Reply to What's the appeal for Amherst?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I don’t think think anything OP said about Amherst is correct, except the comment about diversity.  It is, and always has been, at the top of the pack for SLACs and many kids there turn down lots of other schools.  (I was admitted everywhere I applied and chose Amherst.). It’s a gorgeous campus in a great college community with cool college towns, and great professors who are really engaged with the students. [b] Their commitment to diversity is super intense, though, so there’s no way my white UMC kids from MoCo are getting in.[/b]  So I’m definitely not talking it up to them!  
On the “different groups” point….my experience from some decades ago is that the only group that really didn’t mix much was the prep school kids from NYC (the Dalton folks, etc., not the Regis kids).  Those are also the guy that go into I-banking so maybe what PP experienced—-but those kids are at every top school.  I went to Yale graduate school and I found the Yale undergrads in my program pretty insufferable, but, again, there may be some selection bias there.

At any rate—hope everyone finds a good spot for their particular student! [/quote]

True story - admissions director from Amherst visited my NoVa public many years ago, at a time when Amherst was looking to diversify its admissions pool beyond New England and Mid-Atlantic prep schools.

He made a presentation to a group of seniors the counselors had decided might be Amherst material, and then invited questions.  Crickets.

He then pointed to me and said I must have a question.  I asked him whether a middle-class kid from a NoVa public might feel out of place at a school with so many private-school kids.  For whatever reason, the question triggered the AD and he started yelling about how there were kids from Harlem and from all different stations and walks of life there.  In retrospect, it was a softball question for an admissions director, but he appeared to be seriously angry and offended.

About two hours after the presentation, I got a call to come see [b]my guidance counselor.[/b]  I thought he was going to chew me out for offending the AD, but he [b]said that he'd gone over the grades and activities of some of the invited students with the AD[/b] and that the AD had indicated that he could essentially guarantee that three of us would be admitted, if we chose to apply.  I don't know if the AD had any idea I was the kid who had set him off during the Q&A session.

I did not apply to Amherst, but one of the others did and ended up going there (I ended up going to an Ivy, as did the third student).  My classmate who went to Amherst ended up making loads of money in Silicon Valley.  He had nothing but good things to say about Amherst.  We used to give him a hard time about a famous person in his fraternity. [/quote]

Did you authorize your guidance counselor to share your private information such as your grades with the visiting admissions director ? 
[/quote]

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