I know qualification is subjective and its different to different people. I’m a senior at bronx science and I have a 33 act, 790 math 2 SAT, and 730 chemistry SAT, 93.86 gpa, and 11 aps. I actually want to go to stony. But my friend said that since a lot of Bronx Science kids get into Stony, it’s viewed as a safety. As a result, Stony would reject some highly qualified kids under the assumption that they will reject Stony for other colleges. I’m worried because I actually do want to go to Stony. Plus, I’m pretty nervous because I applied for a computer science major and I didn’t get an acceptance letter yet while my friends already got theirs.
Yes I heard it’s true. What you can do is try to demonstrate to them that you really wanna go. My counsler said to go to the school itself and display your interest to the admissions counselors.
No. Never once in the twelve years I’ve been here.
Chris
Wrenkelly et al., you will come across this type of statement many times “rejecting too highly qualified…”, it is worth thinking about it from the other party’s viewpoint, see whether it makes sense, since it affects what you do and how you do it.
Do you believe Stony produces highly accomplished students, and has highly regarded faculty? I do. 7 Nobel prizes, for example. And I could go on.
Given that one would think that Stony Brook would want the best students it could find, recognizing that highly qualified students will have many options , some of which they may view as more attractive than Stony. So what is a reasonable approach for Stony?
The idea that Stony would deny upfront highly qualified students essentially means they either give up without trying, or somehow know which of the highly qualified applicants will favor Stony (I would suggest that neither is an optimal approach).
A more reasonable approach is to make up the rank order of how qualified each applicant is for each the admission groups (CS, Business, etc.). Now comes the part about how to make the offers.
Stony would have historical records of the admission percentages, and so would have some idea of how many offers they can make without risking too many acceptances. They can also put out the offers in batches to manage how many acceptances they get. They also need to be careful not to wait too long, and keep others waiting and lose them (they will have a pretty good idea, from history, of how long they can wait and still expect people with a given profile, to still be open to an offer).
In short, there are better ways of figuring out how to get the best set of students than assuming upfront that you know who will accept and who will not, and therefore not making offers to highly qualified students.
It is not an easy task for the college, and they will use all the indicators they have to help manage the process.
Who visited, which HS school you come from, did you sign up for an admitted students call or visit etc… there are also the Honors and Scholars and WISE programs. The level of interest and knowledge of Stony included in the app is a usable indicator.
You can also take a look at the scattergrams for Stony, you will see that some highly qualified students do indeed attend.
Parent of a current SB student, no other association.
Not looking to speak for Chris either, who, from watching the process a couple of years ago on this forum, is a clear thoughtful accurate communicator who also tries hard to help applicants not freak out unnecessarily.
This is very well put – but yes, in short, we would never deny an “overqualified” applicant. That would, ultimately, be silly!
Chris