<p>PP - I just did nt think you were right about USC since I like it!</p>
<p>Have you picked your school yet?</p>
<p>Kartik - where are you moving to?</p>
<p>No idea. We’ll get to know along with the transfer orders. It’s not even certain that we will move! It’s driving me crazy!</p>
<p>^That happens with transferable jobs a lot. My school had a lot of tranfers (although not from the field ur father is in and they used to complain about not being able to continue with ECs. It helps their case a bit, but not too much. I’m a bit discouraging on purpose because I’ve seen too many people with a no-so-good profile ruin their 12th due to getting into this process. Believe me, we all start out thinking it’s not going to take too much of time, and it’ll be manageable, but everyone who tries to prepare for IIT and apply abroad ends up screwing up in both, unless they come from a school/city that sends loads every year. All the people I know who did both IIT and applications said in the end that it’s only possible to do either if you actually want to do it properly.</p>
<p>texaspg: Thank you for asking, but nope! I’m not liking Princeton’s grade deflation one bit, esp since it’ll affect my prospects for grad school. But I like the Woody Woo school too much to let it go. I’m debating a Social Studies major at Harvard with normal grades over Woody Woo with lower gpa at Princeton.
Anyway, I’d better not hijack karthik’s thread, I’ll probably create a thread on this later.</p>
<p>If I was at all interested in IIT, I wouldn’t be here! The sole reason that I started looking for alternatives was that I knew engineering wasn’t for me. I assure you, under no circumstances will I ever go to IIT, no matter how much everyone tells me I’m perfect for it.
I am not an engineer, and that’s that.
My backup plans do not include IIT. I have two backup plans, neither of which are related to engineering.</p>
<p>In my application, should I mention why I don’t ave too many ECs? And no, I’m not making excuses. I accept my part in that, but circumstances also play a crucial role in such decisions. Honestly, it get tiring - and irritating - to rebuild everything when you move away from a place after staying there for 2~3 years, not to mention small places like Datia & Shahdol - they’re developed villages, really, though Shahdol was quite good - don’t have much to offer in ways of coommunity service, book clubs and the likes. I’m 16 y/o, and I have moved 12 times. The math is obvious.</p>
<p>Kartik, you should develop a theme around living in rural areas. There is a lot you could do living in small places (raise some money to create a book club, increase the literacy of people around you, teach people how to use the internet, provide advocacy for clean water). Dont get bogged down by big city ideas for ECs. Things you do in real life to help local communities add a lot more to your resume than school clubs.</p>
<p>I already left Shahdol, and am currently in another town. This one is a tad more developed, but the the students here are either those who spend night and day studying from IIT-JEE, or those who can’t be bothered to pick up a book.</p>
<p>Basically, I live in places not developed enough to be truly developed, but developed just enough to not to have visible problems. Not exactly rural, thouh. Kinda like cities and small cities.</p>
<p>sirfkartik, I think it’s fine to talk about your socio-geographic context in your applicaiton, and if you’ve found it stifling (as you make it pretty clear you have) mention that too. Everybody likes stories about overcoming adversity. But it’s not enough just to throw up your arms and say “Oh, I haven’t been able to do anything-- there have been no opportunities!”, or lament the ostensibly vapid trappings of “places not developed enough to be truly developed”. I don’t mean to sound facetious, but what I suspect your application-reader is more likely to be interested in is HOW YOU RESPOND to your context rather than WHAT YOUR CONTEXT DID TO YOU (I’d rather have used italics there if it were possible… but you get the point).
So I think that when texaspg advises you to take a “rural” tack, he may not neccesarily mean that talking about a rural context, specifically, is a good idea; but he may mean ( thoughts, texaspg?) that you’ve gotta show how you’ve responded in an extraordinary way to whatever context you were in, and your indications have thus far given readers to believe that a rural context IS largely the one you’ve had to respond to (and “rural” doesn’t always mean farm-land, just not urban and not sub-urban (in the american sense)…).</p>
<p>Yup, I agree with you on that, JAupiais. Honestly, why would mentioning how circumstances overcame me help me at all? I wouldn’t even feel right saying it.</p>
<p>As far as the “rural” thing is concerned, that would be a matter of perspective, I suppose. While some might call them rural, I feel… not completely right in calling those cities rural. Probably my conscience, I don’t know X_X Feels like I’ll be doing something wrong if I call the city I liked rural.</p>
<p>@ JAupiais: About what I said in the other post. I didn’t want to imply that Princeton has different requirements for specific countries, of course not. Anyone is free to send whatever they want and submit their application however they want to.</p>
<p>I just wanted to point out that my application was different and that it is a trend for Romanians in my region at least, to mail their application folder. Not because we are not comfortable with the internet, but because we don’t really feel we can tell everything about ourselves by just filling in a few forms and writing two essays. This could point towards a lack of adaptation to the way things probably work in the US but we still have time to adapt once we are there.</p>
<p>So I was accepted after the admissions officers read (or could read, I can’t be sure they read everything but at least they saw IT WAS THERE), in addition to the common app and teacher recommendations and supplement, another essay detailing my not very bright family situation, very many additional recommendations coming from people who know me well, some 4-5 pages describing my passion for the outdoor, caving and rock-climbing, some poems I wrote, some drawings and paintings I made, many many photos of me and a lot of other stuff that I can’t even remeber. The entire application folder weighed 1.3 kilograms so you can imagine there was a lot of stuff there.</p>
<p>I felt and still feel that such a personalized portfolio (for example, in addition to an arts supplement, I drew a sketch of my messy desk, wrote the title: The Academic Me and placed this sketch before the chapter describing the school competitions I participated in and the results I got; similar paintings and drawings preceded the chapters describing my EC’s and my Artistic Activities) will make a student stand out from the thousands of standardized forms and recommendations. That is why I chose to submit my application in this form. I worked very hard to make one such portfolio for every college and university I applied to, but the efforts were worth it. I got into: Princeton, Dartmouth, Duke, Cornell, NU, Amherst, Vassar, Swarthmore, Reed, Pomona and Skidmore and I was waitlisted by many Ivies. Rejected only at Harvard and MIT,Stanford,Caltech (where btw, I applied online and I am sure this is one of the reasons why I was not even waitlisted-I failed to stand out in any way).</p>
<p>This is why I am telling the OP that (s)he should try to find out how other Indians submit their applications, if there is a special formula that they have. I used the same formula that other Romanian Princeton students used because I didn’t want to take chances. And it has worked just fine for me.</p>
<p>As JAupais says - in your context is always what matters.</p>
<p>I lived in India for the first 22 years of my life and I would be hardpressed to say there was nothing I could do to there build some ECs, no matter the size of the city. There are so many foreigners and aid workers that come to India as well as a bunch Indian American kids to build their resumes. It is truly the land of opportunity to build a resume with 700 million poor people that can helped in some way or the other to better themselves.</p>
<p>If you have one good private school, there must be a dozen govt run schools that are lacking. If you have a computer, you bring in a bunch of kids with no access to show them basic skills, www or whatever they are curious about, raise money and create a soccer field, tutor kids, help illiterate adults learn to read, we could just go on.</p>
<p>I believe I may not have been able to convey my situation completely if you think that, texaspg - or I may have missed things that were right in front of my eyes. That is not something I can change, however, as the time for community service has passed. When - or if - I move into a new town, I shall see if I can find something.
I believe I can mention quite a bit under my ECs in English and what I did for it (a very small book club consisting of me and my friends in secondary school, and another in high school when I changed towns, a VERY legthy reading - is that correct, syntatically? - list, though I don’t think I’ll be able to include the entire thing in the app :P, and so on), if there is something like an essay I can write for that section in the common app (I can’t find anything similar), but not much relating to competitions. I shall keep trying to remember if I ever did things in English, though I’m certain I didn’t join too many competitions in high school. Everything I did was done on a personal level in high school.</p>
<p>@boogaloony - your advice is very good. A personalized application like that sounds like a wonderful idea. While I prefer the online application for personal reasons, I shall keep that in mind. </p>
<p>BTW, if I add some poems and stuff onto my CommonApp, how will that be?</p>
<p>I think this might clear things up - in his/her post, texaspg mentions public schools and private schools. Well, I’m the guy from the public schools. Not the public schools with no facilities, or the kind of public schools we see on TV. The good public schools, the public schools from the higher part of the spectrum, but public schools nonetheless.</p>
<p>sirfkartik, additional materials such as poems can be mailed in physically, separate from your Common App. materials but still part of your application, or can be included in the Additional Information section of the Common App.
Personalizing an application, as boogaloony advises, can no doubt help to make you stand out, but be careful about the volume of material you send in. I suspect that that 1.3Kg of extra material boogaloony set in was only partially considered. Admissions offices are very busy places, and they make clear on their websites that they don’t really want much more than they request in the application or encourage as an additional submission. But who knows, maybe they don’t really know what they want: boogaloony certainly had extensive success in his college admissions process, in fact vastly more than I did, so his strategy may very well have turned out better than indications would have had me predict.
The small book club thing you mention is certainly exactly the sort of thing that can help under ECs-- why didn’t you mention it before? Taking the initiative to create a small, intimate space where the exchange of literary ideas and impressions can occur (showing, in other words, an appreciation for intimate socratic learning) bespeaks a certain personality characteristic that, though your posts too, you have intimated to possess; a personality characteristic that should stand you in good stead through life, and very likely in the college admissions process. This is the sort of response to context that texaspg advocates, if I understand him/her correctly, you espouse.</p>
<p>And, yes, I believe your sentence is syntactically correct. It made perfect sense to me, anyway… :)</p>
<p>Yes, I will try to keep the amount of material I add under control.</p>
<p>And I didnt mention the book club it before because it wasn’t that big a deal. It was just me and some of my friends to whom I recommended books from the school library, they recommended books to me and we talked about them in break - which was only 20 min, by the way. It was just about the three or four of us. I did that in two places, but when we came to the place I’m currently living in, I just kinda didn’t feel like doing it again. In this place, it was just me and one friend who did that. It was actually kinda funny. Every week on tuesday, we issued a book from the library - that was when I read White Fang and Boy - and read 'em in the library period and the break. I usually took a half a day to finish the book, then we’d talk about them. Every other student used to tell us how “unusual” that was.</p>
<p>You can call it an excercise socratic thinking, but that way, me and my friend used to get into LONG debates about things we saw on Discovery - whenever we watched it, somewhat rare - ranging from the existence of God and whether Einstien was a real genius, or a intelligent hard worker!</p>
<p>Kartik - sounds like you are in the british style public school (in US they are called private schools). Are you in a boarding school?</p>
<p>No. I change schools - and cities - every time my father get’s transferred, as I mentioned before. The entire family moves with him.</p>
<p>JAupiais, I honestly can’t understand how the word espouse fits in their X_X Would you mind explaining?</p>
<p>I have a lot of ECs when you cut through to the heart of things. As you said, there’s the book clubs. I was also the lead in the English drama in my 8th class - an Akbar Birbal play, I really liked it. I was well known as the best English speaker in the class in every school I went to - and every teacher asked me to explain the summary of English chapters, write the speeches for assemblies, write poems and articles for the school magazine, many things like that. Once, a teacher gave me an extra mark just because my writing style impressed her! Honestly, if I could get my teachers to write recommendations in the “format” the adcomms are looking for, I can get SO many glowing recommendations - I know that’s a waste of time and resources, just saying X_X
The problem is - how do I mention all that in my application?! And I don’t have any community service things either 
And most of the things are related to English, and how much my moving around has exposed me to new cultures, new ideas and different types of people. I don’t that’s even nearly enough! Everybody seems to have a lot more “material” things, so to say - just look at perfectpixie’s profile!</p>
<p>Scratch that “their”, and put in a “there”, please X_X</p>
<p>Sirfkartik, it doesn’t matter if the ECs aren’t of the sort editorialized about in newspapers or which make your mouth hang open and think, “how did they do that?”. I certainly didn’t have any of those. ECs are about commitment and personality: those are the two things I believe you need to aim to demonstrate when you include an EC. So leading a theater production, being part of a book club (even if it was only four people-- you don’t have to mention that!), those ARE useful ECs. Perfectpixie is wonderful, I’m sure; but you’re not applying to be accepted as perfectpixie, you’re applying as yourself. So it’s fine if you’re different-- you’re in fact supposed to be. The sort of things perfectpixie did were constructive of the sort of person perfectpixie wanted to be, and so too do I think you should attempt, and not be hesitant in attempting, to create your person in your own application. (I know it’s a bit of a tangent, but you’ve got me thinking of something Richard Rorty wrote… ever seen his essay “Philosophy Without Mirrors”? Look up the first section, “Hermeneutics and Edification”, and read the bit about Bildung… it’s weirdly related to what we’re discussing here…)
With regard to the speeches and things that could make it into a recommendation; why is the format an issue? Recommendations are typically done online as well anyway if you’re using the Common App. … I think an additional idea you could make use of, is to mention that sort of thing in your essay. Explain, in whatever way you want, whatever topic you choose; and then incorporate mention of the speeches and poetry and extra marks and whatnot toward the end as examples of the personal qualities the rest of the essay hopefully will argue and show you possess. Thoughts?</p>
<p>Lastly, one definition of “espouse” from the Oxford American Dictionary is: "adopt or support… e.g. ‘She espoused communism’ ". So, I meant it in the sense, “undertake to evince”. You think it makes sense?</p>
<p>Also, not to be a grammarbot, but “get’s’” isn’t supposed to have an apostrophe… I figure you might care… 
:)</p>