Rant of a rich caucasian about a lack of opportunity

College Search & Selection
21

<p>I think you were misled when you interpreted “go anywhere” as “guaranteed acceptance everywhere”. The sad truth its that you aren’t guaranteed anything but your guidance counselor is right. With your scores, you have many opportunities and chances to go anywhere. 25% chance acceptance to Chicago is higher than the overall rate and of course infinitely better than 0% chance of admittance into Chicago for the vast majority high school students with lower scores and grades.</p>

<p>I remember back in high school, senior year, a couple of friends (affluent white guys) reacted poorly to Harvard’s rejection. They really thought they should have been admitted because they had the grades and test scores. Needless to say, they did fine. One went off to Williams, med school and now is a well respected doctor. The other went of to Lafayette, law school and is now is a lobbyist. </p>

<p>So, with your scores, grades, drive and focus, you’ll have opportunities to go anywhere and do things. Just keep in mind, nothing is guaranteed.</p>

22

<p>I agree with windbehindthewings. I fully believe in all the “nice sounding BS” the adcoms tell applicants about passion, applying sideways, following your heart, etc. It can be hard to believe in the world of SAT prep classes and being forced to take a gazillion APs, but there are many kids with a developed passion who don’t have to be told to seek out competitions or pursue an EC all four years because they love what they are doing so much, they are doing it anyway.</p>

<p>If there’s one thing I’ve learned during my time at CC, it’s that college admissions isn’t something to be gamed. This is something that a lot of people at CC mistakenly encourage. If you have no passion, striving for a perfect GPA and scores won’t help you. Internships and ECs hold no fulfillment or accomplishment, because there will always be someone with harder courses and higher scores.</p>

<p>Ironically, the path that many CCers and parents (who DO know about the opportunities and crunch required numbers and know everything there is to know about this process) <em>kills</em> this. There’s this belief that you <em>have</em> to take x AP classes or be president of this many clubs, and in the process the kid is burnt out, unfulfilled, and has no time to do what he or she wants.</p>

<p>“The CC way”-the number crunching, the struggling, is in many ways the antithesis to what colleges prefer. For the best example of this, I like to look to the kids that MIT recruits to their minority outreach programs. Every kid was first generation and received no guidance from parents and in many cases very little from schools. Some of them have CC accounts but visit pretty rarely, and don’t even try to do the number crunching many of us specialize in. Rather than the kids in my ultracompetitive community who obsessed over how each move would look to admissions committees, they did what they loved and what they wanted to do. If it meant someone took one less AP class to take, for example, sewing, senior year, or spend a Saturday coding a video game instead of doing homework. When I brought this up to them, one kid said something along the lines of: “Yeah, no one here lives for college, we’re just living.” They are founders and presidents of many math teams, science teams, robotics teams, and have been to competitive programs, but because they loved what they did so much they weren’t satisfied with the resources at their school. </p>

<p>jkeil, that’s just it! None of them <em>were</em> thinking four years into the future or about college admissions at all. They were just good at being high achieving at what they loved. College admissions are a side effect of that process. They aren’t thinking about college admissions as a goal, but a stepping stone.</p>

<p>As the upcoming admissions season encroaches, I know they will go on to the most prestigious colleges and universities. (acceptances already include West Point, the Air Force Academy, and a full tuition/room and board/travel/fees/personal expenses ride to Caltech through QB.) Right now, I’m using my CC knowledge to crunch numbers for them and encourage them to apply to the usual match/safety/reach spread.</p>

<p>The whole point of this is to say that these rare kids who have the achievements the colleges want <em>for the reasons the colleges want them</em> do exist. Obviously, most kids(including me!) don’t have the passion that these kids show. I just wanted to give an example of how the “CC way” is far from the only way to gain admittance to top colleges and universities.</p>

<p>A system of admissions the colleges designed to reward passion and intellectual achievement is encouraging burn-out, ultracompetition, and attempts to fulfill a “formula”(classes+leadership+service+scores+awards+fancy programs+GPA=IVY YAYAYA). Eventually, most people realize that the competition will just get more and more frenzied until every kid is taking 14 AP classes and joining five sports and a million things just to get ahead of each other, and realize that there is a much more natural way.</p>

<p>This is basically my interpretation of everything I’ve learned from others, myself, and CC about college admissions in the year I’ve been on here. Take my advice with a grain of salt, I’m just a high school senior who hasn’t been accepted anywhere yet.</p>

23

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<p>Actually, high enough grades and test scores give a number of guaranteed choices among selective schools:</p>

<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1562918-updated-list-schools-auto-admit-guaranteed-admission-criteria.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/college-admissions/1562918-updated-list-schools-auto-admit-guaranteed-admission-criteria.html&lt;/a&gt;
<a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1348012-automatic-full-tuition-full-ride-scholarships-20.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/financial-aid-scholarships/1348012-automatic-full-tuition-full-ride-scholarships-20.html&lt;/a&gt;&lt;/p&gt;

24

<p>AmaranthineD, I appreciate the effort and passion that went into your response. However, your logic is flawed. You invoke the either-or fallacy: either your student has passion and follows her heart and that accounts for her success OR she doesn’t have passion and she’s hoping the system can be gamed with ECs to make up for passion. CC parents and their children, most of them, have passion AND realize that isn’t enough in all but one or two cases. After all, adcoms cannot quantify passion and so when they make their arguments to their peers about why this or that passionate student should be admitted over some other adcom’s student with passion they find themselves swimming in vagueness. Without the stats, the numbers, a variety of strong ECs, some talent or characteristic that makes them stand out, and/or a hook, the adcoms cannot justify their reasoning. So most successful candidates to the top 25 schools are going to demonstrate passion AND the numbers, talents, ECs, and other loosely quantifiable “stuff” adcoms also look for. Finally, your MIT example asks parents to wait and hope that somehow someone at MIT hears of your golden needle son among all the other golden needle children in this haystack of golden needles and pulls your child out. Waiting around for someone else to espy your talent isn’t the way most people find their groove in life. It is important that our children be allowed to find their passion in life, but it is also important that they learn how to find the help that’s out there and learn how to use it. This is wisdom, not gaming.</p>

25

<p>What makes you think Parchment is an accurate indicator of admissions chances?</p>

26

<p>Dare I suggest that you have come to the sudden realisation that coasting along in life- especially if you have a ton of resources at your disposal isn’t enough. There will be people who are your direct peers who you’re competing with, older people who didn’t succeed at something the first time round and also young upstarts. Education, employment and sport favour the gifted and the incredibly focused. Some people just realise this earlier than others. Some never will. </p>

<p>Meh. Too late now. Relax. You’ll always regret what you didn’t do, rather than what you did. That’s one of the most important things to take with you through life. </p>

<p>Nothing in life is guaranteed, I’m afraid. Not even your next breath. </p>

<p>So hitch up your trousers. Hold your chin up high and make college work for you. :)</p>

27

<p>Sorry, I didn’t mean to give the impression that kids have to choose between passion and getting the appropriate minimum GPA/rigor/SAT requirements to get into colleges, nor that it is “gaming” to plan ahead for our children’s futures in order to meet those requirements. The gaming comment was more directed toward the parents of my competitive community in which it is common to listen to parents talk about the path of AP classes, SAT scores, and award applications–while watching their five year olds on the playground.</p>

<p>I disagree with you when you say that passion can’t be quantified–it quantifies in awards and hours recorded doing an activity from working on a science research paper to knitting. Of course a “golden needle” person can’t wait around and expect adcoms to be wowed by his/her brilliance, but this is when the chance to insert oneself into an application kicks in. The application isn’t about “packaging” a kid, but revealing him or her.</p>

<p>Investing a lot of time into a passion, along with some talent and luck, will often lead to achievement in that field, whether it is science research, a sport, or writing. Posters on CC who post things like “What awards am I eligible for?” “What clubs and organizations can I join to make myself more attractive to colleges?” are going about the “right” thing for the wrong reason, and adcoms can often sense that. Passion, talent, and intellectualism often naturally manifest in test scores, grades, and wonderful extracurricular and leadership activities, not the other way around.</p>

<p>I guess the main point of my long-winded responses are that the OP is blaming his ASSUMED impending rejection on the fact that no one around him told him the things he needed to know to make himself competitive, when in fact many make it to the Ivies and beyond without winning or even competing in the game the OP claims he never had a chance to play.</p>