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

[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

The guy has other, helpful comments on Reddit, and his post is actually missing some important things, like campaign volunteer experience,that would have been easy to get or fake.

I think that the post is real, and that this is a bright, mature kid who found college admissions web forums very early.

So, he found school easy, and he knew how to play the game early on. And, thanks to COVID, maybe he was able to do things like “intern for a popular newspaper” without putting in a lot of time.

+1

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

To be fair, DS built a website in middle school. We would have had no idea how to help him. He taught himself 2-3 coding languages by watching universities’ free classes. Yes he was in a magnet where they were teaching python. But it’s doable.

One needs a credit card or online banking to buy a domain and renew it each year. If this kid had their own credit card and/or checking account in the 7th grade THEN I'm impressed.

Also, please tell me where my kid can get a credit card when they turn eleven.

Huh? This is ridiculous. If your kid asked for some money so they can create a website under their name you wouldn't encourage it? Buying a domain and hosting generally isn't super expensive. If she had an interest and asked her parents, or even if her parents suggested it, it doesn't matter. Building a personal website is not that crazy and not a huge deal.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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

The guy has other, helpful comments on Reddit, and his post is actually missing some important things, like campaign volunteer experience,that would have been easy to get or fake.

I think that the post is real, and that this is a bright, mature kid who found college admissions web forums very early.

So, he found school easy, and he knew how to play the game early on. And, thanks to COVID, maybe he was able to do things like “intern for a popular newspaper” without putting in a lot of time.

No, it’s made up stuff.

Only high school intern at prestigious newspaper writing tons of articles? No, that’s not how it works.

You're actually clueless about what kids around the country do, it's funny to see some people here have such confidence about things they don't know about.

Yeah right, he’s interning a prestigious newspaper writing tons (! Lol) of articles but is not involved in the school newspaper or even the yearbook. And he doesn’t get a letter of recommendation from any of his main accomplishments. I just wrote one such letter of recommendation for an undergrad intern. He put in 40 hours a week for 12 weeks.

The internship and research extracurriculars are fake.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:Many schools do not let kids take AP courses in 9th or 10th grade and certainly do not allow six APs in 10th grade. Also, many schools have prereqs for science, math, and language APs. So I applaud this kid, but I don't think he is representative of what it takes to get into a T20. For most students, this wouldn't be possible even if they wanted to and/or were capable of taking on that level of academic challenge.

My kids school allows you to take APs in 8th grade, and by 11th grade, every class but gym is an AP. All to say that the numbers of kids with a ridiculous number of APs is probably more than you realize.

[Anonymous]

Taking differential equations in high school to major in political science. I had a good laugh. I hope it’s fake, otherwise it would be just plain stupid and a complete waste of time.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Unfortunately, what everyone has to realize is that even in the top 1% there is the top 10% of the top 1%. Read the information released as part of the Harvard case, because one of the interesting points is they indicated that 10% - 20% of their acceptances (again, acceptances not applications) are easy acceptances. The kids are so accomplished on every rubric that they just sail through admissions.

Honestly, this kid probably falls into that category or darn close. He says unhooked, however, LMC is actually probably a hook. That demographic is severely under-represented on elite campuses.

Some other random thoughts:
(i) would have been interesting to see if his college admissions were the same had all his ECs been far right vs. far left...can't underestimate how aligned political ideologies of AOs and the applicant likely helped
(ii) colleges don't hold it against applicants if their HS only has 6 periods, or don't allow Freshman to take APs, etc....you are compared to your HS peers, so the question is did you take a challenging courseload compared to your peers
(iii) colleges only really care about taking core APs and/or APs in the areas where you want to study...they could not care less that this applicant took AP CS Principles or any other random non-core APs.
(iv) it makes all the sense in the world that MIT rejected this applicant...MIT offered little to nothing in their major and the applicant had no ECs to support an MIT application...honestly, one has to believe the applicant misrepresented themselves to MIT to produce a competitive application, and it kind of pisses me off that they applied at all
(v) a male applicant interested in liberal arts with a story to support it gives them an admissions edge because the liberal arts are heavily female skewed

Disagree about MIT. This applicant was clearly talented at math and would have been fine academically at MIT. MIT is actually very good for political science so it's not unreasonable to apply there. He probably just didn't have enough STEM activities or involvement to convince MIT that he's a good fit.

Maybe things are different now...but my MIT friends always joke that MIT has liberal arts degrees for all the kids that can't hack STEM (so they can still graduate with an MIT degree).

Political science is no joke at MIT and they still have to take difficult STEM classes that all MIT students do. But I would agree, it's overall an odd place to get an undergrad degree for polisci. I think going there for a PhD in polisci would be more compelling. But MIT is MIT, there's nothing they're bad at.

Sure ain't Harvard or Stanford in that regard though

[Anonymous]

No, folks, you do not have to buy your kids their own web domains when they are in the 7th grade so that tbry can get into a top college

[Anonymous]

I believe the profile but 100% agree this person should have been able to go to Duke with far more $$ given the other acceptances and how even the Duke administration views the pecking order.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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.

Not true. We have a weekly newspaper on our hometown

+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

The guy has other, helpful comments on Reddit, and his post is actually missing some important things, like campaign volunteer experience,that would have been easy to get or fake.

I think that the post is real, and that this is a bright, mature kid who found college admissions web forums very early.

So, he found school easy, and he knew how to play the game early on. And, thanks to COVID, maybe he was able to do things like “intern for a popular newspaper” without putting in a lot of time.

No, it’s made up stuff.

Only high school intern at prestigious newspaper writing tons of articles? No, that’s not how it works.

It is possible if he lived in a small tiny Podunk town

Podunk towns are, by definition, insignificant places. No newspaper. No radio station. No media and, frankly,.no commerce.

You didn't grow up around here did you?

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I believe the profile but 100% agree this person should have been able to go to Duke with far more $$ given the other acceptances and how even the Duke administration views the pecking order.

There’s little in that profile that’s believable.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:I believe the profile but 100% agree this person should have been able to go to Duke with far more $$ given the other acceptances and how even the Duke administration views the pecking order.

There’s little in that profile that’s believable.

The profile is both believable and impressive, but the part that’s impressive is not believable, and the part that’s believable is not 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

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."



The bios of these kids are next level

Is it really that surprising? A program that sends the majority of its kids to Harvard, Stanford, Duke, Yale, and Princeton is bound to be full of kids with pretty incredible accomplishments and academics

Coca Cola scholars are announced after college acceptances. Again, it is no surprise that cream of the kids accepted to those schools are able to win this scholarship.

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

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

The guy has other, helpful comments on Reddit, and his post is actually missing some important things, like campaign volunteer experience,that would have been easy to get or fake.

I think that the post is real, and that this is a bright, mature kid who found college admissions web forums very early.

So, he found school easy, and he knew how to play the game early on. And, thanks to COVID, maybe he was able to do things like “intern for a popular newspaper” without putting in a lot of time.

No, it’s made up stuff.

Only high school intern at prestigious newspaper writing tons of articles? No, that’s not how it works.

You're actually clueless about what kids around the country do, it's funny to see some people here have such confidence about things they don't know about.

Yeah right, he’s interning a prestigious newspaper writing tons (! Lol) of articles but is not involved in the school newspaper or even the yearbook. And he doesn’t get a letter of recommendation from any of his main accomplishments. I just wrote one such letter of recommendation for an undergrad intern. He put in 40 hours a week for 12 weeks.

The internship and research extracurriculars are fake.

Many colleges don’t accept supplemental recommendations and you would never substitute a teacher recommendation with an EC/job recommendation.

Also, even colleges that allow supplementals don’t ascribe much value to them unless coming from a big donor or some kind of luminary.

[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."

It’s quite a lineup of schools that they go to, can’t really get much better

[Anonymous]

Anonymous wrote:I believe the profile but 100% agree this person should have been able to go to Duke with far more $$ given the other acceptances and how even the Duke administration views the pecking order.

That’s not how top colleges work. They don’t say “oh, you got into x school, let’s bump up the money to get you to come.” A school like Duke has more than enough exceptional students willing to attend or come from the waitlist to fill out their class. The administration would not care about spending tons of time breaking their own standard practices to convince one or two students that would otherwise enroll elsewhere, their focus is on building an overall class that fits the school’s mission.