<p>I do. And that’s been my experience.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Wasn’t that part of your own hang-up, though, that U of Chicago was a “step down” (in your mind at the time) versus Harvard / Yale? If you had thought of them all as being generally on the same quality plane, you wouldn’t have had such angst. For some reason, this is reminding me of the newmassdad thread, where the poor dear “only” got into U of Chicago instead of an Ivy, but then she showed them all by becoming a Rhodes scholar or somesuch.</p>
<p>I think the Adcoms could save themselves a tremendous lot of time and angst if they sorted out the obvious ‘not for this school’ apps based on SAT scores, the ‘I’m only applying because Dad went here’ essays, etc. Then they read the remaining apps for needed students like specific-position athletes and left-handed oboe players who speak Norwegian. </p>
<p>Those that survive each get a number. The numbers are put into a lotto-style machine and they accept the ones that pop up. If it’s a lottery, then make it a lottery.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>But there aren’t enough beds at all the dream schools to accommodate all those who want to be in those dream schools and have the necessary qualifications to be able to perform well academically there. That’s what it is. No one is entitled to any spot, anywhere.</p>
<p>Novelisto - if they wanted to save that time, they could all do so. They could easily say “don’t bother applying unless you have a GPA of x or SAT’s of y.” Clearly they don’t want to. There are multiple institutional priorities, and getting just the top GPA/SAT kids isn’t the only priority. It’s obviously working for them, otherwise they’d change it up.</p>
<p>Hmmm. I must know much funnier and creative ones. Or maybe we have different senses of humor.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Courer-- Mclintock is a dyslexic. Having been down this road with a gifted dyslexic, I can assure you it’s a miracle she was able to write as well as she DID. LOL. Still, even she would tell you that it was the exact same thing that made it difficult for her to write which allowed her to make the discovery she made when nobody else could understand. Double-edged, like everything.</p>
<p>The only thing I really find interesting in this piece, or useful, for the kids and parents THIS month, is simply the information that a wait list at a school like this means, for sure, that they think you are just as qualified as those they accept, and there’s no reason, at all, to get off the list if you still want that school, or to be concerned you will be “less” qualified. Other than that? It is what it is.</p>
<p>*It’s obviously working for them, otherwise they’d change it up.<a href=“emphasis%20added”>/i</a></p>
<p>But are they the only ones who matter? What about the kids? And the parents who are footing the outrageous bill?</p>
<p>If any other business treated its customers with such cavalier, high-handed arrogance – while charging WAAAAY too much for its increasingly questionable product – it would go bust in two weeks.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I wonder who edited the chicken nuggets line. Andrew Ferguson, a good editor, only managed his son to UVA. The rest of us may need to hire Jay Leno and his writers. College essay could be a better indicator of family income/parents’ education.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>Lol, Novelisto!</p>
<p>For myself, I think that the adcoms at the elite schools have a nearly impossible task these days. They have 5 to 12 applicants for every slot, most of them qualified. Most will freely admit that they could remove the entire group of admitted students and do just as well with a second batch. Any purely formulaic method is as prone to problems as a holistic one. What would parents suggest that they do?</p>
<p>Don’t laugh… I have a left handed oboe-playing daughter who speaks Finnish… and I’m pretty sure the Finnish played very well in her admissions process, as she had been studying it since she was 8 (of her own choice, we are not Finnish) and wrote a darned good college essay about it (it was even featured in a brochure about how to write a good college essay).</p>
<p>and how it affected you or what your reaction to it was</p>
<p>There’s the whole problem in a nutshell. That is about “me, me, me,” at least to some extent.</p>
<p>If that’s your essay-writing forte’, fine. It’s a perfectly legitimate approach. But some kids would rather write about things outside themselves, without necessarily bringing it all back to their feelings and reactions. I think that should be an option, and I’m glad UNC allowed that option. </p>
<p>After all, many of these kids are going to spend much of the next four years writing term papers, not personal confessions. What’s wrong with letting them tackle some classic expository writing? Just as one option among several?</p>
<p>I’m not suggesting that schools eliminate the “personal essay” prompt. (They wouldn’t, anyway, even if I did suggest it.) I’m merely suggesting that they allow alternative prompts for those kids who really do not feel comfortable writing about themselves.</p>
<p>In Crazy U, the $40K-per-year college-admissions counselor tells Andrew Ferguson that his son should bare his “innermost soul” in his college-app essays. Ferguson’s response: “Seventeen-year-old kids don’t have innermost souls.” LOL! Clearly, he’s joking; we all have souls–even adcoms. (JUST kidding!) But some of us don’t necessarily want to reveal those very vulnerable souls to a bunch of total strangers. If we’re going to do any innermost-soul baring, we’ll do it the old-fashioned way: in our diary. And then we’ll lock the diary and hide the key where no one can find it! :D</p>
<p>Intparent, that is awesome. Finnish is a beautiful language by the sound of it. Of course, I could never be bothered to learn 16 cases in the middle of the words, but it sounded nice. I actually knew the Russian champion of Finnish as a foreign language. I don’t think “brilliant” covered it.</p>
<p>Finnish is way harder than Norwegian, too.</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>I don’t think putting a little bit of personal opinion in an essay about something that is important to you is all about “me, me, me”. I mean, they are asking about you.</p>
<p>Though perhaps you are right–I would have much preferred to write an essay on a topic about which I care deeply.</p>
<p>My essay for grad school was almost entirely about my family’s work ethic, about other people. (And it did not have run-on sentences in it, either.) Then I spent all of three sentences saying how I related to some of these events, and how that related to my desire to go to graduate school. I do not think it was particularly self-centered, considering that the prompt required me to explain my personal motivations.</p>
<ol>
<li> Pizzagirl – I felt bad four years ago not because I thought of Chicago a second-rate (I didn’t, and neither did he), but because he was getting rejected at other places he liked (and that I cared about, too). We both were thrilled, and still are, that he got into Chicago and some of the other great schools to which he applied. That soothes, but hardly eliminates, the pain of getting kicked in the teeth by other great schools, some of which he would have chosen over Chicago, whether or not that would have been a good choice. I wasn’t writing about Chicago vs. Yale; I was writing about the special pain of watching a great kid whom you love, and who deserves everything, get rejected.</li>
</ol>
<p>Emotionally, I don’t think anyone should reject my son! He’s really a great guy! Objectively, I have a perfectly good idea where he may have fallen short at some colleges – and it is precisely in the way that Hunt and simpkin identified, that he “has always done everything asked of him”, or as I put it back then “his next accomplishment that wasn’t essentially expected of him will also be his first”. So what? That doesn’t make him a bad person, and it doesn’t make me hurt less when he is hurt.</p>
<p>I wouldn’t change the system to improve his outcomes (and his outcomes hardly need improving). This was still a painful week four years ago.</p>
<ol>
<li> I want to emphasize to parents of 2012s and later that kids do not have to write quirky essays and do not have to create new organizations in lieu of supporting existing ones. Kids who do those things – really do them well, not just fake it – stand out, sure, and also make for good journalism. But lots of kids without a quirky bone in their bodies get into great schools. I saw this a week ago on the Chicago board – a young woman wrote a passionate diatribe about how unfair it was that she was going to be rejected because her writing was always straightforward, not creative or humorous. I wanted to tell her that based on that one post I was confident she would get in almost everywhere she applied (and maybe strike the “almost”), because it was completely coherent and beautifully written, without being quirky in the least. Most of what kids write in their essays is awful – pretentious, stilted, bleached of anything representing an actual idea. Someone who cares about something and can explain herself cogently is going to stand out as much as any quirkster. And a kid who accomplishes things within the context of an existing organization is much more admirable than one who starts another new, barely-effective fundraising vehicle for a narrow cause of personal interest. Admissions committees aren’t dumb or anti-social, really they aren’t.</li>
</ol>
<p>
You’ve got to be kidding, intparent, lol! No, seriously, your D sounds awesome!</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>If there is something nauseating is that shallow “articles” such as this NPR story present a very distorted view of what happens in the ivory towers of admission. It’s all about hollow soundbites that are meant to be deliberately provocative. Why would we care about such stories anymore than what Jay Leno or Matt Lauer might tell us about the college process? </p>
<p>Students do not get accepted because they are amusing; neither do they get rejected because they lack a funny bone. It is this type of poor coverage that leads people to jump to the wrong conclusions that will be repeated ad nauseam at the cocktail hour.</p>
<p>The point of the story from my mind was: for a college that receives many more applications from highly qualified applicants than they could ever accept, then ONCE you pass that barrier of very high qualifications, then the process does become unavoidably subjective.</p>
<p>The story also confirmed another point - the value of using your essays to get the admissions officers to LIKE you.</p>
<p>MmeZeeZee…I am not knocking your essay approach at all. (I did overstate the “me, me, me” part; sorry.) I’m just saying there should be other options.</p>
<p>When DS recycled his great (IMHO) UNC essay for another school, he added some twaddle at the end about how he hopes he can live his life with the kind of integrity and authenticity that Blind Alfred Reed exemplified. </p>
<p>Um, no he doesn’t. As Andrew Ferguson’s son Gillum so aptly put it, that’s “a bunch of bullcr*p.” LOL!</p>