<p>How much weightage do Ivy League adcoms put on your work experience if, say, you have average SATs, great grades, pretty good ECs/awards, and great recommendations/essays?</p>
<p>I would say that work experience is important. Ivy League schools (well the top ones) basically want a freshmen class of leaders. So someone who has actually gotten their feet wet in the real world is a great quality to have on your resume.</p>
<p>Work experience isn’t a box you can just check. Not every “work experience” is equal. Nobody is going to be impressed if you worked as a telemarketer or a janitor. It’s better than nothing, but that’s about it. Unless it’s an important experience, like an internship in intel or a management position (and I mean management), it likely won’t make a difference.</p>
<p>What if I had to independently teach 20 students English, without the help of anyone else for 2 months in the summer at a well known institution? Basically, I was a proper teacher and had to everything that your English teacher might have had to do when you were 12 years old.</p>
<p>^ I disagree with the above poster, particularly the part concerning the ‘importance’ of experience. Ivy league schools(especially Penn, which placed ‘work experience’ under the category of ‘very important factor’ in its common data set) greatly value those who actually work their way through jobs such as babysitting, dish washing, those who have garnered first-hand experience in the real world. In my opinion, those so-called ‘important’ experiences are sometimes only arranged through special family connection and so on. In the rare cases where students actually earn the spot, say, internship at Microsoft themselves, the superior leadership or intellectual promise they possess would have be exhibited in other ways already</p>
<p>^ Agreed. Michele Hernandez (former asst. dean of admissions at Dartmouth, or something like that) says exactly that in her book. And it makes sense, when you think about it. Similarly, fancy college programs like Oxbridge don’t necessarily look better on an application than a summer job.</p>
<p>“Nobody is going to be impressed if you worked as a telemarketer or a janitor.”</p>
<p>Actually those kind of jobs that require hard work and a great deal of personal responsibility are more impressive than are fancy sounding internships with family friends or obtained through organizations that charged big bucks.</p>
<p>There are a lot of things that require hard work and responsibility. Which is why I said it’s better than nothing. But does it really provide you with that much more than other things you could have done in that same time? It’s not as if a college looks at a person and say “holy snap they babysat and washed dishes! That’s unique and indicative of a great character!”. These jobs don’t tell you anything about the person, other than that they’re somewhat employable, and don’t waste all their time on “fun”. If you met a 100 people who did this sort of work, what’s the percentage of them you’d think would be a great college student? It is simply not a good indicator. It does teach about managing finances a bit better, dealing with co-workers/bosses and such, but that’s hardly critical for college admissions. </p>
<p>And I have had plenty of friends who did telemarketing, janitorial and other sorts of “low-end” jobs in high school. None of them regaled with tales of hard work and responsibility. Much more common were tales about how they found ways to slack off and avoid the boss, and how to date hot coworkers (and let me just say that some of their choice targets betrayed rather irresponsible views of life). The few jobs of these types I did taught me nothing I didn’t learn elsewhere, and were frankly a boring waste of time (other than the money, of course). I would find it astonishing if these sort of experiences were seen as very important.</p>
<p>And just because one got a job through a relative doesn’t mean said job is worthless. I spent a summer working in my dad’s lab, learned a lot and eventually co-authored a paper.
You may scoff on it, but I fail to see why this is much less important than working at a, say, restaurant (and I did, and it was probably the worst month of my life).</p>
<p>@ Ray192 I never said that a job landed through special connection is worthless. Quite the contrary actually, as the reason why they need to be obtained that way is that the job or the opportunity is precious and desired by many people. But that wasn’t my point. The stress is that people are not on a level playground in terms of that. As someone who lives under the Canadian poverty line and has both parents illiterate in English, I would never enjoy the privilege of working in my dad’s lab and co-authored a paper. The only type of job besides internships(whose stipend vary from negligible to none) I can get is dish-washing. To tell you the truth, the type of people you mentioned(always slack off, try avoiding the boss all the time) are quite common. But there’re exceptions, for example, does any of those employee you mentioned and scorned at have an academic record that rivals yours? If the answer is no, then I’m not surprised at all about what they are seen doing. And certainly the job means nothing to them in college application. But how about when the answer is yes? Is it now indicative of the student’s character, especially mixed with a financial position similar to mine? Which student is more unique, assuming identical academic stats, the one who works at his dad’s lab and consequently co-authored a paper or the one who works 20 hours a week attempting to alleviate his family’s financial hardship? Let me take a wild guess, the latter case will have an edge over the former when it comes to the Ivys. What do you think?</p>
<p>Work experience is important under two circumstances:</p>
<p>The workdone was challenging and demanding, requiring dedication, discipline and commitent </p>
<p>The student worked many hours to help family make ends meet</p>
<p>This said, an “average student” (3.0-3.3 student taking regular classes in a regular school with a 1500-1800 SAT score) will probably not get into an Ivy League university, regardless of work experience. Work experience (or recommendations) will almost never substitute a proven academic track record.</p>
<p>@ Alexandre Thanks for the explanation. Don’t want to sound overly defensive but my academic record(3.9 UW, 2200+ SAT) is, at least in my own opinion, way above that of an ‘average student’ you defined.</p>
<p>mathematicism, I was responding to the OP’s question.</p>
<p>Alexandre, I think you got the wrong gist of my question (my fault really, I worded it wrong). I was referring to average by Ivy League standards. In other words 2250 SAT, 44/45 IB, lots of leadership, started a business, built cloud chambers and particle accelerators, all 800 SAT IIs etc.</p>
<p>JebarPolsky, even by Ivy League standards, a 2250 /45 is not “average”. The average SAT at every single Ivy is under 2250 (between 2100-2170 are Brown, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth and Penn) and the average IB predicted score is definitely under a perfect 45.</p>
<p>That said, as I mentioned above, assuming your academic credentials are in line with Ivy League expectations (and yours certainly are), good work experience will definitely be considered seriously.</p>
<p>Thanks a lot mate, really was the answer I was looking for in this thread… for a second I thought it was going to veer off topic but you really hit the nail on the head for me.</p>
<p>what about the average ivy acceptee’s GPA and ranking?</p>
<p>
</p>
<p>This isn’t true. I assume you just added up the 25 and 75 percentiles on each section to get the average composite, but those percentiles are for each section, so while 25% of the class may score below a 690 (or whatever) on CR/M/W, that doesn’t mean that the rest of their sections are just as low. </p>
<p>Also consider that the average SAT of unhooked applicants is much higher.</p>
<p>What would be the average composite SAT I score for Ivy league students then?</p>
<p>I dunno, I had a great deal of work experience. Worked for The Walt Disney Company for about a year. Had SAT scores above ivy league averages, high rank in class, great essays and LORs, rejected by every single Ivy. That’s not to say my work experience didn’t help me get into other great colleges (UChicago, Johns Hopkins, Carnegie Mellon, Berkeley), or perhaps that it didn’t help me <em>almost</em> get waitlisted to some Ivies (hehe), but I’m not sure it helped all that much.</p>
<p>The arbitrary process of admissions at work! :D</p>