<p>Interesting. I'm a total newcomer to this website, so your titling an above post "sigh" seemed a bit impish until I deigned to suffer through twenty minutes of reading some of your previous posts which were themselves extraordinarily repetitive. In sum: "CROSS ADMITS WAHOO." Forgive me if I'm missing an exclamation point or something. Anyway- very disappointing. Are you a college student looking to justify your decision-making process? Are you in HS and unable to relate to the decision-making process itself? Apologies in advance for getting personal, but it nevertheless helps to know where one is coming from, in order to have some, you know, <em>perspective</em> on these things.</p>
<p>Here's where I'm coming from. I applied to seven schools, was accepted at six of them and was seriously considering ALL SIX. (I found out my acceptance at each of these six in early April.) Among the six, incidentally, are the three schools in question in this very thread. I had no idea how to arrive at a decision in a month, so I tried to think back to how I'd felt when visiting the universities. In large part I couldn't remember because I had always visited with friends and we spent most of our time crippling the authenticity of the experience by running around and being cynical.</p>
<p>As a side note, those friends by and large got into multiple top-tier schools, and by and large attend Harvard. One at MIT. I was unusual in making my choice, especially since the school I chose was reputed to be worse in the field I, at that time, was projected to study. I was a "math kid." For instance, I was a very high USAMO scorer, though not top 12; for instance, most of the other high scorers I know chose Harvard, many over Yale. If you want to join forces with the IMO crowd, Harvard and possibly MIT are your best bets.</p>
<p>Lest I diverge anymore: I ultimately had the great fortune to spend a night at four of the universities, and none of them with friends, and none of them during admit days, and all in quick succession (thank you April vacation - you were great and college students miss you.) This was tiring but unbelievably enlightening... walking in with essentially no preference enabled me to BREATHE and it was those very breaths that answered my question. I breathed easiest at Yale and chose that school, to the chagrin of many, not the least of which: my guidance counselor, my parents and many Harvard math majors. Why do I care what cross admits did?</p>
<p>
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"On the other hand, it would be foolish not to consider the informed choices made by other "consumers" - similarly situated."
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</p>
<p>Please make this clear to me before I refute it, because I don't want to argue against something I might be misinterpreting. (Hey, maybe it won't merit refutation! Say something correct!) However, you substantiated the comment with an analogy to buying a car, and these situations are not analogous.</p>
<p>It is <em>so</em> much easier to ensure similar vantage points when buying a car. Categorically: price range, necessary number of passenger seats, desire to be fuel-efficient, etc, where the "etc" is defined to be less than the "etc" in the hypothetical college choosing criteria sentence. Dammit that was somewhat mathematical I THOUGHT I WAS OVERCOMING THIS. Moving on, I've decided to look at what consumers bought within my price range that had no need to carry more than five pasengers and were environmentally-conscious. Also- side airbags? Oh cool, they chose the Prius. Easy, let me test-drive it. Wow, that was smooth, I'll take it! I'm not going to be living in this, dining in this, pursuing my social destiny in this, doing chemistry labs in this, interacting with notable actors in this and sleeping in this for the next four years, after all! (Maybe subtract sleeping, but it was late, I was lost and the seats recline really far.)</p>
<p>Yeah. I'll check the consumer preferences for automobiles, sure, because it's not too difficult to itemize the characteristics I'm looking for and see what other people with the same criteria chose. But there are near-infinitely more characteristics in the college-choosing process and, what's more, the colleges aren't customizable, or else the dorms on Old Campus would have black interiors, air-conditioning and leather. </p>
<p>The most tragic line in your post, btw, was this:
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Consumer reports ranks cars, and the differences can be great; this may persuade some people to buy Toyotas, but it doesn't dissuade a minority from buying *****-cans, regardless. Chances are, they didn't read the rankings!
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<p>We're talking about students admitted to H. Y. P. If one of them made the decision BLIND he or she couldn't end up with "*****-cans." (By the way, I'm running through my extremely long list of internalized obscenities spanning three languages and I cannot for the life of me find the five letter word that fits. Four'd be a cinch, but five?) HYP are all excellent institutions. Nobodys going to end up somewhere horrible by the general numerical criteria, although someone could end up at a place where he or she is unhappy, regardless of numbers. Regarding reading the rankings: consistent rankings where one car is leaps and bounds better than another might be partially illuminating, but were talking about the top three U.S. News ranked schools. Nothing is analogous here! </p>
<p>So, refine your argument please. Once again: my perspective is that the decisions of prior cross-admits do not matter and should not be deemed important and that the best way to arrive at a decision when choosing between excellent schools is to visit each (not on the admit days) and see what feels best. Other considerations are viable but on a per-student basis (for instance, a friend of mine who is in a wheelchair looked for the most wheelchair-friendly campuses). Nothing is universal, I assure you: nothing.</p>
<p>Incidentally, I took all your assertions in the directly above post to be true, regardless of their lack of justifying links, because in my experience they have proven correct. Still- who are you that you have access to confidential information? Why are you credible? And why cant the information be revealed why is this stuff being kept a secret, especially if reasonable individuals like yourself would consider it invaluable knowledge when arriving at a decision?</p>
<p>(Post-wide apologies for being, at times, snide- it's not usually my M.O., I promise, but certain circumstances (sigh) require it.)</p>
<p>EDIT: I had NO idea how long this was after typing frantically for a while, so apologies. Also frantic writing makes for typos. Eek.</p>