Help an desperate Asian boy shooting for Ivy/T10

[DadOfJerseyGirl]

@circuitrider

Every old, big city back East has a rat problem

That!

And, regarding this:

@ChubbyCheez

As for Columbia….
…heard some things abt the social life and how it’s boring

For the record, this is the first time I’ve heard social life in New York City being called boring

[ucbalumnus]

@sgopal2

You’re right when you say that a HS counsellor doesn’t have an individual student’s best interest in mind. They are looking out for the entire HS graduating class, not you. So when giving advice, they are trying to get as many students into the top colleges as possible. These two goals are not the same.

It is also often the case that what the student thinks are the best fit colleges for them are not the same as which colleges think the student is a good fit for the college.

For example, there are probably some highly selective small LACs in rural areas which have relatively low enrollment of economics majors, no business major, relatively few Asian students, and lots of sports teams (so that athletic ECs could be privileged even for non-recruits in order to increase the walk-on pool). These colleges are probably among the ones more likely to admit the OP among colleges of nominally similar general selectivity (and the elite high school’s college counselors probably know that). But they are also probably the ones of least interest to the OP (so any suggestion of such from the elite high school’s college counselors would likely be rejected by the OP).

[circuitrider]

UCB - You almost earned a “100” from me (for the first time), but for the piece about there being plenty of “walk-ons” at small LACs. Wesleyan is the one that I’m most familiar with and the only varsity-level sport where there’s truly a plethora of walk-ons is crew and obviously that’s because there are so few high schools that compete in it.