If it’s a choice, fine by me. But I can’t see blaming the US universities if one doesn’t give the process more than a cursory scan.
@lookingforward: Who said anything about blame? I understand why the American private elites do what they do and I even support it to an extent, but that leads to an opaque process and a lot of heartbreak and craziness among applicants.
lookingforward #258. I did not see the student’s MIT application (please do not jump on this fact), but I know that he worked quite hard on it, and that he happens to be a very good person. I knew him for about 11 years at the point when he applied.
Back at the time of his application, if I had had all of the information that has come out via CC and other sources subsequently, I might have said, "Be sure to . . . " Later, I did suspect where a gap in the presentation may have lain. (But who knows?) I don’t believe I would have needed to give any advice that started out with “Don’t,” given what I knew of his personality and nature.
After that application season, Marilee Jones was quoted as saying that she would like to see applicants whose idea of “fun” (for the “fun” question) was popping some popcorn and watching a video with friends. It would not have occurred to this student to say that, I am pretty sure.
MIT appeared at one point to be touting an admitted student who rode a unicycle and another who was a rodeo clown. The first does not seem all that interesting to me. The second is a mixed bag. On the one hand, it is very admirable, because rodeo clowns take personal risk to distract a rampaging animal from a rider who is in trouble on the ground. On the other hand, there are elements of animal cruelty in some rodeos. So that’s a +/- to me.
I have learned from CC that MIT does not like students who solve differential equations with friends for fun.
At one point, I suggested that someone might be the national champion at rutabaga curling, and that could make them seem fun and interesting (at least to a reader who is not bored to tears by curling). I thought I had made up rutabaga curling. To my great surprise, it exists as a sport! At least if the internet source was reliable. 
And yet, they enroll a plurality of the MIT PRIMES kids (and likely admit a majority of them). So there’s that.
The discussion has made me think of another reason that applicants might have unrealistic expectations, if not exactly “entitlement.”
MIT sets the academic bar for admission low enough that there are indeed many more applicants who cross it than MIT can take. Some of the MIT admissions material gives the impression that the applicants are all equal thereafter and are selected on other criteria. Some information on CC suggests that this is not exactly the case and that some applicants are marked as academic stars, who are reviewed somewhat differently. A bit hard to be sure, and it’s also hard to know where the line for stardom is drawn, if there is one.
But to get to the point about unrealistic expectations: A totally hypothetical student has scores in the 690-710 range on all of the SAT sections. The student has an unweighted GPA of 3.9, perhaps heavily helped by homework, extra credit and class participation, perhaps earned at our local school, where that may put him in the top 25%. The student has a smattering of APs, perhaps the AP lites. So, academic bar–crossed.
Now, in the hypothetical student’s own estimation, he is a phenomenal human being! His parents agree! That ought to be enough to get him in, in preference to all of the boring “grinds.”
But wait! There’s more! The hypothetical student has built a 12-foot model of the Eiffel Tower out of popsicle sticks! And in the model restaurant at the top, there are little tiny tables with tiny chairs and tiny white tablecloths, as a triumph of creativity! The plan to wire the whole thing for a Son et Lumière show had to be dumped, because the hypothetical student couldn’t get it to work technically, but hey! 12 foot tower. In for sure, right?
Well, maybe the student thinks so. Maybe this guy would in fact make a pretty good roommate. Maybe MIT even takes someone like this from time to time.
More likely, this winds up being a disappointed “entitled” applicant. Or at least an applicant who expected to be admitted.
One more comment: In the early days of CC, when a student was admitted to a top school, over acquaintances whose academic credentials were significantly stronger, the admitted student would occasionally post something that boiled down to: “Their academics were stronger, but I am much better as a human being, so I got in!” [While this is not a literal quotation, it is close enough, actually.] When I read comments of that type, I always thought that if the person were actually better as a human being, he certainly would not post that statement! I am grateful that this sort of thing seems to have died off in recent years.
hebegebe: Yes, but it would be the “kiss of death” for an MIT PRIMES student to use that to answer the question about what he/she does for fun. Maybe they warn those applicants? Fun has to be what “regular” people regard as fun.
Those must the ones that had to settle for Harvard instead.
There are MIT students who have fun by measuring a bridge in units of their body height, and in rewiring tall buildings to spell out things on their sides with office lights. There haven’t been a lot of really legendary pranks recently though, so maybe MIT is filtering those kids out nowadays.
Lol, QM. But those unusual side activities are more after-the-fact little bits to collect in marketing materials. I might say, incidentals. Not tips, though they might amuse or intrigue, might show how a kid uses her time after all the rest. Might help make the Stanford roommate letter interesting. But not among criteria. A few years ago, we had several threads that insisted you had to be “different,” as in odd or unusual, to “stand out.”. PG’s old mocky example of the juggling unicyclist. Threads like those can mislead kids.
There’s a faction on CC that says ‘just be yourself, just do what interests you.’ Well, no. I’ll skip more on this, but it depends on what that is…and isn’t.
So, we don’t know how your friend presented. Or how far he got. Maybe he was a serious contender, but at the last minute, someone else, equally good, got the nod. (We do know the Jones era is long past.) I do believe there are kids who could and would thrive at an MIT. But first you have to get in. They’re the deciders.
Try to know your audience.
It can’t guarantee an admit. But imo, better to apply knowing you tried your best and it was up to them, than to assume it’s all about stats and a leader title, any title. And they throw darts.
Q, respectfully, it might help to give is a breath before we go off on other examples or thoughts.
Yes, absolutely. You can love doing differential equations with friends. Where’d thye idea come from, that you can’t? Someone might take that comment as a literal truth.
Btw, yes, humility is good.
For comparison, I was somewhat similar to @QuantMech’s friend, but in the UK. Desperately introverted, hopeless at foreign languages, essay writing etc., no ECs apart from a desultory effort at swimming in high school (and no friends either, although fortunately personal computers were just becoming popular 
). But quite good at math and science (not IMO caliber but probably top 0.1%), so when I told my parents at age 8 I was going to go to Cambridge (which in retrospect might have been a bit shocking for them, given they had both failed their A-levels and didn’t go to university, instead training as PE teachers), I was pipelined in that direction. Fortunately they managed to scrape together the money so I could go to the best private school in the region, which sent 50-60 people a year to Oxbridge at that time (nowadays about half that) and there really wasn’t ever any doubt I would go to Cambridge (I didn’t apply to anywhere else, and I guess I was probably in the top 10% of those 60 admits).
Even with admissions having got harder in the UK, I’m pretty sure I’d be just fine getting into Cambridge today as well, but I don’t have any confidence the same would happen in the US. Fortunately my older kids are much more all rounders, so fit well in the US system. But I do worry about my youngest son, who may have some greater level of mathematical ability (though currently zero desire to take advantage of it, so it may not matter) and can’t write essays, doesn’t work for (or get) As in other subjects. If he does eventually get serious about math, then it seems clear to me he would be better off in the UK system.
Who can blame a kid, as described in post #264, for feeling a bit of entitlement? It is disheartening to know you did everything you were supposed to do and still didn’t win the prize. I don’t blame them for feeling angry/frustrated/incredulous. We adults, particularly Americans, do preach the “if you just work hard you will win” to our kids, it is ingrained in our national psyche. We should, to some extent take responsibility for developing this inflated sense of expectation, because we know, from experience, it is not true a lot of the time. My mom always said “Life is not fair”; sometimes there is no explanation for it. She also said “You can’t always get what you want”. I think there is a Rolling Stones song based on this very premise
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
You can’t always get what you want
But if you try sometimes you just might find
You get what you need
And that is were we fall short, teaching our kids resilience. I don’t know that it matters where the sense of entitlement comes from (I actually think some sense of entitlement is healthy); what matters is that we teach them to mitigate the disappointments.
Re#221 - actually it doesn’t take a rocket scientist (or Ivy graduate) to figure out that certain people are “tools”. In fact, my DD2018 is pretty accurate at spotting them. My DD2016 seems to have developed a sense for it too; she has unerring accuracy as well, only she usually ends up dating them rather than avoiding them. Frankly, for these very selective schools touting their holistic reviews, I would think they could be relatively accurate too, with a little bit of common sense effort. Or, how about throwing an 18 year old into the mix on an admission committee? They can generally spot an imposter/poser amongst their peers, sort of like a drug dog.
I think the definition if imposter should be left to adcoms. On CC, kids and adults tell others not to go for depth and breadth, that it’s “padding.” Says who?
You want to tell those pre meds or engineer wannabes they shouldn’t gain appropriate experiences, it’s fakey? Based on what knowledge?
One can take the view that it is abundantly clear that the tippy top universities in the US are not interested in their admissions being dominated by absolutely tippy top academics, so deal with it. It’s a part, but far from the whole. They are clearly in the business of preserving their tippy top status as the universities of future elites, and this is the way they have successfully done so.
Or you can argue for the downsides to this. I don’t know that anyone expects it to change through CC arguments, but I believe most of the pushback on this thread has been to say there are downsides, even if they are judged not enough to change by those in a position to make the decisions.
@lookingforward I meant more oabout being able to judge who is likely to be a “tool”, lol.
What IMO medalist got rejected from MIT for being an introvert? Who said being an introvert is a bad thing? The majority of MIT students are introverts!
I believe that this is true in the US also, that most students at MOP attend places like Stanford, MIT, CMU, or Harvard.
I would love to see ANY evidence that Cal Tech or MIT screens out introverts.
Parents and students should focus not on what will get them accepted at XX. Rather, they should focus on what will maximize their chances of acceptance at XX1, XX2, XX3,… All of which would be a great match.
I don’t think anyone is saying they screen out introverts. Isn’t this a question about whether kids with few ECs/leadership positions (one possible consequence of being an introvert) and with a relatively narrow focus (say with Bs in English, a foreign language and history) would still have a strong chance of getting in?