Strange UPenn admission

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:There is probably a rich donor in her family you don't know about.

Though she did have a fantastic GPA, so there is that. And maybe her teachers wrote glowing letters of rec.

+1 and maybe she had a fantastic arts portfolio

You also have little clue of her ECs as several kids have accomplishments outside of school. Add in essays and awards also.

When I graduated in the early 2000s, we had a quiet kid who turned out to be homeless/raising himself for most of high school (single mom was strung out on drugs). Always composed and well put together, only stood out to me because he often wore suits. Ended up at Cornell. I couldn't tell you of a single club he was a part of at school. I also had no clue that he was working mostly fulltime outside of school. I didn't find out about any of this until after graduation.

This is a great story. Thanks for sharing. So glad to hear that such students do not fall through cracks in the college admission process.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Just to follow up, rejected at BU, NYU, Northeastern, Northwestern, and many others. Definitely not a secret rich family member. I guess it comes down to having the right AO see something that no one else does.

Rejections from other schools are irrelevant. We're talking about a rich relative who is tied to Penn somehow. We know a kid from our school whose uncle (mom's brother, so different last name) graduated from Penn and has given 7 figures to the school. Kid got into Penn. Kid is not legacy because the parents and grandparents did not go to Penn.

[Anonymous]

Can be full pay in a major that UPenn does not have many applied

Anonymous wrote:Kid at our school got into UPenn RD. 1200 SAT scores and 3s and 4s on APs (although probably test optional, since this was the last year Penn allowed that). Straight As but avoided many of the hardest classes offered at school, not close to highest rigor. Very mid-level ECs. White girl, no hooks. The only minor "hook" we can think of is that she's an artsy humanities major, which they maybe don't get a lot of due to how pre-professional Penn is. She got uniformly rejected by other top tier, mid tier, and low-mid tier schools. She is really unexcited about going to Penn but committed due to lack of other options. Were Penn admissions strange this year?