own charity” stuff.
Looking- Quant and I are most assuredly NOT talking about a guy named Jack. We are using it metaphorically to describe someone who “don’t know Jack s&*t about” college admissions.
I don’t think of anything that would more directly contribute to learning differential geometry in high school than having STEM PhD parents, bonus points if it’s M. Obviously you have to put in the effort, which is not easy. But I can guarantee that there are many many more people that would like the opportunity to learn differential geometry in high school and would do well in the class (or would if they knew that the subject even exists), than those who eventually end up taking it.
I don’t actually know anyone who took differential geometry in high school. In the sciences, usually this does not come up until the student is taking a course in general relativity. It’s probably encountered a bit earlier in math, but still typically well along in a course sequence. I tend to doubt that there are very many students who could do well in a course in differential geometry while they are still in high school. I know how my very smart friends dealt with the subject in grad school. (They are theoretical physicists rather than mathematicians, but still . . . )
Just wanted to add that I cannot think of a “‘striving’ overachiever who has been buffed and polished to a fare-thee-well” among my family’s acquaintances. I would be somewhat surprised if the students in Atherton fit that profile. Why would they need to? I also don’t know any top students at the local high school who had any time commitment to tutoring, unless they themselves were the tutors. Founding a charity? That’s so 2004! (Or maybe earlier.)
I am assuming that the stereotypical striving overachievers do exist, just not around here.
The students that I would classify as real “movers and shakers” [just my own view of them] were admitted to Harvard without national awards. The students who were not in that category and did not seem to have much of a clue about admissions overall, were admitted to Harvard if they had national awards. I don’t know a large enough group of relatively clueless, but nevertheless extraordinarily gifted students [in the non-mover-and-shaker-category] who applied to Harvard to guess whether they would or would not have been admitted without a national award.
I think that many posters would be interested in comments about what Harvard is really looking for. It honestly does not seem transparent to me. In relation to the topic of the thread, it might help people chance students more realistically (and ethically). All of my “surprises” about Harvard admissions have been positive. I might have some retrospective confirmation bias about the students whom I now classify as “movers and shakers.”
Some years ago, there was a letter or essay published by someone in admissions (maybe Fitzsimmons?) about what Harvard is looking for in creating a class. There were categories. One was future important scholars. One was future world leaders. My memory of this may not be exactly correct.
Does anyone remember this and have a link? I can’t find it. At the time it seemed to make sense to me when considering what little I knew about Harvard admission… which is very little at all.
adding: It really was a loooong time ago. It may not be relevant any more.