Reply to Reflections from 2025 HYPSM admit(s)

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]OP here:

On my kid - she is well-adjusted, social, and loved by her teachers and now professors. We are hands off in college and she is thriving. Did very well in the first semester. Calls home frequently. Taking very interesting classes. Joined clubs, figuring out career path. Seems to have great friends, and they will be traveling together during spring break. She is still in contact with her high school friends.

On being a one-hit wonder - we have another, older kid at a HYPSM. His results were definitely less striking than hers, but we had yet to refine the barb approach. Of course, my sample size is n=2. But I think with the variability and low chance, P(strategy working | 2 success stories) is still quite high. Sorry for the probability jargon.

On those calling me deplorable - this is just the current state of the game. I don't fault any of us for playing it. If anything, you should be blaming the admissions offices for encouraging actions like this. The sooner you catch on, the better.

[/quote]

And all of you happily lived every after.
[/quote]

Is it just me or do sentiments like these seem really common? That it's impossible for a kid can be normal, social, even likeable while still attending a top school? That it's inconceivable normal kids would ever try and strategize to get into schools?

It seems to me that the sarcasm in this reply is a really sorry attempt to pathologize success. People seem to find it deeply unsettling when a student is both strategic and socially well-adjusted because it removes their favorite excuse: that elite admissions is a trade-off between prestige and personhood. But it's really not.

Your quip is small, lol. But it's something that I see really often in these forums. When you insist that these kids are miserable or burnt out or deplorable human beings, you as an onlooker protect your own ego. It's much easier to dismiss a HYPSM student as a product of strategy than to admit they might just be a high-functioning individual who understood the rules of the game. I think this reaction is a sign of intellectual laziness. You want to believe in a 'meritocracy of the accidental', where kids get into Harvard just by being authentic (whatever that means). You think strategy is a form of cheating because it just exposes the fact that effort without direction is often wasted energy

It's entirely possible to be competitive and happy all at once, and I don't really think there's a point in moralizing the positions of individual agents here[/quote]

+1000000

Imagine having this snarky attitude towards musicians who deliberately practiced instead of only "authentically" playing songs for fun, or athletes who attended development camps and executed a specifically designed gym workout even if it was monotonous at times instead of "authentically" only playing pick up games for fun when they felt like it.[/quote]

What a poor analogy. The OP's DD got in with a 3.85 GPA and test optional with their contrived scheme that the kid was not actually that passionate about (and I'm sure has already abandoned since getting into Harvard). Athletes can't win an Olympics medal for running 15 secs in the 100m. Those athletes in your weak analogy still have to outperform others based on merits, unlike OP's DD. [/quote]

I’m not sure where you’re getting your numbers from. She had one B in a summer class. She had a 1550+. She graduated top of her class. She took 15 APs. But in today’s day and age, that’s not enough to guarantee anything [/quote]

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