<p>I have heard from a lot of CCers that Stanford seems to be the oddball in college admissions. A lot of HYP admits were denied Stanford, and from the stats of the admits from my school I find the same result! Usually there's about 20 people who apply stanford and the one or two who get in have never been the typical ASB Pres, valedictoria, perfect stats,cookie cutter applicant. Usually at my school there's at least one person who gets accepted to most of the ivies and you can already tell who it its going to be but they get denied at Stanford! Any thoughts as to why?</p>
<p>I’m just guessing, but I think Stanford really focuses in on the “intellectual vitality” they talk about, that curiosity that has people learning and exploring things just for the sake of doing so. And that doesn’t come from huge lists of extracurriculars so much as in what activities you choose and how you express yourself in your essays. So yeah.</p>
<p>“cookie cutter”</p>
<p>Says it all right there. Almost anyone can be near-perfect with enough work. But Stanford wants humans, not robots.</p>
<p>Do you know much about their engineering program?</p>
<p>Very strong. USNWR ranked it number 2 I think.</p>
<p>But back to the thread, yes. I think Stanford really wants those who learn because they want to learn, not those who learn so they can have a 4.0 GPA.</p>
<p>Thanks. Nice to know more about the “atmosphere” at Stanford. visited many schools on east coast…</p>
<p>What if you look like the “cookie cutter” applicant (high A’s), but really love learning… and because you love learning you do well?</p>
<p>and same with EC’s. I do a lot of EC’s, but I like all of them and can’t even imagine dropping one. will this mess up a hopeful?</p>
<p>I think you guys are all right!! I know that certain schools focus on leadership a lot like Harvard ( I think but I’m not sure) and Stanford does say that intellectual vitality is important or a intellectual passion that makes one want to learn more without having to be pushed to learn or study. </p>
<p>When I said cookie cutter applicant I meant the average HYMPS applicant who is top in their class, good stats, good leadership, passion, and ECS. Its the perfect well rounded applicant with no defining spike like an olympic gymnast would have.</p>
<p>that was the focus of my stanford essay.
Stanford, I find, really values creativity and intellectual vitality. They’ve developed so rapidly in the last century, albeit having a short history. And some of the groundbreaking modern ideas originate from Stanford, and graduates feed into Silicon Valley.</p>
<p>I talked about a business idea of mine that will help the users also, wonder if they’ll like that.</p>
<p>If theres anything I’ve learned from College Confidential about Stanford, and that has been validated by anyone and everyone that I know who has been accepted is that
Stanford looks for “entrepreneurship” -individual initiative, uniqueness, and in success -more so than objective numbers. </p>
<p>If you are relatively in range with their SAT scores (at least 2000 flat), and you demonstrate all these things in your app to the fullest extent, you have a vastly greater chance of acceptance.</p>
<p>I heard that Stanford puts emphasis on essays and personality and character as well… so I was getting a little hopeful about acceptance and I posted a thread titled “To get into Stanford…” and someone replied: </p>
<p>“Stanford was lying when they said they read every essay. That’s some ********. I worked at the admission office. My job was to screen out the apps that didn’t meet the criteria. I can’t tell you what they are cuz I already signed a form. After 1 week, from 25,000 apps, it goes down to about 5000 then they read the essays.”</p>
<p>So now I’m super worried now… if that’s true, I’m probably not even going to apply, find a dark corner, sit, and cry :(</p>
<p>^Your admissions officer sounds so uncouth. But I think there is a bit of truth to what he says… Perhaps he exaggerates a bit…</p>
<p>ANYWAYS…</p>
<p>In response to that, I have read on the Yale forum from Tokenadult, I think it was, that they have a regional director that gets the applications from his/her area and screens them to pass onto the main university. Which does have some accordance to what you said. But this is Yale. Looking back over older threads, a really popular one stuck out:</p>
<p><a href=“http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/stanford-university/525549-advice-admissions-officer-who-admitted-me-hs-students.html[/url]”>http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/stanford-university/525549-advice-admissions-officer-who-admitted-me-hs-students.html</a></p>
<p>So… </p>
<p>
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<p>So I’m assuming they have a similar approach, where you are screened and passed on. Your regional admissions officer must be able to recognize you compared to the caliber of students in your area and judge it from there.
However, I doubt we can really understand the criteria looked for. I mean, last year at my school, one boy, ranked second in class of 290, very good athlete (not recruited or anything like that though), some community service, white, had a 2030 on the SATs and was waitlisted. Obviously to get waitlisted, he had to have passed the screening level. Pehaps boundaries are flexible, unspokenly towards race, or anything like that, but like I said in my previous post, if you are in the least, a flexible margin away from the median, you should be safe. And there’s no telling, so better not to frett.</p>
<p>Stanford admissions isn’t THAT much different from admissions at other top colleges. I think CC’ers are exaggerating a bit when they say Stanford weighs personality/intellectual vitality more than objective data. SAT/grades should still be the most important part of your application. However, there seems to be a stronger emphasis on the essays, given the number and the prompts.</p>
<p>“Stanford was lying when they said they read every essay. That’s some ********. I worked at the admission office. My job was to screen out the apps that didn’t meet the criteria. I can’t tell you what they are cuz I already signed a form. After 1 week, from 25,000 apps, it goes down to about 5000 then they read the essays.”</p>
<p>GEESSSSSHHHH!!! That sounds really harsh, I seriously hope its not like that!</p>
<p>If you look at asian75’s posts, a lot of them are extremely trollish. and guys, this is the internet. don’t believe everything you read.</p>
<p>^I looked at them too. Bad grammar, etc. But they ALL pertained to Stanford. And they were all about admissions, etc. which had me wondering. Either way, I think he exaggerated A LOT. How could they expect to build a diverse class at all if they threw out applications without even reading the essays and gauging who the applicant is? If he personally does that, he should be fired.</p>
<p>If that were even remotely true, there wouldn’t be so many students with top-1%-of-everything and incredible EC’s who got rejected.</p>
<p>“Stanford was lying when they said they read every essay. That’s some ********. I worked at the admission office. My job was to screen out the apps that didn’t meet the criteria. I can’t tell you what they are cuz I already signed a form. After 1 week, from 25,000 apps, it goes down to about 5000 then they read the essays.”</p>
<p>I have an incredibly hard time believing this. If he signed a non-disclosure agreement, which is what he seems to be alluding to, I doubt he would be able say that much about the admissions process especially since it goes against what Stanford says publicly. If the Stanford lawyer who wrote this “form” had more than a fourth of a brain, a pretty safe assumption in my book, then this so called admissions employee would have broken the agreement and Stanford would be able to force CC to release his IP address. From this they would be able to find out who he is and pursue legal action.</p>
<p>Since he has probably already divulged enough information for Stanford to come after him, why doesn’t he just go all the way and tell us what the cut offs are? He is not telling us because he does not know them, and he knows that if he lies about it some admitted student will come in to say that they had stats bellow that cut off and their essays are the only things that reviled something unique about them. </p>
<p>To all those worrying about their admissions prospects, do no fret over this piece of misinformation. In fact, just stop worrying altogether. It is done, enjoy the remainder of your senior year. As I am sure you all know it goes by fast.</p>
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<p>Ever heard of “war driving”? u basically use other persons internet connection and surf the internet, even if the ip was released how would you link a random ip to a random ex-employee?</p>
<p>Yes, you can use “war driving” (personally, I would use a proxy server if I was trying to conceal my internet activity as it would be very obnoxious to war drive for the number of posts that asian75 has posted) but if that were the case, why did he not tell us what cut offs were?</p>
<p>Your question was slightly ambiguous, I couldn’t tell if you were asking how would you be caught if you were war driving or how would you get caught if CC released your IP address. If you are war driving, you probably will not get caught so you would be free to tell the cut offs, which he did not do. If you are not war driving or using a proxy, and someone finds you doing illegal activities online, they can find out who you are from your ISP by asking them who was using that particular IP address when the activities happened. Yes, ISPs do keep those kind of records.</p>
<p>Knowing some ones IP address alone will not enable you to find out who they are. People are assigned a different IP address by their ISP every time they go online. The only way to figure out who some one is from their IP address is to go to their ISP and ask them to tell you who was using that particular IP address at that time. Your ISP will only release that information if there is a legal reason to do so.</p>