How about you, I heard one person got accepted from shanghai.
Accepted!! :)))
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I got rejected too. But honestly Iām the first from my school (German) to apply and didnāt have any major awards so I am not too surprised.
Well, itās not really about awards and scores. I do encourage us not to give up and really focus more on the essay for RD. It seems like my Yale essay didnāt work out as I wish to.
Yeah, maybe. If you want to, we can talk about our other essays etc. You can add me on insta (Its the same as my username).
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Emm, in China Insta is blocked 
Do you have WeChat?
Yeah itās the same username
Great, I sent a request.
Accepted! 1590 SAT, 4.0 GPA, intending Computer Science.
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Any other details, like were you president of a country, super quarterback or best selling novelist? Iām asking, because seeing all these super kids get rejected makes me think my D shouldnāt bother applying.
But she will probably.
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Very good stats. But Yale may be getting similar or better stat applicants. Or Yale looking for different type of candidates. Caltech, CMU may like you. They value your AMiE score.
I read some where that these top schools take - most compelling students than most qualified students. What does it mean? Donāt know for sure, but i think it is about writing the story well. How your extracurriculars fit into your narrative. What do you want to achieve and why ? How Yale can help achieve that. For that one need to know lot more about Yale to position them selfs in a given role be it be math major , chemist etc.
Those stats show your academic caliber but not passion. Essays show that. Does your recommendations support that? As we face these rejections, refining our selfs n looking for better fit school is good strategy.
Wish you all the best.
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Wow!! Congratulations!! Every body in this forum breaking their heads with similar stats getting rejected. So , may be your ECs n what you think helped your application ?
Thank you.
My math teacher gives me all the highest ratings(one of the best in my career) on common app and great recommendations. Teachers let me read them all.
I do agree with your opinion on the essay. But one concern brothers me is that some friends think my rejection is because I wrote too much about academic interest and my research experience (even in the short takes). Resulting in the most significant part that Yale values - contribution to the community - was missing (I am the founder of a community service program). Although my recommendations do mention that.
I am confused about how should my essay let the writer find my value both academically and characteristically. Or I should say MIT wants a different value than Harvard, thus I should say more about my future plan and academic interest in school like Caltech. More about how I overcome difficulties in life for Harvard and Stanford.
Thanks for your sharing.
While it is important to recognize what a school values in your essays, you are who you are as evidenced by your academic and extracurricular record and how you are portrayed in your LoRs. To create an inconsistent persona based on your guess of what type of person a particular university prefers is IMO a mistake. BTW, I think all the top universities value community, teamwork, empathy and perseverance in the face of adversity, including Caltech and MIT, although they may see those values in the context of STEM passion and excellence more so than others. To me, tailoring essays to specific schools has more to do with connecting your interests/talents to specific resources/programs/faculty available at that school. A generic brag essay without connecting how that school will best nurture your talents is going to be less effective.
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Agree with what āBKSquaredā has said: ātailoring essays to specific schools has more to do with connecting your interests/talents to specific resources/programs/faculty available at that schoolā.
Many kids with similar talents, ECs and community service are differentiated based on how they positioned/presented them self.
These are my observations:
Stanford: values creativity. AOās expect creative and enjoyable essays. By writing great essays, you can get away with average stats.
Harvard: tries maturity in essays (how?) and all about Brand. If you are in news papers, then you are in.
Caltech: Goes by academic strength and demonstrated interest (this could be because of yield issues)
CMU: Academic strength, AMC /AMIE, Robotics, research
Yale: leadership and community service. But they expect at much higher level.
MIT: Hard nut to crack. no crap allowed unlike Stanford (get away with creative writing). Big on collaboration. Collaborative work such as robotics etc help. The caliber of the students is very high. Applicants with multiple international medals in olympiads is not uncommon.
These are just my observations.
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Itās mind blowing what we have to do these days to get into these schools. Do a search for the acceptance rates 10, 20, 30 years ago and itāll frustrate you because your kid wouldāve been a shoe-in back then!! Things are just crazy these days. Absolutely out of control.
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I feel this strong impulse to comment here for various types of readers, and especially for a couple of the parents who are understandably affected by the disappointment (themselves, or for their kid) of a deferral or rejection in this round. Thereās a lot of data from the Harvard SFFA lawsuit that can be applied more generally to a similar school like Yale that might help inform oneās sense of probabilities, and hence maybe help with any disappointment from a deferral and/or rejection.
In talking with my kid about applying, I emphasized one key statistic all along: the actual data in the lawsuit showed that the admit rate just of the applicants in the very top one-tenth/decile (measured by the simple sorting of the academic index, itself a crude function only of GPA and SAT scores) of applicants to Harvard over the course of 6 six years was 16.5%. ONE IN SIX. (Note, this is domestic applicants, excluding recruited athletes, legacies, and people on some special Harvard donor/focus lists).
Itās useful to emphasize and be precise about just what that means, since it is specially about the top 10% of Harvard applicants, and not the general population: the bare minimum academic requirement to be among the top 10% of applicants to Harvard, ranked solely by the academic index, is a combination of purely academic statistics that looks like a 4.15 on a 4.0 scale (so, more A+'s than As, and assuming zero A-s or lower grades) and a 1580 on the SAT. Those are the minimums to just be in the bucket of students who, in the end, have a raw 16.5% probability of acceptance based solely on grades and test scores, and the probability drops to 12.5% in the next decile down.
My point is, assuming that the large majority of the kids even in this rarefied decile also have a bunch of other things that make their application look attractive, including other academic things (5s on APs), solid LORs and ECs, that nearly ANY applicant entering this process should have a base expectation of it not working out (including the legacy applicants in this tier, too).
There are a LOT of truly awesome kids who are not going to get in. And, asking about āthe statsā of the few people who will post that they got in will not be useful. These āstatsā are not the ones that primarily drive the admit decision, they are simply the table stakes in a crazily-competitive process with a fundamental element of fortune/luck involved. I feel like Iām being pedantic, but my heart goes out to those who are feeling very disappointed, and this has to be in part a function of expectations going in.
The other comment I would make is for international applicants, including @Xeron, who post here about their scores and results, and/or for people who might not understand that they are ex-US. I believe @Xeron had indicated heās (sheās?) from China. If you again look at Harvard to get a sense of Yaleās data, there are currently 71 undergrads from China. That implies fewer than 18 kids in any given class, and Yale is smaller, so maybe Yale has 15-17 kids in any given class. FROM ALL OF CHINA. Presuming that some subset of these are boarders from top US private schools, and some of the rest are known to be the children of hugely wealthy or politically influential parentsā¦ one just has to believe that the base expectation for getting into a school like Harvard or Yale from China is something closer to 0-1%. And whatever breaks through in an admissions committee meeting is not about stats. If suspect if I had perfect information and crafted the perfect application from someone in the very top 5% of academic performers from China, my guess is that Iād still think the odds of acceptance are less than 5%.
I wish everyone the best in the RD round, whether at Yale or any of the other fine schools in the nation.
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Whatās your observation on Princeton?
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Maybe worth commenting on the percentage of that 19% that were either recruited athletes, legacies, or URMs. These categories taken together are likely one-third to half of the acceptances at the top private schools.
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Academic strength (depending on their majors), go out of the comfort zone to pursue their passions (confidence), Intellectual vitality/ research (All students need to do student thesis), showing interest in higher education helps.
I felt, of all Ivysā Princeton takes more balanced approach to things.