I live in a rural area and my high school was absolutely awful at presenting competitions that high-schoolers could participate in. I didn’t even know about Science olympiads or the AMC or anything else like that until this year (Junior year) when it’s too late to do a lot of them. How much would this lack of competitions hurt me in admissions, since most other applicants have done/won them?
If you win one of these big competitions, in most case you are admitted to a school like Stanford. But 90% of the incoming class at Stanford or Harvard hasn’t won one of them.
Not quite that simple, in fact, last year Harvard turned away two applicants who were international Olympiad gold medal winners from the U.S., (they did end up at MIT however). At this stage in the game it would be better to focus on what you can do (winning a gold medal at this stage for you would be almost impossible as there are competitors who have been preparing for those competitions for years), Stanford realizes you simply don’t have the same opportunities coming from a rural school.
@CU123 Ok, yeah thanks. I agree; I think it’s better to focus on the extracurriculars I have been doing for most of high school rather than trying to compete in some of these elite competitions.