Intel finalist is a very prestigious award, it’s a basically pipeline to the top schools, from the Crimson:
“About a quarter of finalists from the past five years attended or are currently attending Harvard College, according to a Crimson analysis. Because of the high number of students who are finalists in the competition and who attend the College, Intel finalists enjoy a head-start socially.”
25% are at Harvard, do you want to guess where many others are at? Stanford, MIT, Cal Tech, CMU, Berkeley, Yale, Princeton, Cornell, Penn, Swarthmore, NU, JHU - you get idea.
“It takes more than “loving science,” founding a science club or having a title or dreaming of an Intel win, to get there, too.”
Actually, this is exactly the profile top colleges want. You don’t need more.
No, lol, they dont want, “I love sci” or founding a sit-around club. They want to see the actions. Show, not just tell.
And an Intel winner with problems in the rest of the app is no sure thing. It’s not all about prestigious awards. Harvard dies reserve some spots for highly accomplished kids. That diesnt change how lesser mortals get in. And they do.
I warn about assumptions and get them back.
@theloniusmonk
lookingforward said “dreaming of an Intel win”,
which to college admins is NOT the same as actually BEING an Intel finalist.
Actually, this year’s Intel Grandprize winner (the very top prize among the 350 winners) was turned down by Harvard but accepted at Stanford. It just shows that even with that profile its not a sure thing for any particular top school. I am sure that kid was also asking the question:" Why didn’t I get in?". Sometimes, there is just no answers.
Lol. Kids, even top performers, can make wild errors in their apps. Eg, they cite programs that exist at X, but
not at Y. Or they may have ancillary interests they throw in, like, “I love that I can golf year round.” Sorry, not in the northeast. Or those LoR writers they know “love me” write why they’re perfect for Stanford in the rec and H sees it.
The list goes on.
An example of how some aspects relating to one’s application are not under the applicant’s control or even visible to the applicant.
@socaldad2002 my daughter does all those things too. But she does them because she enjoys them. I don’t think a lot of these are doing things because they enjoy them. They’re doing them because they think they have to because they have to go to Harvard. Or Yale. Or MIT. Then when they don’t get it they are devastated. I don’t know a lot of 16 year olds who like to stay up until 3am doing homework to get up at 6am to do it all over again. Just for the fun of it.
" don’t know a lot of 16 year olds who like to stay up until 3am doing homework to get up at 6am to do it all over again. Just for the fun of it."
Clearly if high school students are regularly and consistently spending that much time on their homework, they have chosen the wrong rigor of course work. I just don’t see that amount of studying done by D and her peers who are maintaining a 4.0. They all go to bed around 11:00p and get up at 6:30am. The one thing they do which is extremely helpful is weekly study groups to go over homework and study for tests, finals, and AP exams together. They actually have a lot of fun while studying. They are much better students than I ever was in HS lol.
My kid got B+s in 2 STEM classes and never stayed up very late except for one or two cases where he was doing final class projects which were due next days. I left classes he wanted to take up to him but told him when I knew he was making a mistake by taking too many APs he could not handle. He had signed up for both AP Biology and AP Chemistry in his Junior year because some other top academic kids were doing that and I told him “You know, these kids are not going to get into great schools just because they took these two classes at the same time. Just take one of the two and leave some time to relax.” My kid thinks I am a genius for telling him not to over do things and focus on doing things outside the box. He was only one from the competitive school who even applied for two programs outside high school, and this really surprised me.
My daughter took the most rigorous curriculum offered at her school, was very active, worked, etc, had an uw 4.0… and was in bed by 10:30 every night. She had friends who only got a few hours of sleep but that’s because they wouldn’t start their work until midnight because they were on social media or playing video games. IMO, time management plays a big role here. Thankfully sports helped her take advantage of every minute in her day and she was never a procrastinator.