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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]To sum up: Participate in sports because you love to compete, love the camaraderie of teamwork, the personal challenge, the physical activity. Playing a sport is one of the best things one can do with one's time.

But do not participate in sports thinking it will help all that much for college applications, unless being recruited to play on the college level. There is really not more to it than this.[/quote]

False. That’s not a summary at all.

That’s your personal option again that sports, esp team sports, take up too much time.

You’re wrong because there are scholar athletes everywhere who are attractive candidates for colleges and who don’t desire to play college sports, but club or other college ECs and focus on their majors, study abroad, internships, networking and friends.

Get over it OP. Not everyone wants to sit on their butt coding or doing hours of robotics. [/quote]

Honestly the same thing can be said about robotics... and pretty much everything else

The amount of time dedication and talent it takes to turn robotics into an extracurricular activity that is noticably more impressive than varsity sports is huge.

You want to build a competitive robot for the FIRST or Vex competition?  That one activity crowds out pretty much everything else.

You want to get invited to the USAMO?  You are going to be spending almost all your time on it.

You want to be a regeneron semifinalist, forget about the USAMO or robotics or the football team.

The academic extracurriculars are important to have, but if you aren't pointy (winning at least at the state level), it doesn't really help that much, you might as well touch some grass.

And yet every year, IVY+ takes kids that aren't winning competitions or being recruited athletically.

If you don't get in, maybe you are actually better off elsewhere.[/quote]

Np. I feel like you guys need a primer on what AO are looking for. They seem SOOO may Robotics/Vex/USAMO - it doesn't even phase them anymore. They are bored when they read those applications.[/quote]

Really?

There are 223 students that qualify for USAMO in the country.
If you qualify for USAMO and you have good stats, you have a good chance at any school.

First Robotics Competition has 100 Dean's List finalists.  This is significantly more impressive than varsity sports, (not as impressive as USAMO for most purposes).
Vex Robotics has 32 teams with an average of 6 players per team for about 200 students (slightly less impressive than FRC Dean's List).

USAMO especially is a big deal.
I know kids who got into MIT with almost no other EC (they were struggling to fill out that section of their application).
They had great stats 1550+ SAT and near perfect GPA but qualifying for the USAMO was their main activity.
They didn't even qualify for MOP[/quote]

This makes doing robotics or math sound like an [i]even worse idea[/i] than doing varsity sports. Your kid will put ALL his time into robotics or math and have an even worse chance of being a winner/finalist than a varsity athlete has of being recruited.

300,000 students take the AMC exam each year. Of them, 3,000 qualify for the AIME. Of them, 250 qualify for the USAMO. Thus you have a 0.0.8% chance to qualify for USAMO. Meanwhile 7% of high school varsity athletes are recruited (even higher for some sports) - basically 100x the odds of being a successful athlete than of being a successful math geek.

86,700 high school kids competed in the 2024 First Robotics. If there are 100 Dean's List finalists then you have an 0.1% chance of being a finalist, much lower than the odds of being recruited as an athlete.

Yes if you qualify for USAMO or are a First Robotics finalist that's huge but it's like being recruited to play D1 basketball. Awesome if it happens but the odds of achieving that are extraordinarily low. For the overwhelming majority of kids, math or robotics is (to echo the criticism about sports if you don't get recruited) a poor investment of time and is "just another EC" that didn't make them stand out at all.[/quote]

Of the 300,000 AMC test takers each year, I would say there are maybe 10,000-20,000 competitive kids that put in as much effort as a recruited athlete.  The quality of school that you get with USAMO is starkly different than the school that will take the average recruited athlete.  Most recruited athletes aren't being recruited to Stanford and Duke.  The USAMO kids go to MIT and Columbia.

The 86,700 First robotics competitors are on about 3500 teams.  Each team can only nominate 2 dean's list finalists.  So we are talking about 7000 kids vying for 100 spots.  Of the 7000 kids maybe 500-1000 teams are putting in as much time as a recruited athlete.  These kids get to go to Stanford and Carnegie Mellon.[/quote]
I just became aware of a so-so athlete and student recruited to
Carnegie Mellon. No robotics or USAMO. [/quote]

THIS!!!
In the last cycle, I witnessed Princeton denied a MOP male student for a math major whereas they accepted a multi-racial female student for a math major who never had her hands on competitive math contests, either AMC or high-school math league. (In case anyone wants to argue, the male student is at a T-20 now, so he is quite a high-achieving kid.)[/quote]

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