Reply to Wilson H.S. or GDS/Sidwell/St. Albans for your basic Ward 3 smart kid

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Reply to "Wilson H.S. or GDS/Sidwell/St. Albans for your basic Ward 3 smart kid"

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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]I've interviewed a dozen Wilson students applying to my alma mater (an Ivy) in the last six or seven years, and none has been admitted, and not for lack of brains or industry.  Wilson does get one or two students into my school every year, I just haven't interviewed any of the succesful applicants.   If you're willing to play guidance counselor to your kid to a large extent junior and senior year, your kid may indeed do just as well at Wilson as St. Albans etc.   The Wilson kids simply don't seem to get nearly enough attention from college counselors as individuals, a public school problem hardly unique to the school.   But if your kid winds up as Ivy League material, regardless of which area school he ends up attending, you may wish to seriously consider doing something radical for senior year.  That is get him OUT of the DC applicant pool altogether somehow, have him graduate from a school in North Dakota, or Alaska, or Kenya, or the Bahamas.  Anywhere but here or NYC.  The numbers crunch at 5-star schools (mine admits 8%) has become increasingly brutal for a decade, no matter if your kid applies to Stanford, Georgetown, Ivies of military academies, or if a kid graduates from Sidwell, St. Albans or Wilson.  I don't see more kids getting in from the DC independents than Wilson (although kids from high-powered suburban magnets like Blair in Silver Spring and Thomas Jefferson in Alexandria seem to have an edge).  But sometimes I interview kids on the phone, kids who live in cities where few graduates of my school reside, like Minneapolis, and Honolulu and Tuscon.  These kids can get in with academic records that wouldn't fly for a DC applicant by a long shot.  I've seen DC applicants who've taken 9 AP classes, and received all 5s on the their tests get shot down.  I've seen valedictorian kids with perfect SAT scores who published op-ed pieces in the Post and did research at NIH get rejected.  But from Honolulu, they sometimes get in with 4 or 5 AP classes and SATs in the 600s under their belts (and there are not low-income minority kids).  Take it from me, applying to college from DC, the country's second toughest applicant pool, hurts your kids chances of admisssion - the type of the school, the name of the school, doesn't change that.

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So what?  This has been the case even when I went to college, 20+ yrs ago.  At the Ivy I attended, there were a boatload of kids from the DC metro area just the same.  My DH and I both interviews students for our respective schools, both Ivies, when we lived in NYC and while very few of the ones we interviewed got in, there are boatloads of kids from NYC at those schools too. [/quote]

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