Reply to Do you know a kid who was screwed in the college process in last few years?

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]The thing is if your kid is the top of the class/top stats, you can’t really just wing it. Once you meet the baseline for grades and stats it doesn’t really mean much.

So if your kid is planning on applying to many T20 schools, they really should be starting the research on each of the supplemental for each school over the summer. Continue to refine. Dig deep. Sign up to the school newspapers, go to the departmental websites, find events at the university that might interest them.

[b]The problem is these kids try to do all of it in a 10 day period in late December and truthfully it’s just painfully obvious how shallow those supplemental essays are. They never work. [/b]I have yet to see a really good supplemental essay for a top school that was done in a very short period of time.

Why? Because they don’t go deep. The best essays are soaked in the fabric of the school, the intimate details that take a lot of time and research to develop.[/quote]

That is my kid. Did not even finish the common app essay in summer.  Finished the common app essay just in time for the EA deadline.

For a few supplements a few topics were selected but the writing the most intensive was the 1 week prior to the EA deadline for the publics and the 2 weeks during winter break for RD.

DC got into 5 T20s including two of HYPSM. That is where I disagree with the gist of your post. That it takes some deep metaphysical understanding of colleges. Going in, that is what I believed too as that seems to be common wisdom.

I am not talking that the kid was screwed, the results were far beyond my expectations at least. There were 6 colleges that we thought DC had a good chance in and 5 that were probably less likely. Got into 3 of these less likely colleges, where DC did not spend much time as the focus was mostly on the 6 that we thought offered better chances.

For one T20 private, DC was offered $200k in merit. It is a last minute add, because questions were similar to another and changes were no more than a few word replacements for obvious name changes and one new sentence. This is definitely the college that took the very least amount of time. It took more time for safety college.

I thus think there is way more randomness that much of what paid consultants peddle is primarily directed at their self interest rather than students.

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