Reply to Tell me how you got your kid into Northwestern

Forum Index » College and University Discussion

Reply to "Tell me how you got your kid into Northwestern"

Subject:

Emoticons





More smilies

Text Color: Font: Close Marks

[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]Hello. DC is a junior and loves Northwestern - a lot. We visited last summer and loved it. Any tips or intel on what spikes or characteristics NU might look for in students? Aside from stats? Would love to hear your story!

And if your kid graduated Northwestern - how did they like it? How are things post-grad?[/quote]

I went to Northwestern for grad school. I had a work-study job in admissions, and I learned it was unusually easy to get in to my program my year, because they bought new equipment, and they needed student cash to pay for the equipment.

One moral: Especially if you’re a respectable applicant who’s full-pay, always apply to your dream schools, because, sometimes, the school might really need your money, even if it seems as if it wouldn’t care about your money.

Other thoughts:

- Northwestern seemed to me to be the kind of school that’s aimed at good corporate game players. I normally answer questions like these by saying something like, “Kids shouldn’t twist themselves into pretzels to please admissions officers,” but I think the core Northwestern undergrad is like a young version of a sane, functional character from “Madmen.” Middle or upper class high school juniors who are right for Northwestern, and who don’t have amazing hooks, should already have College Confidential accounts and should be active on a wide range of college admissions forums. They should probably be able to give you the user names of three admissions professionals who are active on social media sites. They should have understood the importance of creating a spiky collection of ECs when they were freshmen. If they’re too sincere and dreamy to have been that strategic when they were freshmen, they’re not really a great fit for Northwestern. Maybe they’ll get in anyway and win the lottery, but maybe they’re a better fit for Wash. U., Emory or the University of Rochester.

- Understand that the Northwestern admissions people might have a very hard-headed, Chicago-centric approach to life. Even if they’re poets, they’re the beer drinking barfight poets, not wine-drinking Yale poets.  Much more likely, they’re sober, lemonade-drinking siblings of CEOs with very sensibly diversified portfolios. A kid applying to Northwestern should have excruciatingly sensible, down-to-earth essays. Dreamy students can F off and apply to Oberlin.

- I think that one strategy might be for an applicant to look at academic programs and student organizations at Northwestern, and try to figure out what programs and organizations might have practical itches the applicant can scratch. Students should essentially be figuring out how to present themselves as students who can contribute to and benefit from specific programs at the philosophy department, the sociology department or some other out-of-fashion department, and they should be presenting themselves as potentially great, eager managers of specific service organizations or other important, non-glamorous, non-overrun student organizations. Not as editors of the Daily Northwestern, but as would-be marketers for much smaller, hungrier student groups.

- Students should avoid saying they want to major in a major that attracts a lot of idiotic lemmings, like computer science, at a very selective school, unless they have truly spectacular achievements in that area. It’s hard for a polite person to convey how lacking in commonsense it is for normal great students to apply as preprofessional lemmings right now. This is a great year as to go in as a women’s studies major and somehow double major in economics. It’s not a good year for an 18-year-old who’s not already working for Google to apply to Northwestern as a CS major. Full-pay would-be premeds should already be working for pay in a hospital or clinic, and they should be doing some program this summer that should lead to them probably getting a low-level paper published in a mediocre journal. If they’re truly full-pay, and they didn’t find a program like that on their own and just have you pay for it, they’re absolutely not smart enough to get good grades in Northwestern premed classes.

- Still another strategy for kids who like Northwestern is to look at other Big 10 schools, and at the top research universities in Big 10 school states, and to create a list of schools that are like Northwestern but less trendy. Possibilities could include Case Western, Indiana University, the University of Minnesota, the University of Wisconsin, the University of Iowa, and  Chicago schools like DePaul and Loyola. Even high school students with very high stats should view applications to schools like these as the main course and possibly getting into Northwestern as a surprise gift dessert from the chef.

[/quote]

Options

	Disable HTML in this message
	Disable BB Code in this message
	Disable smilies in this message

Review message

Search Recent Topics Hottest Topics