My friend from India got through georgia tech this year. His application was:
1720 - SAT 1
No subject tests
No AP classes
IB predicteds - 39
No extra-curricular activities
Decent essays
No recommendations
No interview
I honestly have any clue how the hell he got selected ? And that to he’s an international student from india with 1720 SAT score. He applied for Chemical Engineering at GaTech. There was another friend of mine who got rejected early action.
He had 2110 SAT 1,800 - Math 2, 790 - Chemistry subject, IB predicteds - 41, Decent extra-curriculars, amazing essays, 2 teachers recommendation etc and even he applied for chemical engineering.
Even I got rejected ( i had similar credentials to this guy ).
Did my friend get accepted by mistake ? What is the reason he got accepted ??
Maybe he went through difficult life experiences and his essays were very good. Who knows. Jealousy is ugly.
He’s not a recruited athlete.
I’ve known him for 4 years now and before that he was in the same school ( and our school is expensive so he’s from a well to do family ). He’s not filthy rich nor is he a bad student. His dream is NUS. He applied half heartedly to GaTech and that’s the only university he applied in US. half hearted application doesn’t contain good essays and I did read his. It isn’t soooo great. He doesn’t have any life experiences worth portray in also. He doesn’t even play sports.
It is a real mystery. No Olympiads , no clubs, no MUN, no IMO participation, no INTEL/GOOGLE/MICROSOFT competitions, no internships, no summer jobs , no nothing !!! And this 100% true. I swear on god and myself.
It might be a fluke, different readers, expected errors, something like that. What you thought of as a bad essay might have been a flawless essay in the eyes of the admissions reader. And also generally the SATs for International students tends to be lower, and Tech would count his SAT score as good. In all honesty, it might be a complete fluke I don’t think there’s a reasonable explanation to it.
Oh I think he might have applied early! That might be the difference. If he applied early, he would have a much much higher chance of acceptance versus the rest of you guys who might have applied regular decision.
Well, for every class, someone has to be in the lowest 25th percentile…
he’s an international student from India.
and he didn’t apply early
Admissions is not always numbers driven (beyond a certain number of people with high stats, there is no need to just choose more of them, especially if they have the exact same profile as others and would likely get in elsewhere and benefit from those school). It is also not YOUR job to judge anyone’s essays as YOU are NOT the one shaping Georgia Tech’s class (hell, I hate it when in chance me threads, the OP rates their own essay. How the hell do they know what the adcoms at the many different schools they applied to, like. It may be written well and enjoyable to read in a vacuum, but within the context of a selection process that is shaping a class in context of a school’s mission, you can’t really know). It can also depend on what “major” they applied as. International admissions are also driven by whether or not a candidate can pay all the tuition, so while you would think many internationals would have higher scores than ones in the states, I am sure there are many cases where it is not true. Sometimes the verbal and writing scores drag them down below most domestic applicants.
well it just seems weird that’s all. I mean essay alone doesn’t get people through universities, or do they ?
They can…especially if a person has a more than solid GPA in comparison to their high school. Most schools would rather see a high GPA with challenging courses than a super high score w/a lower GPA because GPA usually correlates better with college success (this makes sense because at more rigorous institutions like Tech and other selectives in the US, it isn’t really about multiple choice anymore. And unless it was a low ACT score, not much red flags should be raised because the SAT is general whereas you will clearly take specific classes in college. One can perform poorly on standardized test, but still do well in challenging courses because college exams and course contents are structured much differently from say the SAT…You also didn’t tell us the breakdown of the score. Like what if they hit 6 something in 2 sections and then bombed another (namely writing or verbal)…or they hit 7 in math and got mediocre in others. If they are planning on science, math is the best correlate.