<p>hey everyone stop it. i dont agree with golfer, but by flaming him, ur making him build walls. he’s gonna be worse off than he started :/</p>
<p>^^^okay, again, it wasn’t “something of an ad hominem attack”, it was sarcasm. at least the OP would probably be able to distinguish between the two…& he’s going to a CC! HA! okay, bigwilly?</p>
<p>hey thats mean, deserved, however.</p>
<p>haha, i just say what other people are thinking ;)</p>
<p>Things <em>I</em> learned about Admissions and CC:</p>
<p>1.) Most people on here are wrong, and worry too much.
2.) My stats weren’t like many other people applying to similar schools, but I happen to be an awesome person as a whole, not just as an SAT/ACT score.
3.) Despite what people said, I even had a good chance at my ‘reach’.
4.) Grades don’t matter as much as people here make them out to matter, unless you’re looking at the Ivies.
5.) Same with the SATs and ACTs.
6.) Great AP scores will help you quite a bit, esp. if your grade in the class was a B and you got a 4 or 5.
7.) Teacher reccs are a little underrated.
8.) Don’t ever do an EC for your resume. The great colleges will understand you have passions and not a resume.
9.) Passions are more fun anyways, and much more meaningful in the interview.
10.) You probably don’t need to be president of anything, especially if you work on a group of mostly adults outside of high school. (Even if it involves comics and glowsticks. 
)
11.) Don’t take classes for the resume either, or at least, don’t say you do. My best teachers were often AP, and I admitted it.
12.) Essays are important.
13.) You don’t need to suck up to a teacher, you just need to be a polite human being. Study, listen, answer questions, ask them, start discussions in class, do well, and say hello in the hallways!
14.) You don’t need to buy anyone an expensive gift for everything. I made my recommenders homemade chocolate chip cookies, and gave them the recipe. Cost me less than $10, because I needed more sugar and flour. For christmas, the previous year, I had bought my (History) teacher a CD with history lectures on it, my english teacher an anthology of “Rotten English” from a used bookstore. It included southern dialects, pidgin, spanglish, and everything you can think of, which she enjoyed. I bought my environmental science teacher a copy of Wall-E. That was the most I spent at all, and it was on sale.
15.) Most people on here just want some validation and compliments in “Chance me” threads.
16.) Even more so when they say their ridiculously good grade/score/EC is “horrible.”
17.) Studying for APs is as easy as reading the textbook out loud the week before, non-stop.
18.) You don’t need to know what you’re going to do with your life for the next 4/10/15 years. That’s okay. You’re 16/17/18.
19.) It’s not the end of the world to have one bad grade if you tried hard.
20.) The best admissions officers will sign their letters to you, and laugh when you tell them something awkward like: “I have this thing called the lick test. I lick the signature to see if the ink bleeds. If it does, I know a human signed it, and took the time and effort to address me.” They’ll have engaging conversations with you while not interviewing you, and if they’ve never heard of CC, and you tell them about the mass amounts of hysteria over late ED apps and tiny typos, they’ll laugh then too.</p>
<p>And tell you what you need to know:</p>
<p>21.) Relax, don’t worry so much. It’s going to be fine. You missed an interview? Whoops. Call or email and apologize. Maybe you didn’t really want to go to that school anyways. Maybe you do, and the apology should help. Mistakes happen. Rejections happen. Acceptances happen. </p>
<p>But yet, the world keeps turning. </p>
<p>Every time.</p>
<p>omg 666 views. i just made it 667 =D</p>
<p>I’m not responding to any flame responses. All of what I have said is based on observation and things out of my control. What I said in my original post was many things that I both do and do not agree with.</p>
<p>Everything I have stated has numerous pieces of evidence that I can use to back it up. I do NOT state them for privacy reasons. It is your choice whether or not to believe me when I say this. I’m not giving professional advice, just a personal story and if people want my help (i.e. freshman) than it is there choice if they take it…Is that wrong?</p>
<p>the fact that you stand by your arguments after this much criticism makes me facepalm.</p>
<p>^ lol .</p>
<p>Yurtle’s my new favorite person. Thanks for counteracting a horrible OP’s opinion, and putting a polite truthful spin on it. I shall now be able to succeed in high school, college and life.</p>
<p>a couple of things</p>
<ol>
<li><p>I agree with Yurtle’s statement something something, grades not as good, but a better person.</p></li>
<li><p>Chuckles @ Yurtle’s suggestion that studying for the AP is as easy as reading the textbook. Now I’ll know what to do!</p></li>
<li><p>Yea, most of golfer’s items are common knowledge. The dating thing is irrelevant to the topic suggested in the title, so w/e.</p></li>
<li><p>I dont think golfer was entirely groundless in his (basic) analysis of differences in gender. The mystic ‘advantage’ that going to a top school may not be obvious, but its there. However, in some professions, I would be a fool to proclaim that gender doesnt matter. True, a Princeton degree is, in many regards, valued more by employers than a similar degree from a state flagship. Nevertheless, many employers may have a conscious prejudice in favor of attractive people of both genders, especially women. It has nothing to with an employer ‘being nicer’ to girls; rather, experienced human resource heads are aware that a woman’s pulchritude and charm may allow her to ‘close a deal’ more easily than an otherwise equally qualified man, or even another woman who may be, in all fairness, less physically attractive. </p></li>
</ol>
<p>I’m not saying that pulchritude is the one thing that will make or break you, because that would just be ludicrous. I’m just saying that when considering it vs the absence of it, do not assume that the difference is nonexistent.</p>
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<p>Yurtle, you’re beyond awesome. I cosign everything. </p>
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<p>LOL. The OP makes me want to facepalm.</p>
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<p>I somewhat agree with this, but it probably depends a lot on the school. At my school, girls only care about looks and athletic ability–if you’re shorter than average, sorry; thanks for playing. Most of the time, personality is not even part of the equation–many of them explicitly say “I don’t like nice guys.” They really don’t want success–most of the ones dating are going out with utter losers in every way, and I think working hard on schoolwork intimidates them or cries “asexual freak.” </p>
<p>Oh well, hopefully luck will be better in college</p>
<p>PS: Not bitter, just brutally honest</p>
<p>Your views on gender made me laugh. If this is supposedly based on your “experience” you either have less experience than you believe or you’ve led a very sheltered existence so far. Clearly, Hillary Clinton is Secretary of State because of her looks. Same for Margaret Thatcher. </p>
<p>If being attractive makes such a difference, why are women routinely paid less than men? Clearly, women just shouldn’t have to worry about their level of education or income because their husbands will take care of it!</p>
<p>Your observations are correct; that is, if you live in the 19th century.</p>
<p>Some of his comments are brash and some of your accusations are based on a misunderstanding of what he said. Some of the posters are also flat-out trying to ruin his name so that when colleges see his posts and match them with his application, they will reject him.</p>
<p>He was making an OBSERVATION and that’s how you reconcile his seemingly paradoxical statement about his not agreeing with what he said. In other words, when he said bosses were sexist, he didn’t necessarily believe bosses should be sexist but that’s reality and he was just reporting on that reality. Get it? </p>
<p>There’s also some truth to what he was saying that good-looking girls might find greater success in getting HIRED than less good-looking girls. However, they still face obstacles getting to the top of the ladder because while the bosses want them to be around, they generally don’t like sharing their power with women. </p>
<p>It’s also true that guys care a lot about their status because society says that is ultimately what their masculinity will be judged by. Guys who want to be ultra masculine will probably not want to go to Sarah Lawrence College, major in Men’s Studies and expect women to flock to him. I don’t know how they compare to women though in terms of having this deep internal competitive drive.</p>
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<p>This may be better for humanities type classes…and perhaps sciences like biology and Environmental. But I am dead serious. My first AP test was AP World History, and I picked up the [text] book about a week before the test. And I opened it to chapter one, and regaled to my mother the thrilling story of the evolution of Homo Sapiens Sapiens. </p>
<p>I continued until I was done reading the book. I brought the textbook with me everywhere- class, the car, etc. Now I should probably further clarify and say that teacher had taught me what was being looked for in the essays, but generally speaking, I bought one study helper the night before the test- Flashcards, and went through some of those up until I walked into the testing room. </p>
<p>I knew all the facts I needed for the test for the most part. I made one (seemingly at the time) major mistake by confusing subsaharan Africa with Saharan Africa, but I still got a 4 on the exam. </p>
<p>My Junior year, I had three AP tests, and I did the exact same thing. I read my US History textbook, my Environmental Science textbook, and because English is slightly different, I went over the definitions I needed to know. Carbon fixation and the Civil war have never been so interesting to my mother, haha. I believed I would get a 3, possibly on the AP Environmental Science test at best, but when I got scores back, it was a 4. The other two grades were 5’s and I was quite proud that my obvious method had worked, while students who had plowed through sample tests or fake sample tests had scored lower. </p>
<p>AP English lang or lit may be harder to reproduce this method with, simply because it takes some writing abilities. However, this is solvable:</p>
<p>For Language, you are analyzing arguments. My teacher asked us to look for PAPA: Purpose, Audience, Persona, and Argument. That actually helped, even if I hated doing it. For lit, which I have not yet taken the test for, but have done perfectly well in the class- Buy or check out a book called “How to read literature like a professor.” </p>
<p>It is indispensable to analyzing literature easily, and coherently, and absolutely worth the $15 or so dollars I spent on it.</p>
<hr>
<p>I like being the new favorite person! :)</p>
<p>I like this site as a resource, but honestly, it made me think much worse of myself, and compare too much to other students. But there are so many other factors in admissions, and it took an acceptance letter for me to go: "Duh. Wow. I’m not them." I am me. I do my own awesome things, and if people don’t think what I do is ‘awesome enough’ then oh well. I don’t need a 5.0 or an olympiad to be awesome, but that can help.</p>
<p>I don’t agree with the OP about the gender stuff. But some of the things he said is revelant at some schools or at least, my school.</p>
<p>At my school, since we have huge grade inflation, only the 99-98/100 averaged students get into top schools. Because they have such a high average, they obviously have a high SAT score, even if it doesn’t correlate with their average as well. At my school, most of the very high achieving students are very well rounded, being in numerous clubs, sports, and for some reason, have a strong personalities. Which means a lot of the high achieving kids at my school are popular. If you went to my school, using Naviance, you would think for the college admissions for the top schools, would emphasize a lot on GPA (98-99 average), SAT (highest SATs in the school), ECs (I don’t know how passionate they are, but they have a lot of ECs), and URM doesn’t matter (Because there are very few URMs at my school and the average family income at my school is high).</p>
<p>I honestly think what the OP said was just how it was for his high school and environment. Though his schools is strange, some schools might as well have this situation. For me, mix in huge grade inflation, students not knowing about ECs beyond school, relatively low URM percentage and high family income, and maybe having parents having outdated college admissions knowledge, it does mix into some of what the OP said.</p>
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<p>It doesn’t make such a difference, but it does make a difference.</p>
<p>The fact that women get paid less routinely is because:</p>
<ol>
<li><p>They get paid less on average. As much as it hates me to say this, this average can(and probably is being) be brought down by ‘less attractive women.’ Less than attractive women are not to blame; some of the women who get paid less are just less attractive. There’s no way around it.</p></li>
<li><p>While many top schools sport even women:men ratios, (NYU has something like 63:37), that only holds true for undergraduate. I think the gender ratio of w:m @ many of the top MBA programs across the country is something like 30:70.</p></li>
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