Hi! I’ve been lurking on cc for well over a year and felt that I should reflect on my admissions experience and all its insanity. I know that CC made me feel especially inadequate, coming from a poor high school in South Texas that has maybe three active clubs. Research is practically unheard of, 2100+ SAT scores are legendary, and most people don’t really dare to dream beyond UT, A&M, or our local university. Yeah, I got fantastic grades in IB and didn’t do too badly on the ACT (33 superscore) or subject tests, but coming from where I come from, I had no idea what I was up against.
Before my senior year, I had never even joined a club—never had a leadership position, nothing. I had good numbers, close relationships with teachers, and writing skills, but that was all. Applying to colleges, I felt like I was shooting around in the dark, grasping for anything that I could get my hands on because I didn’t think I had any realistic shot at any of them. I applied to 12 schools in all, only half of which I was seriously interested in, but I needed a sense of security because I desperately wanted to get out of the south. The schools that I applied to were: All the ivies minus Columbia (horrible decision in retrospect), Stanford, Rice, Pomona, UChicago, and Tufts.
Yup. No safeties at all. Was it a stupid decision? Hell yeah, I was having panic attacks every day from January up to March when decisions finally (finally!) came rolling in. I knew that I wasn’t working with much, just good numbers, heartfelt essays, great recs, but really no extracurriculars beyond random things I do at home. In fact, I only put down one EC and that was learning Russian, something I’ve been doing since the 8th grade (I’ve got Russian penpals, read books in Russian, etc). Any proof? Awards? Nope! I was banking on those essays. My common app essay was pretty vague but I thought it was very me: I wrote about how my culture conflicts with my own values and how I’ve learned to acknowledge that tradition while still staying true to my “deviance” in a highly conservative border town. My supplements in general were pretty lackluster for the ivies, but I really let myself loose for Pomona, Chicago, Tufts, and Stanford. For Stanford, I answered the intellectual vitality question by reflecting on an America’s Next Top Model marathon. Yeah. I thought they’d either love it or hate it. Guess they loved it. For Pomona’s freedom prompt, I wrote about coming home from school and singing at the top of my lungs to Natasha Bedingfield songs and jumping on my bed before my parents came home from work.
This is how decisions panned out:
Stanford: Accepted!!
Rice: Accepted (likely)
Cornell: Accepted (likely)
Tufts: Accepted
Chicago: Accepted
Pomona: Accepted
Brown: Waitlisted
HYP, Dartmouth, Penn: Rejected
Of all of these schools, the one that I least expected to get into was Stanford. It seemed like a joke to apply there, but I did it anyway. I didn’t spend more than three hours on the application, but what I wrote was spontaneous and so representative of my personality. Everyone else from my school had gotten rejected even though they all had “legitimate” ECs, comparable numbers, and URM status, yet I got in. Me. Me!! I’ve never been the guy who’s won many things or really gotten much attention, so getting acknowledgment from all these schools—and Stanford especially—was extremely surprising and rewarding because my application was an honest representation of my character. I didn’t change myself for any school; I put down my authentic personality on each application and figured they could take me or leave me.
An interesting observation is that the east coast didn’t seem to like me, haha. I wasn’t particularly interested in any of the ivies save for Yale and Princeton, but neither of them were interested in me, evidently.
So that’s that. I didn’t do anything that I didn’t want to do during high school, and I ended up getting into my ultimate dream school that seemed so out of reach. No fake clubs, 4290492 community service hours, nothing—just me on a piece of paper. Will it work out for everyone? No, probably not, but I think it’s important for kids to know that they don’t have to break their backs to get into a great school. Do yourself a favor and be real—but be compelling at the same time. That can be a hard balance to strike, but once you do, the results can be so sweet. I was sitting here a year ago thinking I’d never get into any of these, and now I’m off to California. So to anyone feeling incredibly insecure about admissions: Don’t lose hope, and don’t lose that spark of individuality.
P.S. Sorry this post is so long and thanks if you read all of it lol
Good luck in Cali!