<p>IN CONTEXT WITH WHAT’S AVAILABLE TO THE STUDENT, ecouter. You don’t just get X number of points for being (say) a USAMO finalist. Good grief, there are probably only 1,000 of the 30,000 high schools in this country where there’s a single math teacher who has even HEARD of USAMO, much less provides support for students wishing to enter. Look at the list - Philips Exeter and other elite schools are all over it. Colleges KNOW this.</p>
<p>And when you talk about research - that’s a VERY urban/ suburban / rich kid vs rural thing. It’s one thing for the kid whose parent works at a research lab in suburban NY or Silicon Valley to “get an opportunity” doing lab work. The kid who lives in the ranch in the middle of Montana doesn’t HAVE that opportunity. Colleges get that. That’s why the kid on the ranch may be more compelling and more interesting than the overly prepped kid who dutifully racked up all the appropriate wins and worked in an internship gotten through mom and dad.</p>
<p>Is there anything wrong with getting internships through mom and dad? Heck no. Hey, I tried to get my D an internship at a lab in our area through indirect contacts, though I didn’t succeed. But it’s very - oh, I don’t know, upper-middle-class-like - to think that colleges automatically award magic points for these things. They know darn well that the kids who live in X places and come from X backgrounds have far more opportunities to do X things than kids who live in Y places and come from Y backgrounds. So you have to cut it out with the blunt “research lab = x points” mentality.</p>
<p>I’m talking about students that post chance threads here on CC or post on HSL regarding whether dropping AP Bio is ok. Obviously a kid in a rural area wouldn’t have the same opportunities as a student in NYC and they will be judged differently. I’m very grateful that I’ve been brought up in areas that have opportunities for me and am most definitely aware that everyone doesn’t have the same chances. </p>
<p>My point was the Cal Newport approach is to develop a <em>genuine</em> interest in something by exploring and trying things out and then pursuing it vigorously. Newport’s entire point is to do something new and different and to do that thing by following your interests to logical ends. By doing so, you’ll have time to live your life and have interesting ECs, instead of a laundry list, i.e. - instead of just joining a club or team, take a deeper interest in the topic and explore. Don’t do a research internship because it’s what X, who got into [insert school] here did, do it because you actually like it. This ‘tactic’ with ECs, in conjunction with having scores in the right range will probably make your life more satisfying and increase your chances more than self studying 7 APs just for admissions. Doing amazing, focused ECs because of genuine interest > loading up on clubs you don’t care for.</p>
<p>Again, this book is geared towards elite admissions crazy kids and parents, not necessarily the general population of people that apply or the US in general. </p>
<p>Also, (I don’t think your intention was to generalize) there are all kinds of students out there who get internships and opportunities all on their own. While having contacts in the area helps, it’s not necessary if you are really committed and want to really work and have access to a laptop. The 2012 ISEF winner did it, as do many sciencey kids. Obviously, more in the know kids might find it easier to do and get support from their school, but if you go in with an idea and know what you want to do, a lot of Professors are (amazingly!) willing to help an interested kid out.</p>
<p>Edit: realized I didn’t actually explain my point. It’s that Cal Newport postulates that colleges, when looking at applicants from the “in the know, wealthy” schools will prefer students who have genuine interests and have followed them (be it through USAMO, internship, starting a club etc.) instead of trying to do stuff just for the letter.</p>
<p>One way to look at this is that the college admissions offices are not just “hiring” back-office students to crunch the numbers; they also need a lot of “front-office” students who can handle customer contact–i.e., athletes, performers, class leaders, EC leaders, etc. The smartest guy in the world is not going to get hired as a salesman if he doesn’t have certain personal qualities.</p>
<p>"Two examples from our high school-one supersmart kid, all of his “EC"s were academic related, no sports, sang in the high school choir though-national Science Olympiad finalist, etc., etc., etc. 4.0/perfect ACT and SAT, National Merit Finalist Got in at ONE school that was Ivy level, MIT, (but no Ivy’s) and our state flagship. Next year, pretty smart kid 3.8 GPA 34 ACT, didn’t take SAT. Got into Harvard, Yale, Columbia, Dartmoth, Cornell, Notre Dame, Stanford, MIT and a smattering of other schools, including our flagship. He was a 3 sport athlete, best on site for state solo contest in band and choir (trumpet and tenor in choir). Supersmart kid seemed like a “shoe-in” for every school except that he wasn’t well rounded enough and lacked social skills. Pretty smart kid is everyone’s dream son-in-law , poised, respectful, just an all around great kid. Not sure when he slept in high school though .”</p>
<p>The reason the 3.8 GPA got in is that he is the type to more likely get hired since he is more well-rounded. I know that firms in my industry (major financial services firm) are far more likely to hire a well-rounded 3.5 GPA (from college) than the kid who obsesses about getting a 4.0. The obsessed 4.0 type rarely takes leadership positions in anything and more often than not seems to be a loner type. In the real world, a person has to know how to deal with failure something the 3.5 is more likely to have experienced since most things in life are beyond ones direct control.</p>
<p>" The obsessed 4.0 type rarely takes leadership positions in anything and more often than not seems to be a loner type."</p>
<p>Gee whiz-talk about perpetuating a stereotype. </p>
<p>Completely false much of the time. A “4.0 type”, as you put it, often seeks leadership positions. If you hold yourself to a high standard it carries over to high expectations in your EC involvement as well.</p>
<p>I’m not sure “well-rounded” is the key term. I think the point is really that selective colleges want a lot of students who are “engaged” with other people. While many kids with top grades/scores are also highly engaged, some of them are not–and I think that it may be some of those who are surprised at less-than-optimal admissions results. This has to hurt, especially if the student gave up ECs in favor of academics. It’s been pointed out many times on CC that this is not the best strategy in the U.S., but many people haven’t seen the memo.</p>
<p>I find this emphasis on sports by Ivy schools really strange, though I sort of get the importance of the “well-roundedness” characteristic that athletic participation supposedly demonstrates. MY S played varsity tennis his sophomore year in part to improve his chances for admission to an elite school. However, he found it boring and unproductive, even though he was his team’s best doubles player, and this year he resisted the pressure from his best friend, who is the team’s best singles player, and from the tennis coach, and refused to play another year even though he knows quitting could hurt his chances at elite schools. He would rather take extra AP’s with that time. He doesn’t need the extra AP’s for his GPA because he is way ahead of the kid who is ranked second in his class. He just craves an intense academic environment and finds athletic competitions uninteresting.</p>
<p>Our experience in HS is that the kids with passionate interests want the ECs to be run right, so they find themselves in leadership positions. These are also often the kids who want to be doing things right in the classroom, and take classes because they want to be there, not because it’ll look good on their transcript. So they are engaged in the classroom and engaged out of the classroom, and have strong opinions about how things “ought to be”. It’s hard to fake actual interest and engagement (not that kids don’t try).</p>
<p>But it’s not so much that the 4.0 student seeks out leadership, it’s more that s/he is resigned to taking on that role because there are few other people who will “do it right”.</p>
<p>Historically, Ivy grads were from upper income family and although not everyone had the intellect, they all participated in some kind of sports, fencing, sailing, tennis, rugby etc.Remember those pictures that graced the pages of newspapers of touch football games of the Kennedy clan at Hyannisport? It’s not surprising they still have this tradition.</p>
<p>My son works in buy-side finance and goes to many functions hosted by bulge bracket banks and big corporations. They don’t entertain by inviting him to operas, Broadway plays and ballet but he’s been to many baseball, football and basketball games in NYC. In his office and among his peers, they participate in fantasy football and baseball.
When he was offered an admission interview at an Ivy, he said all they talked about was baseball. He was accepted.</p>
This is actually a good tip for young people–it’s not a bad idea to have some general knowledge about sports, or at least one sport, if you are interested in working in the U.S.</p>
<p>I think this must depend on which Oympiad. You can certainly MAKE the national team in some of the Olympiads with no one behind you but yourself (and a LOT of study time). Biology is an example where the testing is individual, not by team. Accomplishing MAKING the final national team would be a very big deal in admissions, I think.</p>
<p>If points are used (and I do believe they are in some admissions processes) … I believe they give more points for state and national level recognitions/achievements than school level. It only makes sense, and seems to be reflected in the admissions patterns that show up time and time again on CC “admitted” threads.</p>
<p>Even then you’d probably need a school mentor with deep experience with previous problem sets. Even a brilliant student is unlikely to qualify just by searching the Internet.</p>
<p>My son, who’s a natural in math, used to compete on Math Team against more elite schools. Those students had the benefit of a mentoring teacher who had collected old exam questions for years and written up explanations on how to do them. My son would win award ribbons every time he went out, but it was often for second place: When presented with the 20-question test, there would typically be 6-8 math questions on it he had never before encountered anywhere. He would proceed to concoct his own, perhaps unique, solutions on the fly and got enough of them right to be a tough competitor.</p>
<p>Now I personally think this is good practice for doing cutting-edge research in the future where no one yet knows the answer. But it also leads me to believe that the students who win are not necessarily the best, just the best trained – which can be heavily influenced by the income of one’s parents.</p>
<p>That’s the benign explanation, cbreeze. The more sinister explanation is that Ivy League schools didn’t care about “well-roundedness” until the 1920s, when it became an admissions criterion to limit the admission of Jews, many of whom came from lower-income urban neighborhoods and didn’t have opportunities to participate in upper-crust genteel sports. What the Jewish Ivy applicants did have was brains, and it was feared that if admissions relied on purely academic criteria, Jewish applicants would crowd out the old-money WASPs who had always been the Ivies’ core constituency. At least that’s the claim Jerome Karabel makes in his book “The Chosen: The Hidden History of Admission and Exclusion at Harvard, Yale, and Princeton,” and he produces a lot of evidence to back it up. Some think the EC/well-roundedness obsession now works to exclude Asians, much as it once worked to exclude Jews.</p>
<p>I don’t think it’s quite as blatant as it once was, but to some extent the same dynamic is still in play. Consider the sports Harvard recruits for: besides football and basketball, there’s hockey (which in New England tends to be a prep school sport, unlike here in the the Upper Midwest where it’s largely a working-class sport), heavyweight crew, lightweight crew, fencing, golf, lacrosse, sailing, skiing, squash, tennis, water polo. Now tell me, how many of those sports does the average inner-city Detroit public school carry? It’s affirmative action for the prep school crowd.</p>
<p>Now fortunately, those aren’t the only ECs the Ivies and other elite colleges care about these days (though they may be the only ones that count as a “hook,” and even then only if the coach wants you badly enough). But it’s a “hook” that might just carry you right through the Ivy League and into a job in investment banking, if you choose the right sport.</p>
I’m not sure that those are bad traits.</p>