

The Surprising Psychology of Impressiveness - dsplittgerber
http://calnewport.com/blog/2010/03/26/how-to-get-into-stanford-with-bs-on-your-transcript-failed-simulations-the-surprising-psychology-of-impressiveness/

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melling
I picked David because his achievements seemed more concrete. The "marketing"
and "sustainability" stuff sounded like fluff to me. I didn't read much more
of the article after I found out he chose the other guy.

~~~
wakeupthedawn
As someone who actually goes to top school, I cannot even fathom how someone
would think that being captain of a track team and learning calligraphy would
be more impressive than lobby U.N. delegates.

Track captains are a dime a dozen and there is nothing "impressive" about
signing up for calligraphy class. Maybe those were the easy classes at his
school - I don't know. But there's nothing inherently impressive about taking
calligraphy. I don't even know why you would put that on your resume unless
you were going to write an essay about it.

Working with the UN as a high schooler is something that grabs the attention
of an admissions officer. I'm sure his essay about the experience sealed the
deal.

~~~
sharms
In a world of 7 billion people, you will find that just about everyone is a
dime a dozen.

To use your own words, the following is equally as true: there is nothing
"impressive" about signing up to lobby the U.N. as an unpaid intern.

Show me a student making real money, and that is actually valued by the free
market, and I will be impressed.

~~~
nostrademons
"Show me a student making real money, and that is actually valued by the free
market, and I will be impressed."

I think posts like this actually reinforce the article's meta-point, which is
that people are impressed by accomplishments that _fit with the person's
values_ where _it's not obvious how to accomplish them_.

You (and many other readers of this site) value success in business. Even if
you're currently making real money, you probably weren't at age 17, and
probably didn't have much of a clue how to at age 17, and so a 17-year-old
making real money is impressive.

The football player here values the skills he learned from football, and knows
how difficult it was to balance them with scholastic achievement, and so he's
impressed by the guy who captained the football team and yet still managed to
take calligraphy and get good grades.

The college admission's officer is tasked with assembling a unique, diverse,
interesting class. She obviously would not have taken the job if she didn't
value uniqueness. And so when somebody shows up that doesn't fit the profile
that she sees all day, and has accomplished something a little out of the
ordinary, she's impressed.

Don't mistake the specific examples for the general principle. You may not
share the same value system as a college admission's officer. Hell, you may
not even value college. But you can still use this to impress people who have
things that you want.

~~~
kiba
_You (and many other readers of this site) value success in business. Even if
you're currently making real money, you probably weren't at age 17, and
probably didn't have much of a clue how to at age 17, and so a 17-year-old
making real money is impressive._

I suspect the parent poster loath people who enjoy rent-seeking, political
jockeying, and anything that scream power for power's sake.

He want to make useful products that benefit the world and make a difference.
Business success, per se, is not what he's looking for. Business success is
only a measure of how much he was able to make a difference in the world and
how much he expand the pies for everybody.

~~~
rue
Or maybe they just value the ability to make more money than others.

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aphyr
I thought Steve was impressive because he was uncommon. By definition, every
high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; you're likely
to see hundreds of Davids in a given college admissions department. It's much
less likely that you'll encounter someone who worked with an NGO or the UN--
even if Steve's abilities or perserverance weren't exceptional.

Still, I think there's something to the model. It _is_ difficult to envision
how one might become an advisor to a UN NGO! That was definitely a factor in
my evaluation.

~~~
underover
_By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track
team;_

I agree with your point, but this sentence is not true.

~~~
aphyr
Correction: it is _highly probable_ that they will have a captain. :)

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endtime
This is particularly exaggerated among Stanford undergrads, presumably by
intent of the admissions department. I didn't do my undergrad at Stanford, but
I've heard many stories from undergrad friends about the guy down the hall who
didn't seem particularly outstanding or bright, until he turned out to be e.g.
the #2 model airplane builder in the world. This line in particular stood out
to me:

>Admissions officers would agree. They’re not looking to build hardworking and
diligent classes. Instead, they want to build classes that are interesting.

The emphasis on this elusive impressive/unusual quality over raw academic
prowess also explains the quality of some of the problem sets I've
graded...but then, doing well on problem sets and starting successful
companies (or becoming an outlier by some other metric of success) are
completely different things. Stanford optimizes for the latter.

~~~
jacobolus
I bet you’d find worse problem sets just about anywhere else. There are all
kinds of reasons why 19-year-olds fuck up on problem sets, not all of them to
do with lacking “academic” talent.

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jacobolus
A better way of saying this is: “I worked a lot on X” is less
interesting/impressive than “A bunch of adults acted on something I did.”

To be honest though, this article’s premise (I should figure out how to
efficiently get into college) seems pretty stupid. It’s just as stupid as
college counselor’s premise, and really basically the same.

Instead of _“drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule and put your
attention toward becoming an insider”_ , how about trying to learn as much as
you can from your classes (emphasis: learning not some irrelevant number),
build cool stuff, and try to make it have a real-world impact because they are
intrinsically valuable things to do?

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shadowsun7
_Steve called and e-mailed reporters, eventually scoring a few big hits,
including a mention in Time Magazine’s Green Issue_

Okay, it was at this point where I switched and picked Steve over David.

Captain of the track team sounds impressive, until you consider that there
would be 400 other captains sitting in an academic reviewer's inbox. Now I'm
not really sure if this is impressiveness, but it sure stands out if I had to
sift through a hundred or a thousand applications, and this one guy writes
about his experience in the UN.

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jaytee_clone
In the mind of a typical high school student, being a team captain is a known
path with many known examples. Being a part of UN is not so obvious thus it's
a risky path and it may take many failures before stumbling upon the right
path.

Sure, the right path may be simple. But so are many successful start-ups
ideas. Yet you can't just discredit the skills of the founders just because
the ideas were simple. Because simple ideas usually came many iterations of
bad ones

If I am an investor I'd invest in Steve because, he is, as PG once said,
relentlessly resourceful.

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wallflower
Love this quote. I can deeply identify with it. I don't have to be good at
something to enjoy it. And you'll improve over time, even if that's not the
purpose you seek.

The Magic of Time - The Last One Standing:

[http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-
on...](http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-one-
standing.html)

> When her best friend tried to get Kara to drop a difficult linear algebra
> class, Kara, to her friend’s horror, simply shrugged and replied, “I like
> linear algebra.”

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necrecious
The concept of failed simulation is very interesting. I wrote a post about how
the capability to simulate is important to programmers and designers, where
the failure to simulate is produces bad code/products.

[http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-...](http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-
for-the-daemon-or-are-you-a-good-simulator/)

This article is about the inverse effect, which I didn't even think about at
all.

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postfuturist
The whole concept of highly selective schools is distasteful. I can't imagine
myself in the position of choosing between prospective students for one. The
selection process is highly arbitrary just like hiring. I wouldn't accept the
responsibility of turning away prospective students who actually want to come
to a school to learn.

~~~
sharms
I think, as I have been guilty of, people underestimate just how hard it is to
hire someone.

It always sounded easy, but after hiring a few people, it is very hit or miss
no matter what you do.

To imagine you can predict what a developing student mind is capable of is
simply hubris.

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dgabriel
With a solid C average coming out of high school, I got into Carnegie Mellon
(not Brown, though...), but wound up going to a state school that gave me a
free ride for 4 years. There are lots of ways to hack the admissions process,
but none of them include Japanese calligraphy (unless you become a cultural
ambassador to Japan).

~~~
nostrademons
If you believe Steve Jobs, however, one of the ways to hack the PC market very
much involved calligraphy.

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qaexl
Ha I see. In other applications, this is the "hook", the elevator pitch. Or
the quick bio when networking that gets people coming back to hear the story.
I'm not quite sure how this applies to the "startup story".

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theoden
What's the deal with these joke admissions to American universities. President
of some silly high school club? Who cares?

~~~
_delirium
There's just not a lot to go on. The SAT score is one of the few nationally
comparable objective measures, and obviously measures only a specific kind of
aptitude. High-school GPA is objective but hard to compare across schools, and
measures only specific things as well (ability to do well in high-school
classes). Essays might give you more information, but might be written by
someone other than the student. You end up falling back on _some_ sort of
evidence that the student has independent interests/motivations, whether
president of some club, or webmaster of some site.

~~~
sliverstorm
Also, in the case where you have a 2 students with perfect 4.0 (or better)
GPA's, both got perfect SAT scores, etc- i.e., match eachother blow for blow,
the only way groupthink people have thought of to get ahead is to have
extracurriculars.

Ideally GPA and SAT scores would make the distinction for us. The top X% of
students would range from 3.5-4 in their GPA, or something like that.
Unfortunately, grade inflation and test coaching is compacting an increasing
percentage of the 'top' students into the tiny tiny bracket around 4.0 and
2400 (SAT). Greater-than-4.0 GPA's attempted to extend the headroom, but much
like raising the level cap in WoW this didn't help much.

~~~
jacobolus
> _Ideally GPA and SAT scores would make the distinction for us._

You think these are good measurements of student ability? For myself, I
couldn’t complain about such a system, because (probably like many/most here)
I did exceedingly well by such metrics. But to be honest, I think they are
absolutely terrible.

~~~
nostrademons
Problem is that every other metric is absolutely worse.

When you think about it, the whole idea of rating one human being as "better"
or "more deserving" than another is pretty much absurd. But universities have
a limited number of spots that they can devote time and attention to, and they
have to prune the applicant pool down to something manageable. People are very
uncomfortable with randomness, so if a university's admission policy was
"We'll pick 1 out of 10 at random", the applicants would go "WTF?" So they
make up some arbitrary metrics, add in some guesswork, and try to assemble an
incoming class that they feel will be as interesting as possible.

It's sort of unfortunate that their rather arbitrary decision acts as the
gatekeeper to something that lots of people want - a good, high-paying,
intellectually challenging job. Chalk up another one to "life's not fair".

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greenlblue
By now it's pretty well established that college admissions are a crap shoot
so why is this guy wasting time on failed simulation theory and applying it to
college admissions.

