<p>“And in the case that a university does have the major, people understand that they need to recruit for other majors at the expense of taking students which are stronger in the traditional subjects (english, science, math) taught in school.”</p>
<p>Your example still doesn’t make sense. A student applying to NU’s theater program (and presenting a portfolio of having acted in school plays and so forth) isn’t competing with the kid applying to their engineering program (who may be presenting with a math/science portfolio). Different schools have different missions.</p>
<p>It’s fascinating how MITChris seems to understand his school’s priorities just fine. And again, adcoms aren’t rogues. They are part of the overall university’s strategic plan and mission just like every other department. Just because you wish MIT’s criteria were different – so what? That and $4 will get you a latte.</p>
<p>"Actually, that comment is exactly the stereotypical comment one would expect from someone who is/was in a fraternity/sorority and/or member of the mainstream HS’s popular crowd who enjoys bullying those who don’t fit in. "</p>
<p>You missed the point, cobrat. It is that some keep reiterating “but look how brilliant the kid is!” --while failing to realize that brilliance is not the be-all and end-all of high school, college, the work world or life success. That is the analogy being drawn, not “making fun of kids who don’t fit in.”</p>
<p>Theatre is a hs class. Not everywhere, of course. Can you explain how Shelley Long is relevant here & what you think the red herring is? And how a flagship got in here?</p>
<p>Xiggi, I find it interesting that you seem to have a lot more respect for how well adcoms do their job than the faculty at their respective colleges (from what I gleaned from the Mitch Daniels thread.)<<<</p>
<p>CA, help me out, I do not recall what I might have said about Mitch Daniels. Is he not a President or admin? A group I sometimes call spineless? Was it about a lack of courage or pandering to a special interest group?</p>
<p>Well, the Mitch Daniels thread was about his criticism of academia. One of his points was that they spend too much time “writing papers for each other”. You agreed with this, and added that half of all papers are not cited, implying that a large amount of “scholarship” is pointless.</p>
<p>I find it interesting that you seem to have a much higher opinion of adcoms than of professors.</p>
<p>TPG, I have not checked the Senate minutes in a while, and that is where the numbers are shared by Shaw. </p>
<p>Is the TOK a junior year program at your school, or is it not a senior year affair? In my book, the real horse trading takes place in the 9th to 11th grades, when getting the most boosts is key to maximize the GPA and the rankings. Losing credits in the senior year is usually not that big of a deal if the cards are dealt in November of the senior year.</p>
<p>CA, one can recognize that adcoms do deliver the goods and also be highly critical of the publish and perish model or the triviality and futility of most of the published research.</p>
<p>Published papers in science have a dual purpose: one is to train junior scientists to become independent investigators and work in academia in industry. In this regard, a non-cited paper is not futile.
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The other purpose is to advance the field. You don’t know when you start out in a project how significant your findings are going to be. But if they are find something, you publish it. It shows, at the very least, that one’s lab is productive and can execute a study. The best case scenario is if that study is also significant, but it at least shows that your lab can execute a study; so if your next grant idea sounds good, it is somewhat justified in giving you the money. Even baseball players don’t get a hit every time; that doesn’t necessarily suggest futility. The other wrinkle to the citations issue is that there is competition in a hot area. People often come out with similar results at the same time if they’re in a hot area. The most significant one or the one from the more highly regarded lab is the one that usually gets cited. However, I believe competition does facilitate high quality research. If you removed the competition from the other labs that may end up non-cited, I’d expect that research progress would be slower. Also, people may not be pushed to produce more significant studies. </p>
<p>Lastly, even if you think that the primary job of a professor is teach on an undergrad level, I’d say that practicing the art you are teaching is important to knowing what’s important in your field and how to communicate it. Continued research helps to keep one sharp.</p>
<p>I find your posts well-reasoned and thoughtful, but I think you’ve got a blind spot with regards to research. And I don’t think you’ve applied your critical eye to the world of admissions decsions, but I guess we’ll have to agree to disagree on that.</p>
<p>I have no doubt that MITChris executes the policies as his superiors in the office intended. However, in practice, there is a big disconnect between the faculty and higher administration and the admissions office. Also, Stu Schmill (Dean of Admissions) has changed policies somewhat back to when he went to school there. I wonder if the reason he hasn’t changed it completely back is by his own design, or a reluctance to try to change the entire culture of the admissions office created by his predecessor.</p>
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<p>I suppose this depends on how far I get in academia.</p>
<p>I grant you that schools have many different priorities. They need actors, musicians, journalists, dancers, and athletes, as well as people who aspire to be scholars. However, the red herring is to respond to criticism of rejecting a top student by saying that they need these other people too. The more other types of people of people you recruit, the smaller the precentage of people you’d require from the “scholar” group. However, there is some number, and people have there own idea of what they’d expect that number to be. If a candidate reaches a certain rarefied air, you expect them to be included in the scholar group admitted. This is a simplified model, of course, since people may have more than one talent.</p>
<p>I mentioned the flagship universities as an analogy. One could use the same argument to say that you wouldn’t necessarily expect a valedictorian with perfect test scores to get into the state flagship since they recruit for ECs (athletics, music) as well as different majors. However, regardless, you’d expect the valedictorian/perfect test score candidate to qualify for the enlarged scholar pool of a student body which contains one hundred thousand. For a smaller, more qualified student body such as MIT, I’d expect the stakes to be higher. However, at a certain qualification (e.g., RSI participation), I’d expect that person to be in the admitted class.</p>
<p>"However, the red herring is to respond to criticism of rejecting a top student by saying that they need these other people too. The more other types of people of people you recruit, the smaller the precentage of people you’d require from the “scholar” group. "</p>
<p>But they don’t compete for the same slots. Sigh. If NU turns down our hypothetical brilliant scientist, they did so for another kid in the sciences who was more appealing for whatever reason, not because they admitted a theater major in his place. </p>
<p>Anyway, this isn’t even a real problem, as its hardly as though there aren’t plenty of excellent schools where this kid can go. I realize we are all supposed to bow down to MIT, but really, our hypothetical genius can go do genius stuff at Carnegie Mellon or Berkeley or Michigan. Acting as though MIT has the monopoly on facilities, talent and opportunity sounds just as pathetic as the kids on CC whose lives are over if they don’t get into Harvard because however will they ever find a job on Wall Street because that’s the only possible way to make money. It’s narrow-minded.</p>
<p>“I have no doubt that MITChris executes the policies as his superiors in the office intended. However, in practice, there is a big disconnect between the faculty and higher administration and the admissions office”</p>
<p>Well, then certainly all these genius professors would be contacting the administration and storming the adcom doors to insist that other criteria be used. What’s that you say? They don’t? Well, then it’s either not the massive problem you think, or they are ineffectual people who just like to complain. Because I call BS on the idea that a unified group of MIT professors wouldn’t have influence – if they really wanted to.</p>
<p>But it is the massive problem some people think, because it goes back to the original question–speculation about how certain kids got into certain places (and of course it is only a few “certain places” that are ever up for discussion). How many other threads on CC have devolved into the same debate, often with the same players? There are those here who cannot, and will not, accept that college admissions decisions are an unknowable crapshoot even for those who fit their narrow definitions of “brilliance.” And they somehow cannot understand the concept of a finite resource (i.e., the number of spots available to the geniuses they “expect” should be included in an admitted class).</p>
<p>My definition of “brilliance” is admittedly very narrow–or at least it doesn’t apply to many people at all. However, why would one assume that only X’s brilliance came into play in my thinking that X should have been admitted to MIT RD?</p>
<p>The record of X’s action on behalf of other students during undergrad years, and considerable evidence that X was non-nerdy both exist. At least, X was clearly non-nerdy and in fact quite popular, on the MIT scale–might have seemed nerdy at some places where the “cool” kids hang out.</p>
<p>Also, in terms of the xiggi-collegealum314 discussion about uncited papers: I believe that later studies have shown that relatively few STEM papers go uncited (will try to track the source down).</p>
<p>collegealum314 makes an excellent point about the significance of published research as part of the education of graduate students.</p>
<p>I suspect that some of the uncited work is more along the lines of–to take a joking example from my Faust course–The role of fifteenth century pheasant woodcuts in Goethe’s Faust. (Not mocking non-STEM subjects. Loved the course. Still have some recollection of the line that inspired the joke–it was suggested as a Ph.D. thesis topic.)</p>
<p>QM-
Of course, all of us are operating with extremely limited information since you can’t really tell us anything about x or x’s application. And of course you have limited information because you weren’t sitting in on the admission discussions.</p>
<p>But I don’t think it’s plausible to think that any particular admissions committee considers itself infallible. Therefore it is also a possibility that they went back through the application at waitlist time and were all saying to themselves - “my goodness, how did we miss this student the first time around”, and then they admitted her/him. Those kinds of things happen in life, and I don’t think you can entirely eliminate it. Having done a good deal of hiring I’m fairly certain (no - make that absolutely certain} I didn’t always make the correct choice despite my best efforts. THis was pre magic hat era of course .</p>
<p>That’s why I think it is incumbent on the adults around a student to make sure they know that no group is infallible and not to base their self esteem or life decisions on any result such as this.</p>
<p>CA- What cobrat did has been done for generations. Funny, very funny, at the time. Not an excercise of great social rebellion. Just stuff. The sort of thing I tell my college senior dau to enjoy but keep under her hat. And not get in trouble for. And I learned this same stuff from my own elders.</p>
<p>And your gripe is starting to look like against the universities, not their admisisons folks- the decision to have a theatre dept or advertising major, etc, belongs to the U, not admissions.</p>
<p>Schmill? You seem to have a sense admissions is a fiefdom. That one lord can run things as he and only he sees fit, then another can come in and shift things at will. That Chris is a pawn of the former dean, yet to be reformed. A skeeter bite. Somehow allowed to run social media for MIT adcoms, despite his uncertain loyalties? I think you do not know how adcoms operate, the master they serve, only what you think would be a better plan than what you think goes on. </p>
<p>And let’s skip the switch to flagships, at this time. It’s diversionary. As is the issue of publications. Or Shelley Long.</p>
<p>Face the fact that even an MIT does not want every comer who meets your bar. You are not part of admisisons, (even if you interview, that’s ancillary.) Colleges (focusing on elites, here) are communities, entities, made great by far more than what takes place in the classrooms and labs. They actively seek well-rounded, motivated kids who fit their self-image and their considered needs. You can pie-in-the-sky all year about what you think MIT should do- suggest you take your ideas to them.</p>
<p>The people I have talked to at MIT do not consider undergraduate admissions to be sufficiently important to spend time on it. I wish I could replicate the sound of horror in one person’s voice when I suggested that he just discuss admissions policy with the admissions office.</p>
<p>Or in the words of a Stanford professor I know, “Undergraduates? What are those?”
(Clearly not Dick Zare, which I mention since he is another Stanford professor I know.)
The Stanford rejection mentioned above was perfectly predictable in light of Stanford’s practices for years.</p>
<p>I would like to re-emphasize–i.e. perseverate–that X contributed a great deal to student life while an MIT undergrad.</p>
.</p>