Visitas 2018 was great! Really enjoyed it and my son also.
My son (and I) attended both MIT’s preview weekend and Harvard’s Visitas. MIT’s weekend was the weekend before Visitas. He had a great time at MIT. The culture there is just so unique and the weekend was run so well. Visitas, on the other hand, had a totally different vibe. Less spirited. Honestly, way more identity-based. Kids wondered around with little opportunity to get to know one another. Most of the events were for specific interests. There were a bunch of protests over an incident the week before. All in all not a very enjoyable weekend and he left with a day to go and went to MIT down the road and committed. Clearly, Harvard is for certain people and MIT for others. There is essentially NO overlap. Congrats to all the Harvard 2022 members…best of luck.
Waitlisted.
I agree there isn’t much overlap between Harvard and MIT. Students apply to both because of the prestige factor or because they don’t yet understand the differences. Very few would be equally happy at the two schools. I hope admits do thorough research before committing.
DD committed today.
@jejemine What are the class of 2022 tshirts? Where does someone get one? Did not receive at Visitas
Some of you deserve to be at Harvard, but not all of you. I know more than few got in by kissing up to certain teachers for glorious letters of recommendation, creating fake passions, and using endless tutors for everything, including on essays and prompts. It a dirty that game most kids will not participate to get to the top colleges. Colleges only see what they see on the applications, not the real real kids. The entire system of acceptance is messed up for most honest and hard working students. These kids who cheated the system to get to Harvard will latch themselves to the wealthy and famous kids. Keep your eyes open for these opportunists and gold diggers who will charm everyone at Harvard. All I can say is that Harvard got the wrong kids this year from West. I no longer have any respect to Harvard and many of top colleges.
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@mom169 I can tell you were somehow hurt by this college admissions process. I agree a few “bad apples” will get in, but it is unfair for you to judge Harvard or any other colleges as a whole as being warped and illegitimate kids getting in. Most of the kids attending these schools are genuine and worked really hard and deserved to get in. Unfortunately, with an admission rate of around 5% or so, lots more deserving kids will not get in.
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All I’m trying to do is help some confused kids and parents, but my messages get understood so wrongly. Mine and I went into this whole college application process with blind eyes, and we got completely burned. Not all community service seemed to get recognized by H and others. Helping few kids don’t work anymore. Reaching out to your primary school and spreading to bigger areas by actively recruiting by posting our volunteers and their bios to promote more members to join. Getting the words out to several thousands of lower income kids aren’t very difficult if you get help. I don’t get why this message is wrong to be given to others.
Our case:
My daughter and I went into this whole application process with blind eyes too. We had zero knowledge and zero experience. We did not think about college application and did not do any research on the process in advance. I found out about CC AFTER she was deferred by her EA choice. By that time she had submitted most of her applications including RD to Harvard.
Therefore, her high school life and her application to Harvard were all natural (not influenced by any opinion or any person’s experience). She did get into Harvard in RD (after being waitlisted).
She did all kinds of things during high school because she loved and enjoyed all of them. She was happy if her event had 10 kids coming because it used to be just a few. I let her make her choices since I don’t enjoy pushing kids.
She is great in many many aspects. But she did not organize or lead any project that involves 100 or more kids.
Just one data point for your reference.
I did almost no community service and neither did my sibling and we were both accepted to Harvard (I turned down my acceptance). @gibby has posted how his kids did little to no community service and his kids attended Harvard and Yale. @notjoe used to post on this forum about his two sons at Harvard who also did no community service. None of us had any hooks when we applied. It is a myth that colleges are looking for some magic level of community service (or any at all). They just want to see that you can use your time in HS productively and can have a serious impact in whatever you choose to do.
FWIW, my D did a tremendous amount of CS and started several CS based clubs at her school. She didn’t do any of it to get into college. She did it because she was passionate about it. She was WL and released a few weeks ago. She got into some amazing schools and will be attending UVA in the fall. No regrets or anger here.
I was also a “blind parent” for the most part. I will be very interested to see the admission stats. For some reason it really stings when you see an admit with lower stats. I get it, they had a hook of some sort that caught the AO’s attention. Still stings when you thought your DS did everything right and is disappointed. DS was accepted to a program that will really work for him. So, in the end it worked out fine. I would caution anyone applying to HYPSM to be brutally realistic in your expectations. I was not.