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[quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous][quote=Anonymous]"OP again. There is some serious logical fallacy going on in responses above. I have a 3.98 UW with 15 AP/IB classes before I graduate. All As except for 1 A- last year. 1530 SAT.

The only reason not to increase number of applications is the time and fees it costs.

People who think that the quality of applications goes down after 10 apps have it exactly wrong. My 11th essay is much sharper and wittier than my first, when I was finding my voice."

I love your attitude and wish you only the best! And you're totally correct that each essay is easier than the one before. You find a groove.

And to those old farts who think that students are crafting beautiful applications for their dream schools, sorry, but no. The romance is gone! There's no thick paper that you carefully type on like when we were kids. It's all just buttons you click that yield a badly offset application in the Common App that hurts your eyes to look at. There's one long essay that all the schools use, and then you write a shorter one for each specific school. But the short ones are honestly not that different from one another, so your general themes and the aspects of yourself you want to highlight can be applied to these "variations on a theme."

- Someone who applied as a first-gen POC from a high school that never sent anyone out of state or to an elite HYS. Applied to about 20 schools, including 4 safeties, and got into every single HYSP MIT whatever the acronym here is. I had no idea what my odds were, much less whether they were cumulative, since nobody from my school had ever tried for those places before. But I really, really wanted a shot at the life I imagined I'd have if I got into just one of those schools. I figured that some admissions person somewhere might find my story interesting and keep me in the "maybe" pool long enough for me to make it all the way to the admits, so I kept on filling out applications. And that did seem like kissing a frog. But everyone knows you have to kiss a whole bunch before the prince shows up. I don't see why you care that I spent all that time or that OP is spending more money than is absolutely necessary. We all have our thing that we're willing to splurge on, right? [/quote]

You are the classic “exception that proves the rule.”  If you got into every Ivy that you applied to, there was something in your app that appealed to all of the the ADs.  It’s not just test scores and grades. Being a POC and first gen with an “interesting story” certainly didn’t hurt. For every student like you, there are a dozen who applied to multiple top 20 schools and were admitted to none.[b] If you’re a princess, kissing the frogs may work every time. For your dime a dozen UMC kid, not so much.[/b] [/quote]

That first-gen POC from a less prestigious high school probably goes from 1530 to 1600 SATs if he, she or they had attended the same high school and had the same advantages as the "dime a dozen UMC kid". That's why this kid is a princess and the UMC kid isn't.

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