So Ivies and top colleges are ALWAYS REACH?

[Anonymous]

I am getting pissed now. High achieving Asian-American male student in magnet STEM program. 4.0 GPA, NMF, 10 APs, 1 state level EC, hundreds of hours of community service, member of a number of honor societies, started two clubs, research experience....and Ivies are just reach for him? FU%K IT!!!!!!!

[Anonymous]

Penn is a match. The rest are reaches.

[Anonymous]

Depends on what is defind by top college. Top 25? Top 5? UVA is a Match

[Anonymous]

Well there are literally thousands of kids out there like him, so yes.

[Anonymous]

Imagine 5-6,000 undergrads at a college with identical stats to your kid. Would that type of school be ideal for the best college experience? Or would you want your child's class to be somewhat more diverse in terms of interests, aptitudes, etc.?

[Anonymous]

Oh no! You want a college that has some frat boys, some sorority chicks, some people on Tinder, some on Grinder, some eggheads and some hour glasses! Skip the Ivies and live happily? I guess!

[Anonymous]

What a sense of entitlement, OP. You think nobody else's kid is accomplished? There are thousands of kids with similar stats and it is a reach for all of them. Your child is obviously very accomplished and will succeed whether he hits the Ivy lottery or not.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:What a sense of entitlement, OP. You think nobody else's kid is accomplished? There are thousands of kids with similar stats and it is a reach for all of them. Your child is obviously very accomplished and will succeed whether he hits the Ivy lottery or not.

Correction - legacy admissions that are not based on such excellent stats are the ones with the unearned sense of entitlement. It is the elitist manipulation of the educational system, that gives us grossly under qualified people like Trump in the WH. Or maybe merit no longer matters.

For the non-legacy, non-hook, people with the excellent stats? it's just a lament on an anon board.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am getting pissed now. High achieving Asian-American male student in magnet STEM program. 4.0 GPA, NMF, 10 APs, 1 state level EC, hundreds of hours of community service, member of a number of honor societies, started two clubs, research experience....and Ivies are just reach for him? FU%K IT!!!!!!!

I've been a Harvard interviewer for decades. In this area, a high GPA in the school's most rigorous courseload, several 5's on APs taken as a junior with several more in progress as a senior, and 1500 plus M+V SAT's, gets you into the top 30-40 percent of the applicant pool. The school has freshman dorm space for 4.5 percent of the applicant pool. So that top group still has to be reduced by 80%.

Once you have established that a student is academically prepared, what the universities like to see is that a student is getting off the sofa and doing things. They would rather have a 1500 SAT scorer who gets things done, than a 1600 whose hasn't contributed much. The 1500 who gets things done is far more likely to be successful, and either give a wad o' cash to the university, or make the university look good by creating something.

With a state level EC, lots of community service, and starting clubs, your son has demonstrated that he is proactive. If the research was designed by him and yielded some results that he wrote up, he will demonstrate original/scientific thinking (We see kids at the STEM magnets publishing in scientific journals every year). He will get in somewhere good. Can he count on a particular Ivy? No. This country has 330 million people. At this moment, a kid on Bainbridge Island off of Seattle with 1600 SATS is observing wildlife for the 330th day in a row, and is writing up the results or recording them for a research team at UW. A kid in the Berkshires is composing a concerto. A kid in Minnesota will be written up in the local rag for taking the most APs of anyone in the county. All of this is really good for us as a nation. It means we have a lot of centers of academic excellence around the country. Meeting these kids gives me hope, They, their scientific training, and their motivation will outlive Trump and his pile of old angry white guys.

[Anonymous]

I interview too and unfortunately (barring some kind of research discovery) your kids profile is on a national scale not unusual. Honestly, I do not know why you are surprised or angry. Top schools have been reaches for years for almost everyone. It seems that you did very little investigation or research on admission standards, made assumptions and are now angry. Very odd

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am getting pissed now. High achieving Asian-American male student in magnet STEM program. 4.0 GPA, NMF, 10 APs, 1 state level EC, hundreds of hours of community service, member of a number of honor societies, started two clubs, research experience....and Ivies are just reach for him? FU%K IT!!!!!!!

But there are more kids like this than can possibly be accepted. I don't see anything in your description that distinguishes this student from many others.

[Anonymous]

Sorry, troll post IMHO

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I am getting pissed now. High achieving Asian-American male student in magnet STEM program. 4.0 GPA, NMF, 10 APs, 1 state level EC, hundreds of hours of community service, member of a number of honor societies, started two clubs, research experience....and Ivies are just reach for him? FU%K IT!!!!!!!

Yes, I call them crap shoot schools.

[Anonymous]

The good news is that there are plenty of great schools just under the tippy top schools.

[Anonymous]

Don't feed the troll! Just the fact the OP mentioned their race is very telling.