What did I do wrong

Applying to College
1

I’m sorry for the cross post. However this is killing me. I need some kind of closure, please? Columbia was my first choice. I got:

Accepted
UArk

Waitlisted
Yale

Rejected
Harvard
Columbia
Stanford
Princeton
Brown
Dartmouth
UPenn
MIT
Caltech

Objective:
SAT I (breakdown): 2400 (taken October sophomore year)
ACT (breakdown): 35 (only took once June freshman year)
SAT II: 800 Math II / 800 Chemistry / 800 Physics / 800 French / 790 Spanish
Unweighted GPA (out of 4.0): 4.0
Rank (percentile if rank is unavailable): 1/500ish
AP (place score in parenthesis): BC Calc (5), Chemistry (5), Physics C (5), English CompLit (5), APUSH (5), Chinese (5), French (5), Macro (5), Micro (5). Self-studied for half of these.
IB (place score in parenthesis): [N/A]
Senior Year Course Load: WHAP, AP Bio, AP Comp Sci, AP Music, Advanced French (higher than AP), gym, philosophy (AP not offered, just a chill class). Dual enrolled at UARK for real analysis and Honors Physical Chemistry. Independent study with the professor I did research with over the summer.
Major Awards (USAMO, Intel etc.): made the USAMO 10th, 11th, 12th grade, (scored a 1 and 3, third time the charm?). Won state science fair but gave up my place at Intel fair due to a schedule conflict. National AP Scholar. National Physics Olympiad. National Merit. Some state and city piano things, idk if “major”.

Subjective:

Extracurriculars (place leadership in parenthesis): Student Government (President). National Honor Society (President). Varsity Tennis (Vice Captain). Varsity Track (Vice Captain). Mathletes (Captain solely by virtue of making USAMO). Physics Olympiad (founded at my school, Captain of 4 people Played piano since I was 4, only some minor awards.
Job/Work Experience: [N/A]
Volunteer/Community service: Common Core tutoring for high school students and Boys and Girls club since sophomore year. Founded a districtwide college prep program to bring undergrads at UArk schools to talk to and provide one-on-one college counseling/test prep to students in underperforming public high schools. At one point had 20 college students and 100+ high school students. Habitat for Humanity (2 years). Charity drives through my high school to raise money for MSF in Syria.
Summer Activities: Did unpaid research in physical chemistry at UARK for 2 summers, have a paper “in the works”.
Essays (rating 1-10, details): Thought it was a 10? I wrote about how working at different Arkansas public schools helped me to come to terms with my privilege middle-class Asian male with parents who value education. The interwoven exempli gratia was learning Spanish on my own outside school to communicate with a lot of students whom I tutored who were immigrants, which I am independently very proud of, in counterpoint to my having chosen French as a stupid freshman because I thought it was a more “elegant” language. My English teacher told me it was the best she’d ever read.

Supplement essay: my passion for the Core (of course) but also unrepresented voices such as Native Americans and PoC. I meant it to dovetail with my main essay.
Recommendations (rating 1-10, details):

Teacher Rec #1: 10 - aforesaid English teacher, who taught me in AP English as the only sophomore in a class of seniors. She LOVES me
Teacher Rec #2: 9-10 - Physics teacher, went to Columbia. He is more reserved but I got a really good vibe from him, like if no one in the class can solve a problem he mocks resignation and asks me to go up to solve it. He asked me if I wanted to help him start a Physics Olympiad team.
Counselor Rec: 10 - worked with him to start my program. Apparently the number of APs I took and how early I took them was “unprecedented” - he showed the rec to me and it was sincere but almost embarrassingly praiseful, to the point where I almost asked him to tone it down.
Additional Rec: Research supervisor at UARK. Honestly I don’t know how good - he seems to like me and was really surprised as a high schooler I knew what physical chemistry was and wanted to go into it, but compared to him I’m an idiot. He hasn’t had high schoolers in his lab before which could be a plus (I was very persistent) or a minus (no idea how to write a college rec).

Interview: 8. Interviewed with a lawyer who kept talking about herself. Most of what she said had to do with Columbia Law and told me she had no idea about “that science stuff”. She was impressed by my volunteer resume though and said she thought I’d be a great fit?

Other

Applied for Financial Aid?: Yes
Intended Major: Chemistry and Physics
State (if domestic applicant): Arkansas
Country (if international applicant): US Citizen
School Type: Large public
Ethnicity: Chinese
Gender: Male
Income Bracket: $200,000-250,000
Hooks (URM, first generation college, etc.): Research in physical chemistry in high school, enrolled this year in a PChem class, started a volunteer program, started a club. However even though my Spanish isn’t perfect what I am most proud of is learning Spanish independently

Reflection

Strengths: Loaded up on APs sophomore and junior year to show colleges evidence of being able to handle college level work. I test well.
Weaknesses: Asian. Possible weak add’l rec? Bad interview? Essay topic was patronizing? I don’t know, I really really don’t know.
Why you think you were accepted/deferred/rejected:
Where else were you accepted/deferred/rejected:

General Comments: I am speechless, numb, beside myself. Presumptuous as it sounds, I can’t shake the feeling that there has been some mistake. My first rejections were Caltech and MIT but I rationalized to myself that I wanted to do academia, not engineering and I think it showed. The first few were disappointing but I had braced myself; good people get rejected, the officers said, but they always end up getting accepted somewhere just as good, they said. As the rejects piled up however I am questioning my self-worth, everything I have worked for I did it not for college but because I wanted to. I was arrogant - or perhaps gullible - and believed the college officers when they said my “genuine passion” would shine through. I had the mistaken confidence that I fit the college moulds without having to compromise and force myself to do for the resume what I didn’t want to do.

Now I am consumed with regret. Is it really this hard? Gosh I knew it was a little harder for Asians but can it be this much harder? I keep futilely replaying scenarios in my head, even the really stupid ones, tormented by the ‘what if’ - what if I hadn’t dropped MUN because I hated it? What if I had pushed a little harder to be Track Captain? What if I had pushed my supervisor to put me on a paper I only did a little for? What if I asked him to show me his rec? Was there one thing I could change about my app to turn everything the other way around?

Yale is my only hope now. I almost didn’t apply to UArk and /can’t/ go there - no disrespect to the school, but it doesn’t have the programs or the opportunities for me to pursue my dreams. The people I know there acknowledge as much. Creating this post was like a shot in the dark for me - I’ve read CC but never posted or even commented. I’m looking for answers, for closure. What did I do wrong? Please?

2

All you did wrong was to not pick ANY match schools, and a safety you didn’t like. It’s fine to aim high, but tons of perfect kids get rejected from the whole top 10. Every year. I’m not sure why people don’t know how common this is. You needed to add more realistic options (matches) is all. Gap year?

3

read this old thread-

http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/parents-forum/47867-were-picking-up-the-pieces-but-what-went-wrong-p1.html

the kid made the same mistake as you did- aimed too hi and had no matches or safeties where he had a good chance of acceptance AND where he would be happy to go.

regroup, take a gap year where you do something meaningful, and apply to entirely different colleges where you have a good chance of acceptance next year.

4

Dang this doesn’t even seem possible. Most have been your essays honestly.

5

If you don’t want to go to UArk and don’t get into Yale, take a gap year and apply to a new list of schools next year. Or wait for the list of schools that are still accepting apps (I think it comes out in May).

6

I would talk with your guidence counselor. See if he/she can read the letters of rec and maybe talk to one of the schools-not to grieve the decision but to get a perspective. I agree that the IVY"s are not a given for any student but I don’t think it is a 'crap shoot" either. And, with your credentials, I am guessing you have some sort of red flag in there that you are unaware of. So I’d go and talk to the guidence counselor who can view all your materials.

7

I agree with @HRSMom. I’m very sorry you got such disappointing results. You do seem like a top candidate. But even a top candidate should have some match schools and a safety you can accept. Didn’t you have a guidance counselor? It’s hard to imagine a GC recommending just Ivies/Stanford/Caltech and UArk.

8

I am surprised by the request for aid given your family income and living in Ark-but these schools are need blind and would not have let that impact decisions.

9

Applying to nothing but the most highly selective colleges is like applying to individual state lotteries- your chances in any one state lottery dont improve by buying tickets to multiple lotteries.

10

First off, I’m sorry. I can only imagine how much it hurts. Your stats sound incredible, and I understand your shock.

Unfortunately, your issue is glaring: you ONLY applied to reaches. Sadly nowadays, even stellar applicants can’t only apply to reaches. Things are so competitive and there are so many applicants with “perfect” scores that a shut-out situation like yours isn’t uncommon. If you’d posted on here last fall with that list, people here would have strongly advised you to flesh out your list with more schools with acceptance rates over 20%. We could have also recommended a number of safeties where you would have qualified for automatic merit (w/ your income bracket, you won’t get fin-aid anywhere).

So you have two options: go to UArk/pray you get off the waitlist for Yale (I’ve heard it’s a long shot), or you can start over. Take a gap year. Do something enriching and interesting, and apply again–to a few of the reaches you were denied from, but mostly and more importantly to a nice spread of schools where you have a great chance of admission. There are SO MANY schools that fall between Ivy and UArk that I honestly think you would have gotten into if you’d applied. Then again, you might be happy with UArk? But it doesn’t sound like it. What do your parents think?

If you’d like some additional piece of mind/perspective, I’d be happy to read your essays. Honestly they sound like they could have easily tipped into pretentious and try-hard… they might have been part of your problem.

11

Wow I did not expect this kind of response. Thank you for your kind words. Some people have sent me private messages: Just to clarify, my school almost never sends people out of state so my GC was not as experienced as he could have been in retrospect. He told me that these schools were my match schools and advised me to pick 5 to apply. I decided to do 10 just to be safe. I don’t want to blame him as this was not an area of his expertise and my dad even offered to pay for a private tutor but I (perhaps sanctimoniously) believed that kind of coaching was unethical. I did try to keep that in mind and didn’t want to be “that guy” who applied to all the Ivies. I visited Cornell but knew it wasn’t a good fit for me so I didn’t apply.

12

Only far-reach “lottery” schools plus a safety you’re not interested in at all? What match schools did you apply to?

13

^^ none. that’s the problem…

14

What did you do wrong?
You assumed you were a shoo-in and that no school could possibly reject you so you didn’t pick any safeties. Sorry, but lots of students are presently in your situation because they also didn’t think that the schools would reject them. There is not enough room at the top, and the top schools HAVE TO reject thousands of students with perfect scores because the universities don’t physically have the room to take in all of the students who want to attend. Dem is just the facts.
Getting top scores and good grades is just part of the equation.
You also indicated, above, that your hook was learning Spanish independently. That’s not a hook.
A hook is recruited athlete, underrepresented minority (AA, MA, PI, NA), a first gen kid, so hopefully you knew that going in.
I see lots of activities but nothing that hooks them together other than being really super busy.

So, regroup and consider your options:

  1. Go to Arkansas
  2. Take a Gap year and reapply to different schools that will want you; if you apply to the same schools and nothing has changed, you will be rejected again.
  3. Go to a CC, make great grades and then transfer.
    Good Luck!

Guidance counselors are there for a reason. Why would your GC not have you apply to at least one safety?

15

UNBELIEVABLE. You should be accepted at most if not all of those schools. I don’t understand these admission counselors and their “holistic” approach. I would call the admissions office and press them on WHY you were not accepted. GOOD LUCK and don’t give up on your dreams.

16

“if you apply to the same schools and nothing has changed, you will be rejected again.”
this^^^^^^^^!!!
OP- if you decide to try again, dont make the mistake of ignoring this most important point.

17

" I would call the admissions office and press them on WHY you were not accepted."

Terrible idea! Calling any of the colleges that reject a student will change ABSOLUTELY nothing, and furthermore he will never find out why he was rejected. It will be like pouring salt in a wound.
Its time to move on…

18

@menloparkmom Clearly you have not called an admissions office. And YES decisions can change. NOTHING is impossible.

19

^^^Oh puleeeze… NOT at the schools where he applied and where there are 10-20 qualified applicants for every opening… 8-|

20

Well, perhaps there is a fairy godmother to smooth things out… :wink: