Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Is this from the earlier post:

"Beginning to explore scholarship opportunities for DD and kept seeing the Coca-Cola Scholarship pop up. Seemed like a great program that my DD would very much like to pursue, but then I saw the photo of their top 5 colleges. Is it basically pointless to spend time applying for, and if so what are other scholarships that are more accessible (doesn't need to be as large as Coca-Cola)? For context, she's a good student (4.0 unweighted) with good test scores (1550+) but doesn't have any mind-blowing awards that would make her particularly stand out."

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looks like a troll.

Doing a LinkedIn search for incoming Duke students, I found one with a 1600 SAT and 16 scores of 5 on AP exams (not including senior year) with better awards and extracurriculars than the person from the Reddit post, but from Maryland. This Reddit person definitely exists, if you understand the overall details it's in line with profiles that are out there and it's backed up by existing data. But it seems like you can't fathom it for some reason.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Crazier people than him exist, you don't understand the type of effort some kids are able to put in. On the previous topic about Coca-Cola Scholars, someone shared one of the scholarship winner's bios and it's more time intensive: https://www.sabrinaguo.com/about

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looks like a troll.

Doing a LinkedIn search for incoming Duke students, I found one with a 1600 SAT and 16 scores of 5 on AP exams (not including senior year) with better awards and extracurriculars than the person from the Reddit post, but from Maryland. This Reddit person definitely exists, if you understand the overall details it's in line with profiles that are out there and it's backed up by existing data. But it seems like you can't fathom it for some reason.

You are REALLY invested in this!

Anonymous wrote:Smart accomplished kids exist, but in this case I think it’s a troll, or at least there’s a lot of exaggeration in the description of his accomplishments.

One thing that’s odd is that he’s taking AP Physics 1 and 2, then also AP Physics C. Really strange to do this since it’s the same material but at different levels of difficulty, particularly since he’s not interested in a stem degree. Same thing with math, there’s little reason to load up on math in 12 grade with stats, linear algebra and differential equation if your passion is political science. Only advantage is checking a box on a large number of advanced courses.

Looking at time commitment at his extracurriculars, first for research, nobody is going to let him design experiments, that’s a gross exaggeration, he’d probably be given a lower level task that he can handle. Then, a good graduate student will publish a paper maybe once a year, working at least 40 hours a week. To include a high school volunteer on the paper with all the hand holding guidance and mentoring he’d have to put in at least 20 hours per week. Most likely he’ll rarely see the professor but mostly the grad student he’s helping. Also really odd to ask for a recommendation from the math teacher but not from the research mentor or writing internships since if true they would be the highest accomplishments that not many student have.

Do an estimate for all activities and the heavy course load you’d realize he’d need to clone himself several times over.

Research internship 20 hours/week
Writing internship 20 hours/week
Local youth 4 hours/week
Local leftist 4 hours/week
Restaurant job 30 hours/week, summertime only
Soccer team captain: 12 hours/week, underestimate likely more
Knowledge bows with regional and stat champ 12 hours/week likely more
School debate team captain 4 hours/week
Informal debate club 4 hours/week
Philosophy club 4 hours /week

The total for extracurriculars is 84 hours excluding the summer job. Add in the regular school hours 8 hours a day, and the need to study and do homework, one hours for each class, you end up with 164 hours. The 7 day week has only 168 hours.

Sure, maybe he meets fit the philosophy club only once a month for an hour, but I’d question how ethical it is to include it on the list of extracurriculars. Most clubs meet once a week and if you are the president you’d have to also do time consuming administrative stuff. For state and local championships, those kids practice a lot, you need to add at least 10 hours a week.

Anonymous wrote:

Anonymous wrote:Looks like a troll.

Doing a LinkedIn search for incoming Duke students, I found one with a 1600 SAT and 16 scores of 5 on AP exams (not including senior year) with better awards and extracurriculars than the person from the Reddit post, but from Maryland. This Reddit person definitely exists, if you understand the overall details it's in line with profiles that are out there and it's backed up by existing data. But it seems like you can't fathom it for some reason.

Anonymous wrote:Looks like a troll.