<p>Yeah, I've come to peace with a deferral. Most likely for MIT as well as UChicago with their crazy-insane increase in applications. Why did all of our parents decided to get busy in 1989/90?</p>
<p>I'm glad you guys like my closing line. I'm actually editing my main essay right now for HYP, and I think I like this version better. To be perfectly honest, it's all little changes which no adcom in their right mind would/should notice in a quick read. But still.</p>
<p>And I've actually just decided to apply to Yale. I don't like Harvard anymore, and I just remembered all the reasons I liked Yale so much last spring, and I can't remember for the life of me why I took it off my list. I've spent the afternoon seriously considering my college options and envisioning myself at every school at my list. I'm not seeing Harvard at all.</p>
<p>Anyone else having this sort of thing? I've had my college list finalized since JUNE, and with less than a month till the deadline am adding an Ivy League school. Smooth.</p>
<p>EDIT: Fun question. When did you guys know that you wanted to apply to MIT? I've wanted to go since 7th grade when I read about astrophysics research going on there (this is when I was on my hard-core physics kick).</p>
<p>Probably freshman year... I was one of those kids who literally knew nothing about college before freshman year (I'm the oldest in my family). I only knew about Harvard (from movies and such) and our state school. Ha.</p>
<p>My love for UChicago came out of nowhere, probably around August. I had really only been considering New England schools, and hadn't even bothered to research any other ones.</p>
<p>So, as you can probably tell, ducktape, I'm just as upset about the HUGE increase in applications as you. Whatever happened to UChicago being a self-selecting school!?!? =P</p>
<p>Dude, seriously. What's comforting is the fact that I bet a lot of those people don't actually know much about UChicago, so they'll be easy rejections (like a few kids from my school), but judging from the kids on CC... I don't know.</p>
<p>I HATE COLLEGE.</p>
<p>My love for UChicago sprouted last December after a good friend got accepted early, and my infatuation with Yale began about an hour and a half ago.</p>
<p>Y'know, reading this thread, I've realized how...dedicated...to higher education the lot of you are!</p>
<p>But weighing that with something my history teacher told the class on Friday, it seems less like you've all got extra gusto and more like I've simply got less.</p>
<p>Want to know what he told us? Just seven years ago at my high school, most of the students didn't go on to college, and that those that did mostly went to the community college--which is and was notoriously terrible. And that seven years later, we've picked up: we get students into the UC system (up from five or six out of 3k students to several hundred out of 3.8k students) and we have an I.B. Programme in place; and yet, we're still not completely "there" with the other schools.</p>
<p>Apparently, we've only ever had one student get into M.I.T. (this from the counselor telling me to save my money and apply only to the UC schools), and chances are that I'm the only student applying this year.</p>
<p>The more I think about it, the more I realize that my grades aren't the weakest point on my application: Not knowing the above to include it is the weakest point on my application. But I did have a sob story anyway. "Where did you come from...." That essay was a golden opportunity for me; I really couldn't do myself much better unless I'd grown up in Inner-City L.A. or an illiterate village in the Appalachians...in fact, my hometown was disgustingly illiterate.</p>
<p>And I included that. I am so lucky! My parents sheltered me, so I'd be the same if I'd grown up in the Hamptons, but..."Lake Los Angeles...[insert rest of essay here] ...my source of motivation and ambition to do the world one better."</p>
<p>I decided to apply to MIT because a) it had early action (stupid reason, I know), b) when I was in 10th grade my chemistry teacher told me I'd be a good fit for it, and c) I <3 math/sci. So I knew I wanted to apply probably around 10th grade. All for stupid reasons. Now I've got about a bajillion BETTER reasons why I want to get in. :)</p>
<p>EDIT: And I feel bad for the kids next year applying to UChicago; I expect its acceptance rates to fall to near-upper-tier-Ivy-like rates once it switches to the common app...</p>
<p>Maybe I'm just weird, but I HATE the common app. It's actually a major pain because you can't format things the way you want and it's just ugly. I much prefer Princeton, MIT, and UChicago's apps.</p>
<p>But yes, I agree that UChicago's acceptance rate is going to plummet dramatically. It's an awesome school, though. Maybe that will earn it some respect from the non-academic community.</p>
<p>Yea! The MIT application was so nice and easy to use. I liked it wayy more than the common app.</p>
<p>I probably knew I wanted to go to MIT around 10th grade also, when my cousin had finished his first year there and loved it. Also, I've always been a math/science kinda person. But over the past few months I've absolutely fallen in LOVE with MIT.. It's my number one choice by FAR and I can see myself there in a heartbeat. I'll be thrilled if I don't get into ANY of my other schools and only MIT. I wouldn't even think twice about the others..
Ahhhhh high hopes!</p>
<p>MIT's app has been the best for me so far as well =)
I hate Stanford's app.</p>
<p>I started wanting to go to MIT around the latter half of my junior year. Before that, I was in LOVE with Yale. Well, long story short, since I was young I've always wanted to do computer sciences, but for about two years in my high school life I suddenly got obsessed with foreign languages and wanted to double major French/Japanese. Well. After I took Honors Physics I fell back in love with the challenge that comes with math/science and thus began my love for MIT, where I can be submerged in the sciences with a bunch of other people who are just as passionate about those topics as I am.</p>
<p>I'm kinda looking forward to late-night problem sets with a bunch of other clueless freshmen like myself. If I attend my safety, it'll be more like late-night parties instead of p-sets -_-</p>
<p>Wishlist for Christmas: MIT acceptance letter in spring.</p>
<p>OMG the common app is very annoying. I liked the UC Berkeley app, actually - lots of space for extra coursework and things that I had to put in "Extra Info" for other schools. </p>
<p>Anyway, I think my weakness is that I don't know if there's anything that stands out in my application. In my city, I do not know anyone who likes math and classical music like I do, but it seems like this is not only common, but a bit of a stereotype (everybody applying to schools likes MIT like math and plays piano etc.). So, I think I might seem stereotypical. Also, my "end of the world" essay was really serious, making it hard to show my enthusiasm and excitement about learning math and music - I hope this came out somewhere in my app; it's something people always comment about when they meet me, but it's hard to show in essays, and it might not have come out at my interview as much as I'd have liked (I was kind of nervous because my interviewer wrote down EVERY word that I said, pretty much, so the conversation didn't really flow because he was always writing - did this happen to anyone else? Do ECs usually write down everything the applicant says?) So, I don't know, I have a terrible time judging things that are subjective, but I hope the subjective aspects of my character and personality came out on my application.</p>
<p>Pretty much just my grades and test scores are pretty awful. But actually my extra-curriculars s*** in a major way. All and all, though, I think I offer a pretty good ensemble, at least if you look at the total package.</p>