Hi everyone,
I just wanted to know if most people applying to the top schools have backgrounds/stats like the applicants on this forum. M10 is approaching fast and I don’t want to let myself hope that I could get accepted into my dream school.
Thank you all! 
Even on this forum, applicants have very wide range of backgrounds. I no longer worry that I am not legacy, or D1 athletes or whatever.
I have calculated the probability that I am not accepted by any single school, assuming each has say 15% acceptance rate, and I applied to n schools. Not getting any acceptance P=1-0.85^n. So the larger n, the small this P.
If you apply to schools with higher acceptance rate, P of rejected by all will get even smaller.
From my experience, the people on this forum tend to be a pretty good representation of applicants for gladchemms schools, and slightly more than for other schools. One thing is that there tends to be an overrepresentation of waitlists here.
Though people with (in their opinion) better stats are more likely / more confident in posting chance me threads imho
@Oyinkansola_Adekoya just, pray for the best, prepare for the worst
though thats easy to say hard to do
Thank you everyone for your responses; I honestly wasn’t expecting so many replies in such little time!
Is it a good sign that a school I applied to contacted my parents about financial aid 10 days before the decisions come out? I’m not sure if that means they are considering me or anything like that.
Depends on what they asked/talked about. Did you ask your parents?
If the discussion was about missing paperwork, maybe. If the discussion was about whether it would be a financial burden to reclass, maybe. If the discussion was about whether you would be able to be a boarder rather than a day student, maybe. Some schools will consider not accepting you if they cannot provide enough aid, can your parents pay more. Some schools will weigh every student’s aid need against students who don’t need aid. It isn’t necessarily good and it isn’t necessarily bad.
As far as the chance me posts being representative of the applicant pool? Going to say extremely doubtful. There are tens of thousands of students who apply to these schools. There is a handful of supposed very confident people who post their stats which we have no idea if they are truly real or not as we do not see their supposed application, do we? I think we have seen less than 50 kids post stats this year, it truly is a small number. Sure there are going to be some great students applying, but reality is, most kids are not playing 9 instruments, finding new planets, starting international non-profits, and an olympic athlete in 4 sports all at the age of 13. Breathe a little easy.
That’s probably true and leads to why there are more waitlists here. Many come in thinking that having good grades and a test score is everything and will post thinking they will get in. This will many times lead to them getting waitlisted.
Your analysis would only be valid if the probability was actually 15%.
A 15% acceptance rate does not mean that every applicant has a 15% chance of getting in; it’s not a lottery.
Furthermore, at a certain n, one’s applications become less targeted, and therefore potentially less compelling/interesting.
let’s just keep it a happy hope that “the numbers” tell us for someone who applied to eg 5 - 10 schools we have a good chance of getting into one (and i assume any school you applied to, you like much better than other BS)
Technically, your calculation is only reasonable if the admission processes and results are totally independent from school to school. The reality is that the top schools are looking for similar characteristics in the candidates. So the chances of admission is even lower than what you calculated. This means it doesn’t improve your chances much if you apply to similar schools.
That’s why many people say “cast a wider net”.
And, adding e.g. Groton to Andover and Exeter does not a wider net make.
You have the correct analysis from someone who majored in Economics. People seem to assume that admissions people randomly select individuals from a pile like roulette balls spinning on a wheel and make their conclusion to apply to as many schools as possible. Which is incorrect thinking as you’ve noted. One has to have focused applications with higher than mean probability of acceptance which admittedly is very difficult to quantify unless a legacy or with a bona fide hook.
An awful lot of those posts read like parents coming up with some sort of fantasy list of all the things they think their kid might be able to achieve in the next year or so. I always take them with a grain of salt. (And, frankly, it sounds kind of horrible to be at a school where EVERYONE is a type A workaholic who does literally nothing other than practice their 9 instruments. And, fwiw, I have one of those kids, and they’re pretty intense. Even the most toppest of top schools need to let in a few genial kids who can come up with appropriately low-key small talk at alumni events.)
Thank you so much for your constructive answer! I never really thought of the applicant pool in that way.