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<p>For whatever it may be worth here, there are (I am sure of it) plenty of students at HYPMS who were waitlisted, or simply denied admission altogether, at Columbia. The notion, promoted by the obsession with rankings, that all students at school X1 in the rankings could also have gone to X2, and, correspondingly, that none of the students at X2 could have gone to X1, is simply false.</p>
<p>Phatmomi,</p>
<p>Most LAC’s, despite being excellent schools, do not have the same name brand stigma attached. They will serve just as well if not better than the ivies.</p>
<p>I cut and pasted the OP’s post to word doc. to save for my high school Freshman. He is heading on the same path as the OP and wants the whole HYPSM thing for the same reasons (plus Dad went). I want him to recognize that his emotional growth and happiness are just as important and he dosen’t need to burn himself out in high school (playing the who can get a better class rank game) to be happy and successful in life. Thanks for the post.</p>
<p>Excellent. Thanks so very much!</p>
<p>Cut it and emailed to DD who is a high school senior. Her best teacher who she TA’s for teaches IB. Told her to pass it on.
Thanks…</p>
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<p>Socialists and sexual openness and tolerance? Hmm, Columbia sounds like it’s worth a look.</p>
<p>Thanks for posting your experience so that HS students hear these thoughts from someone other than their parents. Your insights are very useful.</p>
<p>I have observation about the culture shock you’ve had in New York. Learning tolerance and testing the world outside your comfort zone are valuable parts of college life. We need more tolerance in this world, not less, so I hope that some kids don’t read your message as “Be careful about going to a place where there are lots of weirdos.” I know that’s not what you intended. Instead, I hope HS readers of this thread interpret your message as, “Be prepared to live with more difference than you might have been used to, and treat it as part of the learning experience.”</p>
<p>For my city-born and -raised son, this means going to college with suburban kids who have never been around anyone who’s not white or Asian. That was a real eye-opener for him, but I think he sees it as an opportunity, not a problem. (He’s quite the novelty, and he likes that!)</p>
<p>Yes, I’ll add from having watched admissions pretty carefully for a decade that I fully believe the “we could admit three identical classes” line. HYPS admits great students, almost uniformly, but only a handful are greater than the students those colleges reject.</p>
<p>Harvard admissions people (and Yale admissions people, too) have said that every year they get about 200 applications that are so compelling they are no-brainers, and the rest constitutes a huge pool that’s up for grabs. (There’s probably an overlap of at least 175 in the 200 most-compelling applications those colleges receive.)</p>
<p>Look at this year’s Rhodes Scholars. One-sixth of them went to HYPS (which is pretty good). How many of the others do you think were rejected by all the HYPS schools to which they applied? Some – Myron Rolle – may not have applied to any of them, but I would bet that most of them did.</p>
<p>OP - Wonderful post. Thank you.</p>
<p>Terrapin,</p>
<p>Thank you for your thoughtful post. There is a great deal of wisdom here. You may be aware of it, but probably cannot fully appreciate how much you have matured since the days you were deep into the college search/application process. In hindsight, of course things are clearer to you today, and it helps that you are pleased with the outcome. As a high school junior or senior looking forward, however, you were always going to sweat all the details. Why? Because that’s what intelligent, successful people do. Congratulations on your accomplishments and thank you again for sharing your experiences.</p>
<p>wonderful post but you seem quite uptight. the comment about homosexuality and liberals caght me off guard. that’s why NYC is so great. diversity and tolerance. and it should be something you should consider more. maybe you should have looked more into ur location bc NYC is one of the most liberal and accepting places in America</p>
<p>awesome post. i’m a sophomore at dartmouth, so my experience has been in some ways different from yours (more conservative, rural, not quite so fashionable), but i agree that what i’ve gained from it (and this may have been the case at any college, but who knows?) are things i never could’ve predicted as a senior in high school; the same has been true for what has most disappointed me (some of the people and aspects of the social life, mainly, as you noted). as it turns out, i’m on a promising path and i like the person i’m becoming, but that may be a happy coincidence as none of it was anything i even remotely planned for, and in retrospect i was really quite clueless.</p>
<p>Interesting post.
Currently a high school junior ( class of 2010) and know college is more than about being at an Ivy League etc… although I rather attend a university ranked in top 100, have a medical school ( plan to be a doctor), not located in the south ( due to seasons), and student body of 30,000+. A lot has to do with reasons you’ve listed.</p>
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<p>Nice post. Lots of good stuff there.</p>
<p>Now, about the quoted bits . . . It sounds like you came from the South and therefore got out of your comfort zone a bit in selecting a college. Good, very good. It sounds to me, though, that you had and still have some serious issues with tolerance and diversity. Maybe you have made good progress on this as a matter of personal growth, but it is clear that there is work to be done yet.</p>
<p>I guess maybe part of the message here ought to be that there will be some culture shock if a kid picks a college that is in many ways “foreign.” I would hope that, on balance, you found that part of your college experience eye-opening and something you could recommend to others.</p>
<p>I’m curious about whether the OP had ever been to NY or visited Columbia before enrolling, as many of the things found objectionable would have been in plain view during a college visit . . . .</p>
<p>JHS and epistrophy, I appreciate your graciousness, but I still find it hard to believe. Here’s why:</p>
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<li><p>What this implies is that if we were to take away the top 200 most compelling applicants, then the student bodies at HYPMS vs. the lower Ivies would be indistinguishable from each other. (That’s assuming that everyone else is really “up for grabs” and the process is really a crapshoot.)</p></li>
<li><p>If (1) is true, it means that the adulation which HYPMS receives is rightfully intended for the top 200 applicants, since they are what separates HYPMS from the rest. So the rest of HYPMS students are in fact basking in the reflected glory of the top 200, when they could just as well have ended up at one of the lower Ivies (or worse!)</p></li>
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<p>Now, I find (2) to be absolutely preposterous. If you think so too, then you must acknowledge that there is some significant difference between the student bodies at HYPMS vs. the lower Ivies, no?</p>
<p>of course not, js.jazz88. that i, aged sixteen and a month when i sent in my applications in december 2006, was in possession of so unimpressive a resume as to be forced to matriculate at the barely-accredited sham of an institution known as dartmouth college (not having applied to “hysm,” but having been unceremoniously rejected by princeton) can only be incontrovertible proof that i’m not only intellectually incurious, but personally unremarkable and probably morally bankrupt. in fact, it is unlikely that i will ever achieve anything useful, and at this point i may as well jump out my twelfth-floor window onto the streets of manhattan, having been consigned to the bleak life of the chronically unimpressive, never to glimpse hope again.</p>
<p>seriously, does anybody actually believe this stuff?</p>
<p>Thanks for your reflections TP!
I think lots of people needed their app season college stress to be put in perspective. </p>
<p>Even though I would love to live in NY, get socialist pamphlets, and be that liberal loudmouth.</p>
<p>camelia, I read your chances thread way back when you posted it. Like many others, I found your writing delicious and thought you deserved a spot in Princeton. But they rejected you. And me. </p>
<p>I’m sure you were more impressive than some of the successful applicants. And I think I’m more accomplished (and so were many others) than the dolt who got into Harvard from my school. But for us “losers” in the college admission game, who were rejected from our top choice but still ended up at a fabulous school, we can’t possibly whine that the process was a crapshoot, can we? No, that would be poor form. The everyone’s-equally-qualified-but-it-comes-down-to-luck line is best left to those who won admission to HYP, because that would be the gracious, good-natured thing to say.</p>
<p>The stuff I spout about HYP kids (except for the top 200) being more qualified than us Dartmouth or Columbia kids, that’s just my way of rationalizing things. I hate how I’ll have to jump through more hoops than the dolt at Harvard just to be on equal footing, because getting into Harvard was THE big hoop for him - and he made it. </p>
<p>So I tell myself that there must be some damn good reason that he got in and I didn’t, and the whole process is still somehow rational. If it isn’t rational, then why are HYP held in such damn high regard - just for the top 200 kids?</p>
<p>Sorry if this post offends anyone. That was not my intent. I’m probably going to need serious help to get over all this nonsense. lol.</p>
<p>Thank you for this post. We are just beginning the college search process for our daughter, a high school junior. I hope she can keep in mind the whole “good fit” concept.</p>
<p>i guess the way i see it (and i was very sad about my princeton rejection for about 48 hours, but haven’t really thought about it since) is that though those students may very well have been more accomplished and impressive at age 16 or 17 or 18 than we were, but that’s hardly a guarantee that they still are today, or that they’ll always be. i think that’s too deterministic. </p>
<p>in my particular case, it seems obvious looking back that i was a late bloomer; i dabbled in art, writing, chemistry, and a number of other things, but i never had that one defining “passion” that successful hypsm applicants are said to. in college, i’ve discovered that i love american politics and public policy – not a self-evident obsession for someone born in europe!</p>
<p>so i spent my freshman summer at a d.c. nonprofit with housing and expenses fully funded by dartmouth, and my sophomore fall campaigning for obama with the college democrats; i’m set to declare a double major in government and geography with a minor in public policy; i’m right now writing budgets and proposals for a new policy initiative that i’m starting up on campus, and it’s looking like it’ll get funded. i’m really excited! even though i still love art and wish i could do more of it, i’m more focused and motivated than i ever was in high school (and after a rough start due to illness freshman year, i get better grades, too).</p>
<p>it’s true that the cachet of having harvard, yale, or princeton on your resume is second to none; it’s also true that their alumni network is unparalleled. but i guess i still don’t fully believe that the college you attend is the determining factor in whether you’ll have your dream job ten years from now, especially not at such high levels (hypsm versus “lower ivies”). </p>
<p>and of course this is all anecdotal, but if i’ve changed from an admittedly intelligent, but also (it must be said) aimless and self-centered little kid into someone who’s passionate and focused and actually doing something with herself… then who am i to presume that everyone else at all these schools will stay at exactly the same level as they were in high school? just as there are kids at lower-ranked schools who needed a few more years to realize their full potential, i’m sure there are kids at hypsm who won’t live up to theirs.</p>
<p>i mean, i’m sure if you did a pure statistical analysis of the quality of the student bodies of all these schools, the hypsm kids would have a higher mean and perhaps (?) a smaller standard deviation… but i bet they’d still be normal distributions, and i think the curves would overlap to a great extent. i’m just not convinced that the hypsm kids will categorically be more accomplished and impressive for the rest of their lives; the probability is likely somewhat higher, but i doubt the difference is that great.</p>
<p>this may all have been complete nonsense; i’m no good at statistics… the original point was something about determinism. sorry about the ramble. :o</p>
<p>edit: uh, this sounds really conceited. all i meant is that looking at my college application, you would never have predicted this is where i’d end up (academically, extracurricularly, and otherwise). i certainly would never have guessed. so based on my admittedly subjective experience, i don’t really believe that where i got into college almost two years ago is that much of a litmus test of character and potential.</p>