Research paper for Harvard

[compmom]

<p>Not irritated at all. Main message: call admissions with your questions :)</p>

<p>Also, hoping some of your safeties and target schools are need blind, too-?</p>

[mathjj]

<p>@compmom, Yes. But again, I can’t be too hopeful to get into all need-blind schools that I’ve applied to. So, yes, some of them are need-blind.</p>

[yalehacker]

<p>@texas how is the rest subjective?</p>

[mathjj]

<p>^Good question.</p>

[LesPaulFireburst]

<p>my guess is bc you had no community service, low test scores for asian, and they dnt prefer famous ppl writing letters (taken from the gatekeepers).</p>

[LesPaulFireburst]

<p>and no listed subject tests, even if yale doesn’t require them, but idk if it does…</p>

[gibby]

<p>

my guess is bc you had no community service

</p>

<p>These days colleges tend to discount community service because some high schools require it for graduation, while other students do it to make their college apps look good. FWIW: my daughter was accepted to 9 out of 11 colleges, my son 10 out of 11 colleges with absolutely no community service – zero, zilch, none. So, you can cross that reason off the list.</p>

[LesPaulFireburst]

<p>By community service I mean showing some commitment to others, not your standard key club or the like, and I dont know what shools your kids applied to, but at the level of a school like yale…it can raise questions.</p>

[gibby]

<p>^^ My son is a junior at Yale; my daughter is a senior at Harvard. I stand by what I said in post #67. Their lack of community service, or an activity that showed a commitment to others, did not seem to hinder their acceptances to HY, nor to Princeton, Dartmouth, Brown, Williams, Georgetown, Pomona, Middlebury, Boston College, and Vanderbilt. Colleges really do NOT put that much stock in community service. It’s great if you have it, but the lack of it, does not hurt an applicant or raise questions.</p>

[texaspg]

<p>"having published research, a letter of rec. from a top-class research scientist and making an iPhone app that’s in the top 5 on Apple’s App Store. "</p>

<p>"@texas how is the rest subjective? "</p>

<p>Tell me what makes this quantifiable to an adcom? I am reading it and I have no idea whether the publication is meaningful to a department at Yale, who would be considered a top scientist, and what a top 5 iphone app would be. If my kid developed a phone app that made a lot of money, I would tell them to forget college.</p>

[gibby]

<p>After reading my comments about community service in posts #67 and #69, a student pm’d me for confirmations outside of my own children’s experiences, so I sent them these articles.</p>

<p><a href=“http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/09communityservice-t.html?_r=0[/url]”>http://www.nytimes.com/2011/01/09/education/09communityservice-t.html?_r=0&lt;/a&gt;

Bob Patterson, director of admission at Stanford, notes that not all students need to have done volunteer work. “Some applicants work 30 hours a week to support their families and don’t have the time to volunteer,” he says. “Others may just not be passionate about volunteering.”

</p>

<p>[How</a> do Admission Committees Evaluate Community Service? - Ask The Dean](<a href=“http://www.collegeconfidential.com/dean/archives/000125.htm]How”>http://www.collegeconfidential.com/dean/archives/000125.htm)

It used to be a big plus for college admission officials to spot community service on a prospective student’s application. Now, however, it’s almost the norm, especially at the more competitive colleges.</p>

<p>Not surprisingly, the more selective a college or university, the more outstanding a volunteer endeavor must be to make a mark with admission officials. Just as 1,300 on the SAT will wow evaluators at one college and only a near-perfect score will be truly impressive at another, so too will the pickier colleges be flooded with more typical service endeavors (peer counselors, elementary tutors, monthly soup-kitchen servers) and the more elite institutions are looking for atypical endeavors or unusually high levels of commitment.

</p>

<p>[Community</a> Service: How is it really valued? | College Admission](<a href=“http://collegeadmissionbook.com/headlines-we-hate-community-service-work-increasingly-important-for-college-applicants]Community”>Community Service: How is it really valued? | College Admission)

While community service is wonderful, many students serve their community – their school, their peers, their families – in ways that are not linked to a specific organization or activity. In the current economic climate, there are many students who simply must work to help their families make ends meet, and those students are deeply engaged in that activity and may not have a moment to volunteer after working, studying, and attending classes. Other students who are musicians, athletes, entrepreneurs, or artists are deeply engaged in activities other than service, and their time commitment makes volunteer work almost impossible.

</p>

[gravitas2]

<p>^^agree with gibby and the quotes above…Our kids were admitted to their top choices with minimal community/volunteer hours…they just did not have the TIME…</p>