The Indian Thread #20

Student Lounge International Students
421

<p>Hi all maybe this my last post on CC before i leave and maybe i’ll drop in a few times later in the year.</p>

<p>I want to first talk to all those of you who are going for the IIT-JEE as well as applying to US ones, if you are a student who needs lots of aid you are at a big disadvantage. Apart from a few elite schools very few are need blind and unless you have stellar EC’s, stellar grades, great essay writing abilities and by stellar EC’s i mean something like a international olympiad medal or atleast a great national olympiad medal or you writing a bestselling book or opening a company that is about to go public etc (you get the idea) you cannot be sure of getting acceptances and again if these EC’s are not accompanied by a good essay and grades you again stand a chance of rejection. I read that the MIT rejected a student who had built a fully functional nuclear reactor at his home!!! So unless you are the one i mentioned above ie. you have a crore to spare or you have the exceptional ec’s etc. i say you dont completely ignore JEE, infact keep the US thing secondary like if i get in great but i have my IIT with me if all fails.</p>

<p>And now coming on to some advice I’d like to give to the JEE aspirants, Please, Please and once more please dont take it lightly. It may appear now that yeah i’ll do great in JEE i have the required brains etc. I can remember this was me two years ago. JEE CANNOT be cleared solely on the basis of intelligence. It requires hard work and a lot of it. I learnt this during my stint at Bansal Classes. Intelligence does help as was in my case but all it does is it reduces your effort, From fourteen hours of study it may bring it down to eight but you still have to study eight hours. There is no substitute for it. when i was in bansal in the beginning my timetable was at follows: We had classes for three hours and one and half hours on alternative days, Sunday was a holiday. So out of 24 hours 3 hrs for classes
, 7 hrs sleep , 6 hrs study remaining 8hrs for other <em>stuff</em>. So as you can see i was still doing 9hrs a day including classes and i continued this for a greater part of 11th grade but i found out it wasnt enough and i had to increase my time to 8hrs.
The most important part of JEE is not how much time you study but how efficient is your time management. I studied each day for about eight hours yet was able do all other stuff like watch movies, hang out with friends, play snooker, play Crysis and Counter strike and other <em>things</em>. I was lucky that i could manage with 8hrs a day but there were others who couldnt they needed 12-14 hrs and there were yet others who required 6 but i havent seen anyone lower than that. I’ve also seen the ones who pretended to study for 12hrs, but all they did was sit in front of the book they werent actually studying and then there were the plain less gifted ones who even after studying well couldnt get the results. So it all depends on your time management.
Now comes the question are coaching classes effective, my answer yes and no. But surely skip bansal it has become **** since the 21 teachers left there are better ones now. But in general yes because it worked for me, i simply couldnt hope to find the level of expertise the teachers there had anywhere else. They taught superbly and you could get the “feel” of the subject as we at bansal call it, and mind you “feel” is very important. They had an established system you could follow to get success. In short you didnt have to reinvent the wheel. No, because i have seen numerous fellows fell prey to the attractions of Kota and living away from parents. They whiled away their time and didnt manage it properly, they did did everything i did but then they did not study when time came to study. So finally it is your call if you think you are latter then stay away from coaching institutes away from your hometown if you are the former i say give it a go.</p>

<p>You can be infinitely intelligent but still unless you have done that Differentiation or Integration before you wont be able to figure it out during the exam. They expect us to solve the problems which took their originators days to figure out in 3 minutes, so you need to know the solution beforehand this is why practice is necessary especially in mathematics. </p>

<p>Now on to the US part, i have a great book named indian guide to US admission it is a good book and offers lots of insight. I have very little to say in this as much has been already said by people who know better than me. So i’ll skip it.</p>

<p>So best of luck all</p>

422

<p>Also here are my stats if any of you would like to know</p>

<p>Sat: CR 690 M 800 W 570
Sat II : M2 800 P 800</p>

<p>Ec’s</p>

<p>1.I was the school overall incharge
2. National Cyber Olympiad AIR 1
3. NTSE Scholar
4. KVPY Scholar ( my only award during 11-12grade)
5. INMUN Best delegate award
6. District level spell be champ
there are others which i dont remember</p>

<p>IIT-JEE AIR 112</p>

<p>Couldnt apply to any US university as my school principal refused to send my secondary school report and teacher recos.</p>

423

<p>@nomadMIT - that was a very informative post! well could you tell me if the 2015’ers who got selected into good schools had the money to get into those schools? There were many who got into ivies and several of them asked for aid. What stellar stats did they have?</p>

424

<p>Im sorry to burst your bubble but from what I know Stanford is certainly not need blind to internationals.</p>

425

<p>Well I’m aware of that…
How do you know Stanford is my dream school by the way?</p>

426

<p>I didn’t go through the whole lot of posts here, but regarding GPA I did mention this:

You just don’t. You just leave it blank. Your counselor gives cbse percentages on the blank side of the international student form (as it is directed in said form) for predicted scores and gives percentages in your school transcript for the rest of the other school years.</p>

<p>Most major schools (read top 100) understand the different evaluation systems for different countries, and India is a major international feeder country, hence our marking system is properly understood by most schools. They have certain “regional officers” out of which the one for India or for South Asia surely knows exact intricacies of the Indian transcripts.</p>

<p>Again, NO gpa, unless you’re applying to schools like GaTech which purposely demand it, and you use WES or the other two mentioned on their website.
PS: These WES/such conversions shall be next to useless for universities other than GaTech, etc.
Please don’t waste your time trying to find a gpa convertor, there isn’t a standard one for Indian schools, and you can’t really just use one and mention that you “used such and such gpa convertor for this conversion”.</p>

<p>Hope this helps!</p>

427

<p><a href=“Harvard,%20Yale,%20Stanford,%20MIT,%20Duke,%20U%20Chicago,%20Johns%20Hopkins,%20Vanderbilt,%20Williams,%20Amherst,%20Swarthmore,%20Wellesley,%20Wesleyan,%20Smith,%20Hamilton,%20Bates,%20Colgate,%20Colorado%20College,%20Macalester,%20Mount%20Holyoke,%20Kenyon,%20Trinity%20College,%20Trinity%20University,%20Connecticut%20College,%20Union%20College,%20and%20Manhattan%20College…etc.”>quote</a> are need blind

[/quote]
</p>

<p>Nope. For international students (undergrad), only Harvard, Princeton, Yale, Dartmouth and Amherst are need blind.
In addition MIT also admits internationals on a need blind basis, however, they only take ~300 internationals.</p>

<p>Also, Cornell has the TATA scholarship which means a small number of internationals from India get a full scholarship. However, most of the rest of needy students who qualify end up getting no aid. :(</p>

<p>Stanford gives wonderful FA if you get in and are financially needy. I hear their aid is second only to Harvard’s.
The other colleges you mentioned are also pretty good with FA though, although on a need aware basis. :slight_smile:
They’ll all have small loans in their package though, which packages from HYPSMAD don’t contain. Also my penn package didn’t have loans too, I think Brown and a few others (maybe Duke?) also have eliminated loans for internationals. You’ll have to check individual sites after narrowing down your college list.</p>

428

<p>@nomadMIT-goodbye…and Best of luck!!!
@perfect pixie-thanks again!</p>

429

<p>“In addition MIT also admits internationals on a need blind basis, however, they only take ~300 internationals.”</p>

<p>I think you mean ~100</p>

430

<p>Yeah and Caltech is only about 20-22 and not need blind. So those in need of FA, you might fare better with MIT.</p>

431

<p>Pixie, you mentioned WES for GATech, but after a few clicks on their website, I was surprised to find that 60%-100% is recognized as A grade. Shouldn’t 85%+ or 90%+ be labelled as A+? Unless of course, there is no category as ‘A+’.</p>

<p>I stumbled deeper to the iGPA calculator, but it seems it is only for those students who are already in college. Any suggestions?</p>

432

<p>Anyone thinking of applying to the 1st tier British Universities like LSE , Oxford and the like?</p>

<p>I mean it certainly is a lot more cheaper than US…</p>

433

<p>Well they’re a lot harder to get. I think you need to get 96+ average in 12th or something.</p>

434

<p>Some more to the MIT vs. IIT debate:</p>

<p>The professors at several IIT coaching institutes claim that ranks dont matter much. They say this because (according to them), most IIT graduates dont pursue a career related to their field of study i.e. what they study at IIT does not matter in their professional lives.</p>

<p>On the other hand, the new MIT admissions website claims:</p>

<p>‘Eighty percent of undergraduates indicate that their position is related to their academic major.’</p>

<p>…</p>

435

<p>Lol NO. UK is easier to get into unless you’re talking Oxbridge+LSE which also, I hear with the new budget cuts and everything are a tad easier to get into that the best in the US.
They’re desperate for non europeans because such internationals pay ~3 times the price compared to that a european pays, and they need the money.
They give you a required score to meet which is not generally very high, I remember another user getting into Warwick and being required to get a 90+ in each subject. Some of my friends who’re going to King’s and Manchester also got conditional offers and got 92, 93 which is not that hard if you only applied to UK/Singapore for whom CBSE result is very important and focused on boards instead of wasting your time writing a huge number of essays and trying to understand the US admissions system. </p>

<p>Idk prinki. A lot of people apply to the UK as well as the US. Some even add Singapore to their list. There are a lot of reasons for US over UK, for me it was more choices and financial aid. UK system is more like the Indian college system and I wanted a more liberal system.</p>

<p>Blackadder: Yeah, thanks for correcting me!</p>

<p>Tizil: I’m sorry, but what are you asking suggestions for?</p>

436

<p>Is it necessary for us to write A levels for Oxbridge/ LSE ? CBSE not accepted?</p>

437

<p>Actually not anymore. You’ll have to check their websites though. And from my experience, the UK doesnt care about any ECs at all. So those who like to study…only might find their chances favourable there. As a result their admissions process is a lot less random than the US. Still their academic requirements are pretty insane.</p>

438

<p>Hey guys/girls</p>

<p>can anyone please let me know if Emory provides ANY financial aid to internationals or for that matter Mexicans and canadians? I searched the stupid site. Couldn’t find the info in simple terms :(</p>

439

<p>Hey guys, first of all congrats to class of 2011 and goodluck to the class of 2012. It seems like thread now has lots of students applying from India, not like it did before but still good luck everybody!</p>

440

<p>[Financial</a> Aid and Scholarships for International Students | Emory College of Arts and Sciences Admission](<a href=“http://www.emory.edu/admission/admission/international_students/financial_aid_scholarships.html]Financial”>International Applicants | Emory University | Atlanta GA)</p>