<p>I think it is semantics then. It is "random" to me whether they need a bassoon player or a trumpet player that year, but I agree that the two are not completely equally likely. (It is more a butterfly effect from chaos theory.)</p>
<p>From what I saw last year though is that juniors are soon going to have threads saying that there is absolutely no luck involved in the process and that if you don't get in, you don't deserve to get in. The juniors saying this of course are convinced that they are the ones who will get in. The argument I particularly liked last year was some people would be accepted to Harvard and not Yale, and vice versa, since Harvard and Yale each had different institutional personalities and were looking for different types of people.</p>