Is This What it Takes to Get Into a Top School Nowadays?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Holy cow, did she have time to sleep?

Wow! She even made her website in 2018! All of that time devoted to so many other things and still had the foresight to buy a URL domain and setup a profile when she was in the 7th grade!

Domain Information
Name: SABRINAGUO.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2329959973_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Domain Status:
clientTransferProhibited
Nameservers:
NS63.WORLDNIC.COM

NS64.WORLDNIC.COM

Dates
Registry Expiration: 2023-11-06 17:32:11 UTC
Updated: 2022-09-07 08:15:10 UTC
Created: 2018-11-06 17:32:11 UTC

Extraordinary

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Is this from the earlier post:

"Beginning to explore scholarship opportunities for DD and kept seeing the Coca-Cola Scholarship pop up. Seemed like a great program that my DD would very much like to pursue, but then I saw the photo of their top 5 colleges. Is it basically pointless to spend time applying for, and if so what are other scholarships that are more accessible (doesn't need to be as large as Coca-Cola)? For context, she's a good student (4.0 unweighted) with good test scores (1550+) but doesn't have any mind-blowing awards that would make her particularly stand out."

Also she isn’t even the craziest coke scholar. Look at some of their profiles. There are some extremely talented and hardworking kids out there and I’m not sure how they get it all done. Believe me this Reddit kid is far from the most stacked out there, but he’s very impressive with his background and being from the south

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Is this from the earlier post:

"Beginning to explore scholarship opportunities for DD and kept seeing the Coca-Cola Scholarship pop up. Seemed like a great program that my DD would very much like to pursue, but then I saw the photo of their top 5 colleges. Is it basically pointless to spend time applying for, and if so what are other scholarships that are more accessible (doesn't need to be as large as Coca-Cola)? For context, she's a good student (4.0 unweighted) with good test scores (1550+) but doesn't have any mind-blowing awards that would make her particularly stand out."

I saw this post now I remember, those Coca-Cola kids are something else. Props to them, some of them make this Reddit guy seem lazy (joking but seriously some of them are extremely impressive).

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Holy cow, did she have time to sleep?

Wow! She even made her website in 2018! All of that time devoted to so many other things and still had the foresight to buy a URL domain and setup a profile when she was in the 7th grade!

Domain Information
Name: SABRINAGUO.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2329959973_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Domain Status:
clientTransferProhibited
Nameservers:
NS63.WORLDNIC.COM

NS64.WORLDNIC.COM

Dates
Registry Expiration: 2023-11-06 17:32:11 UTC
Updated: 2022-09-07 08:15:10 UTC
Created: 2018-11-06 17:32:11 UTC

Extraordinary

Lol, a truly impressive 7th grader! Makes you wonder how much of her “accomplishments” were set up by mom and dad.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Holy cow, did she have time to sleep?

Wow! She even made her website in 2018! All of that time devoted to so many other things and still had the foresight to buy a URL domain and setup a profile when she was in the 7th grade!

Domain Information
Name: SABRINAGUO.COM
Registry Domain ID: 2329959973_DOMAIN_COM-VRSN
Domain Status:
clientTransferProhibited
Nameservers:
NS63.WORLDNIC.COM

NS64.WORLDNIC.COM

Dates
Registry Expiration: 2023-11-06 17:32:11 UTC
Updated: 2022-09-07 08:15:10 UTC
Created: 2018-11-06 17:32:11 UTC

Extraordinary

Buying a domain name that early literally means nothing. Kids with the creative desire want to start putting things online. Could've understood that having your own name with a .com is a really nice perk which many people don't get. Parents could've even bought it just to save it for the kid. You're thinking too much in bad faith.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:It’s an amazing resume, but some of the listed activities are hard to verify (e.g. 30hr/wk at restaurants every summer). Do people self claim or exaggerate on college app? DC is bloody honest and I am afraid that’ll hurt the chances.

My kid had 35 hr/wk — submitted FAFSA and CSS to all colleges (early and RD) in November — our tax returns clearly showed how much DC made. Applied for FA in the early rounds because we had no idea what we were doing but did not apply for FA in the RD round. The colleges still had proof if they wanted!

Although I agree it probably is not hard to fudge those numbers for most kids. Case in point — a kid worked on a project started by my DC. That kid’s LinkedIn says they put in 150 hours when it was 30. Her parents (double income high earners) said she needed to get merit scholarships wherever possible, so this girl lied. Funny thing is her LinkedIn describes her work as “paid” and the says she volunteered 150 hours — she was only accepted by one private and our state school. Easy for AOs to catch a contradiction like that if she put it on her app, but also they might have compared hours with my kid’s hours — and my kid also put down total hours for the project, so there was no way anyone would believe this girls 150 hours were correct. She was a perfect fit for so many schools, but was rejected most places.

Some kids in Class of 23 thought they could claim they had “led” my kid’s project when my kid was a senior — I know this because they tried to pass it off for a competition as “theirs”, and my kid saw and had to correct them. Not sure if they tried to do that with college apps as well, but my kid’s counselor would have definitely given a bad LOR to anyone in his group who listed it as one of their activities (he asks for them) as he knew exactly what my kid had done. End result — no T20 admits for this group of cheaters! And then they wonder why their high GPAs/rigor/SAT scores do not get them in.

Be honest and parents — please don’t pressure your kids to get $$$. It’s too much for them.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Wow, for an unhooked applicant without major awards, this is basically as good as it gets. You could’ve told me this was a prospective math major and I wouldn’t blink an eye

No significant math or STEM activities.

And he was strategic and applied in social sciences, at a time when social sciences are disfavored.

If he’d had equivalent STEM activities and awards and applied at the same schools for CS or biology, he might have gotten into three of these schools, at best.

The parents here who love prestige schools but push kids to major in CS are so intensely stupid.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Is this from the earlier post:

"Beginning to explore scholarship opportunities for DD and kept seeing the Coca-Cola Scholarship pop up. Seemed like a great program that my DD would very much like to pursue, but then I saw the photo of their top 5 colleges. Is it basically pointless to spend time applying for, and if so what are other scholarships that are more accessible (doesn't need to be as large as Coca-Cola)? For context, she's a good student (4.0 unweighted) with good test scores (1550+) but doesn't have any mind-blowing awards that would make her particularly stand out."

I saw this post now I remember, those Coca-Cola kids are something else. Props to them, some of them make this Reddit guy seem lazy (joking but seriously some of them are extremely impressive).

I’d take what you find on the internet with a grain of salt.

While impressive on paper it really sounds like a student chasing grades and resume building opportunities. Why do you need to be president of 6 clubs at a time? What kind of impact will you have when you’re spread so thin? There’s a lot of incongruent stuff that a normal student would not do.

Regardless, nobody cares, unless it’s someone like you who is gullible enough and wants to find someone truly awesome for their kids to model.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There are, in reality, some seriously awesome kids out there. They don't need to have this fake B.S. propagating all over the internet. It doesn't help anyone

If this is complete, this isn’t that strong of a chance me. Example: The student has no student council position, and he wants to majoring poli sci but doesn’t seem to have worked on a campaign.

[Anonymous]

There is a girl in my DDs 8th grade class like this. She sleeps no more than 5 hours per night and has done this for years. Put into a time intensive sport relatively rare in DMV at age 4, and 4 musical instruments. The whole point is college admissions. So when you look at these profiles, it is very true that there is a lot of intentional shaping from early on. Now: the kid has to rise to the challenge, and that is where it gets interesting. Some actually thrive on it.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:There is a girl in my DDs 8th grade class like this. She sleeps no more than 5 hours per night and has done this for years. Put into a time intensive sport relatively rare in DMV at age 4, and 4 musical instruments. The whole point is college admissions. So when you look at these profiles, it is very true that there is a lot of intentional shaping from early on. Now: the kid has to rise to the challenge, and that is where it gets interesting. Some actually thrive on it.

+1 these people exist and are way ahead of the game in high school. We knew another family that prepared their kids this way and they did extremely well in college too, so it wasn't just prodding from mommy and daddy. Hope this guy makes the most of his opportunity at Duke. It's a good sign that he was able to prioritize his fit, not a lot of high schoolers can say no to Harvard. But Duke is super prestigious too so it's not a big deal. I'll be over the moon if my kids even go to UVA.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I don't think this is legit, but it sure must have been exhausting typing it all out.

Very legit, I knew a kid like this at DD's HS. Ended up at Princeton and was an academic machine. It's actually encouraging to me that there are kids like this out there who have that motor to exceed.

These are really bright kids who find going to regular high school classes painful. They don’t find an AP class difficult.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is a girl in my DDs 8th grade class like this. She sleeps no more than 5 hours per night and has done this for years. Put into a time intensive sport relatively rare in DMV at age 4, and 4 musical instruments. The whole point is college admissions. So when you look at these profiles, it is very true that there is a lot of intentional shaping from early on. Now: the kid has to rise to the challenge, and that is where it gets interesting. Some actually thrive on it.

+1 these people exist and are way ahead of the game in high school. We knew another family that prepared their kids this way and they did extremely well in college too, so it wasn't just prodding from mommy and daddy. Hope this guy makes the most of his opportunity at Duke. It's a good sign that he was able to prioritize his fit, not a lot of high schoolers can say no to Harvard. But Duke is super prestigious too so it's not a big deal. I'll be over the moon if my kids even go to UVA.

I don't believe the Reddit post was legit

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is a girl in my DDs 8th grade class like this. She sleeps no more than 5 hours per night and has done this for years. Put into a time intensive sport relatively rare in DMV at age 4, and 4 musical instruments. The whole point is college admissions. So when you look at these profiles, it is very true that there is a lot of intentional shaping from early on. Now: the kid has to rise to the challenge, and that is where it gets interesting. Some actually thrive on it.

+1 these people exist and are way ahead of the game in high school. We knew another family that prepared their kids this way and they did extremely well in college too, so it wasn't just prodding from mommy and daddy. Hope this guy makes the most of his opportunity at Duke. It's a good sign that he was able to prioritize his fit, not a lot of high schoolers can say no to Harvard. But Duke is super prestigious too so it's not a big deal. I'll be over the moon if my kids even go to UVA.

I don't believe the Reddit post was legit

Are people still stuck on this? It's legit, there are more that people do out there, this person just happens to have a great overall package coming from a lower-middle income background. We should be celebrating high achievers not fabricating ways to make people feel better by saying it's not legit. Obviously it's an anomaly and isn't needed to get into a lot of top schools, but having academic achievements like that doesn't hurt.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is a girl in my DDs 8th grade class like this. She sleeps no more than 5 hours per night and has done this for years. Put into a time intensive sport relatively rare in DMV at age 4, and 4 musical instruments. The whole point is college admissions. So when you look at these profiles, it is very true that there is a lot of intentional shaping from early on. Now: the kid has to rise to the challenge, and that is where it gets interesting. Some actually thrive on it.

+1 these people exist and are way ahead of the game in high school. We knew another family that prepared their kids this way and they did extremely well in college too, so it wasn't just prodding from mommy and daddy. Hope this guy makes the most of his opportunity at Duke. It's a good sign that he was able to prioritize his fit, not a lot of high schoolers can say no to Harvard. But Duke is super prestigious too so it's not a big deal. I'll be over the moon if my kids even go to UVA.

I don't believe the Reddit post was legit

Are people still stuck on this? It's legit, there are more that people do out there, this person just happens to have a great overall package coming from a lower-middle income background. We should be celebrating high achievers not fabricating ways to make people feel better by saying it's not legit. Obviously it's an anomaly and isn't needed to get into a lot of top schools, but having academic achievements like that doesn't hurt.

+1 it’s definitely legit but it’s dcum you have to expect people who won’t believe things that don’t fit their narrow views. Taking lots of APs is not new