<p>If this is real: Congrats, you've been accepted to Stanford, one of the most prestigeous(sp?) universities in the world. Go celebrate.</p>
<p>If it is a fake: You're a bad person.</p>
<p>Abort/Retry/Fail</p>
<p>I give this a 4/10, try harder next time k?</p>
<p>Wow. There is no way that Stanford would right such an informal likely letter.</p>
<p>I don't really see the point in you writing this point, but whatever it is...I hope you made it. Or else this is just a useless post for everyone involved.</p>
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Wow. There is no way that Stanford would right such an informal likely letter.
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<p>^ SP error intentional? Woulda been funny if you inserted it in there on purpose.</p>
<p>Oh and February is spelled wrong in the OP. Gives me all the reason to call this a fake.</p>
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This isnt true. That doesnt make sense. i know for a fact that ur better off going to a top undergrad school and doing decently than going to an average school and doing really well. U make it sound like a school will punish u if you have a lower GPA at a top school. Quite the opposite. Grad schools will want u more because they know u are prepared for a competitive environment like that.
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<p>I am just writing it because I thought people getting rejected in the EA round might sound bitter. I mean... it's just from my personal experience.</p>
<p>I know a person who attended Harvard now attending Virginia Tech (with middle GPA in undergrad). I know a person who studied at Harvard now attending a non-prestigious med school with 20% acceptance rate for provincial residents (if you want to know the exact name of that school let me know; I cannot disclose it publicly for... private reasons).</p>
<p>I know a person who attended provincial school in Canada now studying at Harvard for his MBA, with astronomical GPA, of course. And of course, there is the famous example of Andrew Fire, who studied at UC Berkeley (rejected by Stanford), and went on to MIT for grad school, and was the co-winner of the Nobel Prize for Medicine and Physiology just a few years back.</p>
<p>My statement was not scientific in any way. It was just a reflexion of some of my personal experiences.</p>
<p>My point - don't let rejections/acceptances/deferrals define who you are. Be modest! Be hopeful!</p>
<p>...It seems that the OP copied this from a real letter (i.e not emailed)...if this is not a fake.</p>
<p>Check those graduate student profiles from Stanford you will see the difference. They are much less diversified compared with UG, and the selections are mainly based on academics rather than other factors or the school you come from. A 3.5 GPA at Harvard may not be good enough if Stanford requires 3.8. Consider yourself very lucky if you get in Stanford.</p>
<p>I call BS...</p>
<p>A sample page from Stanford...</p>
<p>Financial</a> Mathematics: Students - Stanford University</p>
<p>I joined this site to tell you people that this is real. I got a letter too, and it says says the same as what itsme123 quoted. Mine was signed by the Dean of Admission, Richard H. Shaw. He even wrote "Come to Stanford!" at the bottom in pen.</p>
<p>This is not BS. Its a 'Likely Letter', and many of the top schools do it. Stanford calls theirs "early approval". They take a very small amount of students that are clearly eventually going to be admitted in April (I didn't think i was, but my essays must have done it) and send them this letter, to try to get their minds set on Stanford before they get accepted anywhere else. The only reason they don't publicize this or word it as an official acceptance and give you all the packets and such is so they can still say that technically no decisions are released until April.</p>
<p>People who receive these letters are the most highly qualified Regular Admission students in the pool after an initial statistical review.</p>
<p>Here's a few links to back me up:</p>
<p>this one's a google cache, couldn't get to the actual page. scroll down to the quip about "Likely Admit Program":
Admit</a> yield increases by 2 percent - The Stanford Daily Online</p>
<p>here's another thread about this:
<a href="http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/stanford-university/489528-likely-letter.html%5B/url%5D">http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/stanford-university/489528-likely-letter.html</a></p>
<p>I know the first article says stuff about 'Multicultural Likelies' and affirmative action. DO NOT TURN THIS THREAD INTO JUST ANOTHER ARGUMENT ABOUT AFFIRMATIVE ACTION. I, for one, want to find out more about this likely letter business and why in hell I got it over anyone else.</p>
<p>Well, are you "multicultural"? Because that could be a reason...</p>
<p>Congrats OP and ngolsh314! :)</p>
<p>I guess I can let go of the tiny hope of getting a likely letter.</p>
<p>No, not really. My father is Iranian, but that doesn't really count, because Iranians are Caucasian. For all intents and purposes, i'm a white kid from rural central Pennsylvania. And i didn't think i was the best academically. I got a 35 on the ACT. Maybe what got me in was my effort to go beyond what my crappy rural high school could give me and take college courses from Penn State... or it was just my essays.</p>
<p>thanks, taintedk. never give up hope. even if you don't get in, if you have the personal drive to do so you can change the world from wherever you end up.</p>
<p>What is the average SAT score at your school? When you said that you were not the best academically, did you compare yourself with other kids in your school? or other schools?</p>
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Tyler 09, you think that grad schools dont know that its harder to do well at the " more prestigious/ competitive" schools? They're not stupid. A guy who comes out of an IVY with a decent GPA is usually put above a guy with a higher GPA at a " less well known" school because the guy at the ivy was challenged more and competed with the best. Even my grandma knows that.
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<p>A basic, simplistic line of thinking. The average gpa at a public school is 3.0 while the average gpa at an ivy league school is about 3.4. That is a significant gap, much of it due to grade inflation. (statistics from American Scholar, I'm sure they could be replicated by a google search) There is only a marginal increase in academic difficulty between a state school and even a top private school. </p>
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In his 15 years as a human resources professional, Mr. Taylor said, he has found that a young applicant’s G.P.A. is the best single predictor of job performance in the first few years of employment.
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Justin Kirk, a New York University senior whose 3.3 G.P.A. as an economics major was considered below the standards of the most competitive investment banking companies. ... “The cutoff in investment banking is somewhere around a 3.5,” he said. “Someone like me might have a lower G.P.A. because they were always working and always busy with extracurricular activities. I wanted to stand out, and I knew I had to be more than just my grades.”
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<p>More tangibly, it is commonly known that attending an elite school over a good school, provided one was accepted at both, confers very little income advantage. Sure, much of this I believe can be explained by the type of person who would turn down those schools and the careers people who go to each of those schools choose. But if it was better to have a mediocre gpa at an Ivy, where grade inflation is high, instead of a high gpa, as those people who turned down an Ivy would have, at a state school, then we would expect that a significant earnings gap would emerge between the two groups of people. </p>
<p>Conventional wisdom is just that, conventional.</p>
<p>@ewho
the average SAT score (1600 scale) was 1200 or less, i would say. my graduating class has 112 people. my sat score was 1510/1600, 2260/2400. the highest ACT score the school has ever had was a 32, but i got a 35. Subject tests were 740 lit, 760 math lvl. 1, and 780 chem. I'm the first person from my school to be accepted to Stanford, or any school of its caliber. The majority of my school goes to either local small state or private schools, or vo-tech programs. I finished the available math courses in my junior year, so last summer i took calc II at a penn state branch campus, along with a programming course just for fun. I'm studying AP Physics C and AP Comp Sci completely independently this year, and two other APs provided by the school.</p>
<p>@Tyler09</p>
<p>please go have your argument in a post that's about what you're arguing about.</p>
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please go have your argument in a post that's about what you're arguing about.
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<p>He was just responding to someone's comment. No need to be rude.</p>