Is my profile good enough?

Answered

Hi, for any elite university, you have met the threshold for all the checkboxes and are quite accomplished so good for you. But remember one thing, it's not a binary application process, it's not about stats and meeting the standard, it's all a grey holistic review. So while you have been working super hard and getting all these qualifications done, what they are going to look at besides a list of accomplishments is something you can't easily put on paper. At the top 10 schools, they are going to need something to judge your personal character, your intellectual vitality, your potential to contribute to the particular incoming Freshman class they are constructing as a portfolio and some sort of easy to use translation guide that allows them to take your ECs and place them in the following buckets: World Class competitor, National competitor, State competitor, Regional competitor, Local competitor. Someone taking a cursory look at your list of ECs will not intuitively know how good you are at any of those things in comparison to other Elite college applicants. Some say the hardest colleges to get into are Harvard and Stanford with less than 5% admit rate. At both these schools, the readers assign a numerical scale from 1 to 6 with 1 being the world-class top and 6 being a waste of time. Most admits have an average of 2+, 2, or 2-, and not too many 3s get in. So what I'm saying that whoever reads your application is human who is either having a good, avg. or bad day, and they are going to take all your info and essays (interviews), etc and transpose a numerical value on a single sheet of paper and tally it up and give you a final score and then take it to the committee and either let the committee decide or they are going to advocate for you. So the process is good but not perfect. There are things that you can do an there are things that are out of your control. For instance at Harvard, what we learned from the latest Law Suit brought against the Harvard College for potentially discriminating against Asian students which they were found innocent of, once an applicant meets the SAT standard of 1500 or ACT standard of 33, they have checked off the checkbox for Standardized tests. That means that if you have 1550, 1580, 1600, you are treated the same as someone submitting 1500. And if you have a 36, 35, 34, you are treated as someone who has a 33. So in that specific category, there is no reason to take the SAT or ACT again. But this is Harvard. If you are applying to MIT the 25/75% range is different and you have to make that choice on your own. So there is no hard and fast rule. Research your colleges first. Also, all these elite colleges are looking for interesting, genuine, quirky kids with either a major "spike" or "multiple smaller spikes" versus generalists, although nothing is wrong with being great at 10 things. So the admissions teams are building a portfolio of talent called the Freshman class out of the 45,000 applicants so sometimes having perfect stats has nothing to do with the exercise they are doing. They might come across a talented Ballerina who already dances in the Boston Ballet Company who is also designing her own "Pointe" shoes using 3-D printing techniques to make the shanks, and say "hmmm this is clever STEM girl who is has a spike in Dancing, let's bring her on". And so forth and so forth. Therefore, if you are reading between the lines of what I'm writing you still have time to develop and explain what your "spike" is. It's not the sum of the parts that will get you in necessarily, it's the quality of what they are tallying up on your final sheet and a story that makes the reader advocate for you. Good luck in your college admissions journey.