Please, please don’t dwell on the negatives of your experience. If you’re accepted to a college you love, then that’s alll you need to focus on. The “what ifs” will drive you crazy. Comparison is the thief of joy. Be happy you’ll be in school somewhere in August, and forget the schools you won’t be attending!
Some students may get all of the information that they need from the web site, an informal visit, and/or talking to the college fair rep without getting recorded, perhaps because they do not know that they have to “show interest”. Also, Tulane offers both EA and SCEA, where SCEA is the way to “show interest”. In general, why would regular EA (as opposed to SCEA or ED) be any kind of way of showing interest beyond RD, since applying to as many of one’s schools as possible EA is a strategy to try to net an early safety?
UMass - Amherst also considers “level of applicant’s interest”, so a highly qualified student who realizes that his/her perfectly good state flagship may not be a true safety because of that factor may choose to add additional schools to his/her application list “just in case” – the opposite of what you want to see.
Cornell rejecting you is a surprise for ED. Berkeley and umich are a little bit surprising. The rest are fairly obvious.
Evidently, some people do not read threads they are responding to. Cornell rejects high-stats apps and take low-stats apps in ED all the time.
^This. Before I started reading CC, I had no idea that interest was something colleges considered (much less how to show interest). I visited a bunch of schools (informally) and I don’t think the college reps I talked to took down my name either. Although I understand why a college would consider interest, I think that their ways of measuring it are far from perfect (and rather easy to fake).
Interest is honestly so full of nonsense. Low income kids can’t compete with people who can take numerous visits.
Also creating an effective narrative is single handedly the best way to demonstrate interest in my book. With so many high quality applicants, colleges are looking for kids who are passionate, and fit a role in the college. When you get to top 25 schools essays, recs, and supporting ECs with an emphasis on how you developed yourself are huge.
For example, when I wrote my Northwestern app, my opening was having lunch with a professor at another school (not Northwestern) and talking about the meaning of university tenure. This narrative was an implied/unsaid appeal to their school, because I tried to convey that I valued professor interaction so much to the fact I was having dinner with one. Why is narrative important? Schools especially LACs try so hard to flaunt close faculty interactions. Hence a large school like Northwestern may face criticism that the experience is large and informal. So I while I discussed important things like my research experience and talked about what the school could offer me, I added the dimension of having Northwestern look forward to me being one of those kids they flaunt had discussions with professors and talked about philosophical things like the meaning of tenure, even if in reality it rarely happens. I tied in who I was and what the schools could offer, but an interesting story can do much more.
And THAT @bodangles represents how creating a narrative can set you apart when applying to selective schools. Take it or leave it. Nobody really says that, but for me it makes sense that you should set yourself apart in indirect ways.
@ucbalumnus We are obviously just going to disagree on this and I am not advocating for the use of expressed interest as one of the major factors schools should consider in their admissons decisions. However, when it is broadly defined and is utilized the way the schools I’ve mentioned do to identify the “Harvard material” applicants who actually want to attend it adds value. This assists the schools in winnowing down their applicant pools to focus on match and high interest students instead of forcing them to wait passively to see which disappointed Ivy rejects fall into their laps. It gives both the schools and the students more control over their destinies. Used more broadly, this type of process would add a bit more logic and sense to applicant behavior, IMHO, by preventing rather than encouraging pointless applications.
I think every college asks visiting students to register, and so the names are on record. I don’t think that “interest” is immensely important, but I think absence of it can tip the scales at “second-tier” schools. Most students cannot visit colleges physically, of course, but - in this digital age - it is very, very easy to demonstrate interest. Go to a college’s website, identify your regional admissions representative, research “road-shows” in your area. Highly competitive students probably won’t have free time to meet an admissions rep or alumni/ae interview in the fall of their senior years, but they will all have the time to send an e-mail inquiring about alternative times or simply saying how sorry they are that they cannot attend. Find some intelligent, meaningful questions to ask the admissions office. I see too many students lamenting their disappointing admission results after “shotgunning” the “Top Twenty” (or thirty) colleges. I think some of those waiting-list spots might well have been acceptances if the student had invested a few more minutes communicating with a shorter list of colleges. That’s pure hypothesis on my part, but I had a son punch slightly above his weight last year, and I attribute it to his outreach efforts. The one surprise was University of Washington, which was one school where he had not demonstrated interest. He didn’t get in everywhere, but they all knew he was serious about them.
What evidence is there that Cornell rejects/defers high stats kids often in ED? Why would Cornell do that? I didn’t notice that looking through Cornell’s ED threads,
Mine didn’t visit Michigan and USC and was admitted. I don’t know about showing interest have to be in person. However, I did send the free SAT test scores to both schools very early, once she was happy with her SAT.