Reflections from 2025 HYPSM admit(s)

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I think you have to acknowledge that if a reader is going to remember you, you have to be memorable.

standard strong is not memorable in T20 pools. sorry. tell a story. make it easier on the reader to remember you, like you, want to admit you.

if you think that's a game, then just submit your 1540 and your AP scores and your essays about the big loss as a team that taught you more than the big win as an individual.

That’s the ironic part — how is a young person developing into a NORMAL adult is not good enough? Don’t they have their own personalities, passions, and interests? The assumption that kids are just grades and a checklist of “typical” extracurriculars, and that anything outside of that doesn’t deserve a place in a good school, is deeply flawed. School is for learning. And if these teenagers put focus on learning during high school and get a good grades, why aren't they not GOOD ENOUGH? What exactly is the point of ranking these schools if they care other things more than academic? You might just call these institutes high end expensive youth clubs!

It’s sad that our society turn into this vanity fair values a narrow, manufactured version of success over the reality of everyday individuality.

It really comes down to a simple question: why can’t they just be themselves?

There are hundreds of thousands of seats in good schools each year. If you want your good kid to go to a good school, you have nothing to worry about. The issue comes when you want your good or very good kid to go to an super duper uber-elite world class school.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I am a professor and the idea of strategic position is so nauseating to me that I feel like writing a letter to our admissions office to let them know about what I read in this forum and others.

To be clear, I am not attacking the OP. She did what she felt she had to do to benefit her child. However, favoring students with unusual niche interests is clearly not the best way to find the most authentic students. Maybe this approach was more authentic 10 years ago before college admissions officers and parents pushed it en masse, but clearly this is no longer the way.

I always wonder how professors view their admissions offices and admission priorities.

Our child was told that activism was the essential key to admission to selective colleges. He followed a different path and somehow ended up at HYSPM.

He has met many classmates who were primarily involved in activism and impact-oriented activities. Sadly, he has seen those classmates struggle with the material to the confusion of their professors. I wonder if professors understand what the admissions offices are doing.

Professors admit graduate students, and since we work directly with the students we admit, we get obvious feedback on our selection methods. We see some students succeed, and others falter. Admissions officers don't have this benefit, because they will never teach the students they select.

If they care to, they can see how their admits are doing. If they don't, it's up to the professors to complain, publicly if necessary.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok you have one kid who made it to all HYPSM. Something about her application resonated with the admissions officers. Congrats. But I don't think everyone should be following your advice. Mine as just accepted early to 1 HYPSM this cycle. I suppose he had a spike (and barb) as do most interesting kids who are accepted to HYPSM.

I would completely agree with this. You think you're an expert based on a sample size of one. I see this all the time in my field. Believe me, they are not experts. Neither are you.

I applied to 3 tippy top schools back in my day. Accepted at all 3. I thought at the time I knew the reason these schools all accepted me. Then I gave it no thought for years and years. Until my kids got to college app age. Now, I think it was a different part of my profile entirely. Was I right as an 18 year old or a 50 year old? Who knows.

The whole point is that you think you know what resonated in your DD's app but really you don't know.

You can FOIA your decisions to find out.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:OP here:

On my kid - she is well-adjusted, social, and loved by her teachers and now professors. We are hands off in college and she is thriving. Did very well in the first semester. Calls home frequently. Taking very interesting classes. Joined clubs, figuring out career path. Seems to have great friends, and they will be traveling together during spring break. She is still in contact with her high school friends.

On being a one-hit wonder - we have another, older kid at a HYPSM. His results were definitely less striking than hers, but we had yet to refine the barb approach. Of course, my sample size is n=2. But I think with the variability and low chance, P(strategy working | 2 success stories) is still quite high. Sorry for the probability jargon.

On those calling me deplorable - this is just the current state of the game. I don't fault any of us for playing it. If anything, you should be blaming the admissions offices for encouraging actions like this. The sooner you catch on, the better.

And all of you happily lived every after.

Is it just me or do sentiments like these seem really common? That it's impossible for a kid can be normal, social, even likeable while still attending a top school? That it's inconceivable normal kids would ever try and strategize to get into schools?

It seems to me that the sarcasm in this reply is a really sorry attempt to pathologize success. People seem to find it deeply unsettling when a student is both strategic and socially well-adjusted because it removes their favorite excuse: that elite admissions is a trade-off between prestige and personhood. But it's really not.

Your quip is small, lol. But it's something that I see really often in these forums. When you insist that these kids are miserable or burnt out or deplorable human beings, you as an onlooker protect your own ego. It's much easier to dismiss a HYPSM student as a product of strategy than to admit they might just be a high-functioning individual who understood the rules of the game. I think this reaction is a sign of intellectual laziness. You want to believe in a 'meritocracy of the accidental', where kids get into Harvard just by being authentic (whatever that means). You think strategy is a form of cheating because it just exposes the fact that effort without direction is often wasted energy

It's entirely possible to be competitive and happy all at once, and I don't really think there's a point in moralizing the positions of individual agents here

+1000000

Imagine having this snarky attitude towards musicians who deliberately practiced instead of only "authentically" playing songs for fun, or athletes who attended development camps and executed a specifically designed gym workout even if it was monotonous at times instead of "authentically" only playing pick up games for fun when they felt like it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:This probably does get a kid into HPYSM, but it’s highly contrived, and thus, sad. It’s like the parent is applying to college.

We knew a case where a parent helped a kid do this and it was successful, but everyone who knew the kid and family knew this was the game plan since elementary school. The dad managed the kid’s life from 0-18 and probably is still at it. In the end, I’m not sure where this really gets a kid. I guess we’ll find out in 10-15 years.

I know a family like this. My kid was in the local newspapers and the family copied my kid’s project. Ok both got into Harvard. We met at some award ceremony and our school had published all my kid’s awards while their school had not said too much about the other kid. Turns out they have a younger daughter who then copied all my kid’s activities except she could not win the awards! Obviously Dad or Mom was directing their activities. I recently found out they are donors — lol no wonder younger kid also got in! It’s ridiculous how much these parents are doing for their kids.

And I bet the younger kid will copy all my kid’s clubs and activities at Harvard.

[Anonymous]

Pp here. It’s so sad that these kids can’t do anything on their own.

[Anonymous]

I’ll add that DD needed to interview at all of these schools so she must have been able to speak about her barb with passion and genuine interest. Either that or you’re both psychopaths.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:We are fortunate to have a daughter who was accepted to all of the HYPSM schools back in 2025. We are unhooked in every aspect of the word.

I am not here to engage with people who call me a troll or try to discredit the premise of the post; I am laying the facts of our experience down and you may choose whether or not you want to believe me. Quite frankly, I don't care if you don't believe me. If you choose to believe the post, I hope that it will be useful. I am also not here to discuss ethics.

It seems to me that the best way to get into these schools, nowadays, is to use what I call now a 'barb' instead of a 'spike.' What this means is to go all-in (extracurriculars, essays, classes) on one incredibly, incredibly niche field. This departs from the typical sense of a 'spike' in that a spike is far too broad. Spikes are often synonymous with a field of study: computer science, environmental science, politics, healthcare, etc. But a barb is far spikier than a spike. It means that you must specialize within that spike. Spikes have now become well-rounded, and well-rounded applicants have become rejects.

So, you could choose to go 'all-in' on ways that Native Americans interact with the environment. Or go all-in on compilers in computer science. Or spend your time lobbying for laws that challenge deceptive interrogation tactics. Or architecture in hospitals. Or a specific gene in the ostrich genome (this one's probably too specific Hahaha).

In a way, we found success by targeting all of our daughter's ECs at that one particular topic. This leaves no question for the AO as to what place the student will take on campus, what labs they will engage in, what classes they will take, what clubs they will join, and what their future looks like. It's makes your regional AO's job (advocating for you in committee) incredibly easy, because they can just refer to you as "that student who is interested in making exonerees" or "that student who has a deep passion for colonial Japan's rise" or "that student who has worked on protest theory for years."

Barbs also lend themselves to great awards to put on an application. Such deep intellectual rigor, research, and involvement is often rewarded.

And this might be a little unethical: what sweetens the deal at these schools is that you can change your major before you even arrive on campus. There is no commitment to any of these barbs. No self-respecting person is going to major in Inuit cosmologies, but a self-respecting high schooler may very well choose their barb in that field.

This is also a very high-variance strategy. If rejected by all T10s (or whatever), you may be stuck studying political science at UMD or UConn. This strategy has been very successful in recent years, but that's of course anecdotal.

Curious to hear thoughts, questions, etc.

How about being all in on helping ICE deport people, & focusing especially on members of MS13. Would that be spiky enough?

[Anonymous]

OP’s strategy is risky in that some kids might believe they are truly passionate about and will excel at the niche field. It also exposes their parents’ hypocrisy too early, which might backfire later.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Ok you have one kid who made it to all HYPSM. Something about her application resonated with the admissions officers. Congrats. But I don't think everyone should be following your advice. Mine as just accepted early to 1 HYPSM this cycle. I suppose he had a spike (and barb) as do most interesting kids who are accepted to HYPSM.

I would completely agree with this. You think you're an expert based on a sample size of one. I see this all the time in my field. Believe me, they are not experts. Neither are you.

I applied to 3 tippy top schools back in my day. Accepted at all 3. I thought at the time I knew the reason these schools all accepted me. Then I gave it no thought for years and years. Until my kids got to college app age. Now, I think it was a different part of my profile entirely. Was I right as an 18 year old or a 50 year old? Who knows.

The whole point is that you think you know what resonated in your DD's app but really you don't know.

You can FOIA your decisions to find out.

Not really. Most times you see a sanitized file with an unknown rating system. Sanitized after immediately admission decision- months at a minimum before any foia request.

[Anonymous]

"HYSPM" is not a monolith. I love it how parents obfuscate and note their kid is at a "HYSPM" ... you're on an anonymous board with tens of thousands of parents (maybe much much more!) ... trust me, if you say your kid is at Princeton, or Harvard, or Stanford, no one is going to isolate that we're talking about YOUR family or your child! You can go ahead and name the school. It's kind of ridiculous what gets posted on this forum and passes the smell test for people.

[Anonymous]

Doing all this just so your kid can become a corporate drone for decades? Makes no sense.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:"HYSPM" is not a monolith. I love it how parents obfuscate and note their kid is at a "HYSPM" ... you're on an anonymous board with tens of thousands of parents (maybe much much more!) ... trust me, if you say your kid is at Princeton, or Harvard, or Stanford, no one is going to isolate that we're talking about YOUR family or your child! You can go ahead and name the school. It's kind of ridiculous what gets posted on this forum and passes the smell test for people.

If I say my kid is a freshman at Princeton who had a spike in basket weaving, the kid is identifiable.

[Anonymous]

With the advent of clever AI, such BS can be much more easily detected than replying on the mediocre AOs of those elite colleges.

https://dianeravitch.net/2018/11/30/louisiana-the-miracle-school-that-was-a-fraud/

[Anonymous]

You are really gross. The process is broken. You refer to what “we” did hsvibg nothing to do with your child’s autonomy or true, authentic vision. It’s just a game to you. Too bad AO couldn’t see through your bullshit.