I love Emory and the students I know who went there had wonderful experiences both at the school and in Atlanta. It is located in a great neighborhood. I tried to get my kids to apply but D24 wants New England and S24 seems to want big SEC/ACC.
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WE had an amazing visit there. Their music department head and the specific music teacher were both exceptional and the entire school, campus and community seemed wonderful. And cant beat the neighborhood and ease of travel from the Northeast
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Emory is on S24 list. Incredible research school!
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My S24 was not interested in going too far south or too far west.
If he had not felt that way, Emory (and Rice) would absolutely have been priority visits based on the sorts of colleges he liked.
Bigger picture, I think colleges like Emory arenāt often suggested here when people have not already identified them because they are obviously great colleges but also very hard admits. For good reason, a lot of the conversation here is about colleges maybe people have not already considered, but might be good ideas for colleges to explore. Emory is more just an obviously good idea that most people have probably already considered.
So, like, I think the classic CC college is something like St Olaf, because that is a great college with not so crazy admit statistics that a lot of people might not have heard about before. Emory is just way too well known for that.
But all that said, I am pretty sure if you bring up Emory, or actually ask for suggestions that point toward Emory, a lot of people here will in fact talk very positively about it (as we should).
In our case, Emory never was going to be on the list because:
- itās not affordable
- D24 doesnāt want to live in GA.
- the school is a little too close in proximity to a toxic grandparent.
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Iām hoping upper middle income Northeast/New England suburbs will now qualify as geographic diversity for southern schools.
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We too now find ourselves in the phase in which the kids are both adding and subtracting schools. Goal is still to shrink the list butā¦
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My friend swam for Kenyon in the 90ās. LOVED it!
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We had great success with that thinking with some very competitive mid west schools. The theory was that it was preferable to compromise on location rather than academic quality.
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Under the much lauded Coach Steen.
Another important reason may be that Emory is not known for CS and engineering. A meaningful proportion of this group has kids wanting to major in those areas.
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I would suggest that at many selective/rejective colleges, they have to deny literally thousands of students who are absolutely qualified - they might say that the denied students donāt meet institutional priorities? But even then, I think that most admissions officers would admit that at a certain point, the admission decisions are fairly random.
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S24 missed deadlines to submit his essays. He has been very down all day.
I just hope he learns from this and be more organize, and really manage his time, from now on.
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I think this is where is comes down to whether the Admission Officer thinks the application sent in shows a good match to the school or no. Lots of students would do very well academically at many highly selective schools - but not all of them would actually be good matches for each individual school.
Itās one of the big reasons I always side eye students who want to apply to all the Ivies or all the schools in the Top 20. The schools academically might not be all that dissimilar but in all other measures - there are lots of differences. And there are very few students that all of those schools would perceive to be matches. Usually the students who are āuniversal matchesā are extraordinary/outstanding or fulfill an institutional priority that is both widespread across the colleges and niche to the student.
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I do not think this tbh, at all really. I do understand why this perception persists, but I actually think thereās far more intentionality and specificity involved. And in fact even (and in particular) the most rejective schools telegraph quite a bit more than many people dig in to parse. The āwhat we look forā web pages they all publish, for example. At a glance they may mostly read like abstract, general, marketing-ish gobbledygook. And of course thereās some of that! But actually, Iāve found that if you give this stuff a close examination thereās a lot that is detailed here, with plenty of differences from one school to the next, if nuanced.
IPs are another thing I find surprisingly misconstrued (or just āmissedā). Often discussed as some sort of impenetrable, unknowable, NSA-level secret stuff, in fact schools telegraph quite a bit about these, sometimes even explicitly. Obviously Lee Coffinās podcast is an example. Others publish blogs. And Iāve found that at info sessions for example AOs can be quite candid about IPs, if theyāre asked. Iāve also exchanged emails with a regional reader who was candid when asked.
All said another way, I concur with what @beebee3 is saying in a sense. My version of which is: schools are also able to determine fit, and in fact are generally much better at it than generally perceived. So when AOs talk about how many times over they couldāve admitted an incoming class, they nearly always qualify it by saying that they couldāve done so without any drop off in academics. Point being thereās āthe restā which became their basis of selection.
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I agree many could excel at schools they donāt get in but Iām guessing most early decisions (not EDs) sent out are pretty cut and dry to AOs.
But parents and students want to think they were qualified. And it hurts less to think this way.
And statistically maybe one is but Iām guessing in most cases AOs arenāt that torn.
Just my hypothesis.
This is why D24 is not applying to Emory. She is CS/ physics and there are other schools, even our instate school, with stronger programs. But otherwise, lovely school!
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I might suggest if people are interested in a window into self-perception of the process by AOs, it would be well worth checking out two episodes of the Yale Admissions Podcast, Episodes 2 (Committee) and 25 (Final Review):
https://admissions.yale.edu/podcast
Aside from the still-shocking revelation Hannah had never seen The Matrix, I think they also really help illuminate the deliberative nature of the process, how different stakeholders in admissions outcomes get represented (e.g., representatives of the faculty and usually the residential college deans sit on committees), how there is a step at the end I would call a version of normalization, and so on.
āRandomā is a word that can mean a lot of different things, and perhaps at least some elements of how that all works out for a given applicant may fairly be called a matter of chance (if nothing else, in marginal cases it may matter which cycle you applied in). But personally, the more I learn about the process, the less I think random is a good word. Subjective sometimes? Yes. Complex and difficult to predict sometimes? Also yes. But truly random? Not so sure.
And for what it is worth, that accords with how these AOs sum it up. At many points, they explain the process is very difficult to predict. But they also explicitly say it isnāt random either.
In any event, definitely worth checking out if you have not already and are particularly interested in the process (which, I should warn, may mean almost nothing to you in terms of practical questions like how to write the best application, what your chances are, or so on).
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Unforgivable!
Somewhat related aside: itās always interesting and sometimes fascinating to me to learn how pop culture (especially film) is/isnāt a thing with some families.
We brought the son of one of our closest friends, who is also among our kidsā BFFs, to see The Force Awakens on opening night. When Harrison Ford made his first appearance on screen, the audience went predictably nuts. At which point our friendsā son turned to me and asked, āWhoās the old guy?ā
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Hereās hoping that one of S24ās readers is familiar with Star Wars . . . not his main essay(s), but it did make an appearance.
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