
Offer HN: Ex-Ivy League admission officer will review your college application - brandnewlow
I'm a former Princeton admissions officer.  I did that job for two years from 2004-2006.  During that time I read probably 2500 applications, spoke at about 80 high schools, and physically voted on whether or not to admit about 5,000 applicants.<p>I believe applying to elite schools is a total crapshoot unless you satisfy an instutional need of the university (minority, athlete, rich person, super elite academic/artist/entrepreneur).  That said, it's incredibly important to make sure that there's nothing WRONG with your application before you send it off.<p>A good college application (like a good movie according to Siskel) has 2-3 good qualities and no bad ones.<p>That's where I can help.<p>Many applicants are deep-sixed simply because no one told them not to include X in their application.  I suspect HNers would be a crowd that might have this problem.<p>In the spirit of this week's Offer HN spree, I will give 15-minute reviews to college applications from Hacker News members who reach out to me through my profile info.<p>I will not make edits or write anything on your app.  I will look for red flags and inform you of any you find and my general impression of your strengths as an applicant.<p>Note: My experience is 100% in undergrad admissions.  I have no experience with grad school applications and any advice I give on those must be taken with a grain of salt.
======
charlief
What an incredible offering. Not all of us have Ivy League applications as
readily available as our CVs and startup web pages. After you have reviewed a
few applications, would it be possible to summarize some of your findings and
advice in this thread?

~~~
elliot42
Summary and examples for public will be much more helpful than individual
consulting. Then make a webpage/book for yourself--pretty much everyone wants
to understand this information.

If you want to get wonky, read "Homo Academicus" by Bourdieu. Educators (or
other gatekeepers, e.g. job interviewers) apply implicit categories of
judgment to applicants. If the applicant matches the class/cultural background
of the gatekeeper, there's a higher probability that the applicant has
naturally acquired and presented the things the gatekeeper is looking for.
(Else, the applicant will come in without having anything to offer that the
gatekeeper cares about.)

~~~
brandnewlow
I respect the intention of this idea, but I'm not in the business of giving
general advice about the admissions process to people. I don't think there's
much in the way of general advice to give, for one. Also, there's a whole
industry based around that, and it's full of charlatans and snake-oil
salesmen. A few years back, I started a site where families can post user
reviews of consultants they hired, <http://collegeconsultantreviews.com>

Right now I run a social news site for Chicago and received seed funding to
launch a new advertising startup that will help save newspapers. I'm happy
with my life and excited about these challenges.

One day, if I do decide to come back into admissions, it will be to disrupt
the system and hopefully destroy all these awful know-nothing consultants and
quacks, rather than to add my voice to their chorus.

So I'm happy to look at applications. Pulling general advice from them is
really less useful than you'd imagine. Everyone's different. Everyone's red
flags are different.

If you want one piece of general advice though: don't mention video games,
gaming, Magic Cards, Dungeons and Dragons, Pokeman, Anime, poker, Comic books,
or anything like that on your application. You will automatically be cast into
the "misapplied intelligence" pile. I've played my share of video games in
life (My Civ III skills are pretty impressive), but at the end of the day,
that's time that could have been better spent. My experience in admissions
showed that POV to be pretty widespread. No, you won't impress them with your
poker winnings or TF2 pro tour success. They think that you are not creating
real value with these pursuits for the world, or yourself.

~~~
pinko
I wouldn't challenge your general advice, as I am just one data point... but
just to underscore what a crapshoot this all is, I actually got into to
college on the basis of an interview in which my primary schtick concerned why
Dungeons and Dragons made me smart.

(How do I know? The head of admissions, who interviewed me, told me so a year
later. It was a small school, I was applying for January admission, and she
basically made the decision herself. I had nothing on paper to recommend me
above anyone else -- she just loved the interview.)

------
weel
I recall speaking years ago with the head of admissions at Caltech, who had
previously had a similar job at MIT. On his desk was a newspaper clipping
about legacy admissions, so I asked him for his opinion. He was a very polite
man, but you could see the fire in his eyes: he was not happy with it, and
rather emphatic in declaring that neither Caltech nor MIT would do such a
thing. (This is definitely consistent with my experience at Caltech. I know of
one Caltech student who was the grandson of a big-time donor, but he was also
one of the best in his class, and clearly had what it takes to get in anyway.)

I find it very interesting how you describe applying to Ivy League schools as
a "total crapshoot." I wonder what your opinion is about high-end
science/engineering schools (not just Caltech and MIT, but also CMU, Cornell,
Harvey Mudd, etc.) Is their admissions process just as flawed? Or are they
more predictable?

~~~
brandnewlow
From a libertarian/utilitarian POV, the processes at those schools are "less
wrong" in that they are more likely to admit a student with perfect test
scores, incredible grades, and little if any extracurricular activity outside
of modding xBoxes and lan parties. Those schools are looking for raw smarts
and technical aptitude...

<Ivy League Douchebag>...which is why so many M.I.T. grads end up working for
Princeton/Harvard/Yale grads.</Ivy League Douchebag>

At the Ivies, lots of kids apply with perfect grades and scores. Those schools
have the luxury of passing on most of those kids in order to select the ones
who are truly interesting and/or clearly hell-bent on changing the world for
the better.

In my own case, I was applying from a small public high school in a resort
town in Western Michigan. Having gone back and pulled my files once I got the
admissions job, my read on why I was admitted was because "kid is being doing
more with what's available to him in this odd part of Michigan than the other
kids we see in his state, he also sounds pretty cool and fun and everyone
likes the guy. Plus he's in the top 1% of his class."

So I was admitted to bring in some color and culture, despite being a white
male. Despite being "the smart guy" in every social situation growing up, that
wasn't even a factor in why I was admitted. My credentials put me squarely in
the middle of the pack academically unbeknownst to me. That's humbling but
also great self-knowledge to have about oneself. Sometimes I think students at
these schools should be told why they were admitted. I probably would have
felt better about being the president of half a dozen clubs and playing in the
most popular band on campus had I know that's why they brought me there to
begin with. :)

~~~
vishaldpatel
Pretty good story =)

------
ilamont
Harvard used to get a lot of flack for legacy preferences. A writer named Dan
Golden documented some of the "Z-List" rule-bending in his 2006 book, 'The
Price of Admission: How America's Ruling Class Buys Its Way into Elite
Colleges -- and Who Gets Left Outside the Gates'. Here's what the Boston Globe
reviewer
([http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/09/04/...](http://www.boston.com/news/globe/living/articles/2006/09/04/harvards_admissions_of_gilt/))
had to say about the book when it came out:

 _Golden's book is a well-reported critique of what amounts to affirmative
action for rich people, who enjoy a panoply of preferences in the college
admission process that outsiders could never dream of. The best-known examples
are ``legacy" admissions for alumni children; scholarships reserved for upper-
class sports, such as rowing; and the ultimate preference: dough. When you
read how Harvard treats the children of its fat - cat Committee on University
Resources -- who enjoy such perks as sit-downs with the director of
admissions, personal campus tours, and access to the coveted ``Z-list" of
deferred applicants -- suddenly real affirmative action for people who need it
doesn't seem like such a bad idea.

The most egregious example of pay-for-Crimson - play is that of Jared Kushner
, now the youthful owner of The New York Observer. While Jared was applying to
colleges, his dad, New Jersey billionaire developer Charles Kushner , pledged
$2.5 million to Harvard, to be paid in installments. (Kushner pere pleaded
guilty to tax evasion and other counts in 2004 and recently completed a prison
sentence.) An official at Kushner's high school told Golden: ``There was no
way anybody in . . . the school thought he would on the merits get into
Harvard. His GPA did not warrant it, his SAT scores did not warrant it. We
thought, for sure, there was no way this was going to happen." Kushner
graduated from Harvard in 2003._

I'd be curious to know if this is still an issue at Harvard, or any of the
other Ivy League schools. Maybe the OP can talk about what happened/didn't
happen at Princeton?

~~~
chrischen
I know Jacky chan donated a large amount and his son didn't get in.

~~~
coryl
source?

~~~
chrischen
I read it on Wikipedia, but apparently it may have been fake:
[http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-
university/91141...](http://talk.collegeconfidential.com/harvard-
university/911418-can-u-buy-ur-place-harvard.html)

------
todayiamme
I guess what goes around comes around #. As, now, I am the one who needs help.

I have a really messed up college app and I need a lot of guidance in it.
Sure, I can nail the writing and communication, but I don't exactly have a
bright past and I don't know what to do with it. Is disclosure appropriate? Or
is buttoning up about it the best way forward? I want to be honest, but I
really don't know what's it like at ground zero. So, my app has been
languishing in edit hell for a while now. What's worse is that I really don't
have any clue whom to turn to.

Do you mind if I start a conversation with you?

*# <http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1826828>

P.S. - I am willing to say it again and again this community really is
awesome.

~~~
brandnewlow
Sure, drop me an e-mail.

------
mcknz
Don't know if you saw this article:
<http://news.ycombinator.com/item?id=1816141>

The writer claims you can potentially backdoor the admissions process by
simply starting to take classes at the school you want to attend. Would be
curious to know if you think this has any merit.

~~~
brandnewlow
Sure, this is all doable. One of the most elegant social hacks out there today
is to go to one of the hundreds of 12-month degree-mill graduate programs that
"top" schools have launched in the last 20 years, get a degree in "Public
Speaking and Elocution" for $30-50,000 and then be able to put "School X" on
your CV and resume for the rest of your life.

In truth, most of these programs will admit almost anyone who sounds like they
won't embarrass them or flunk out. They don't have to worry about their
ability to pay the ever-climbing tuition for these programs because the
students have been lulled into thinking it's a good investment to take out
loans to get that name as a brand they can wear for the rest of your life.

I am very, very proud to have done my undergrad studies at a place, Princeton,
that has resisted the urge to offer programs like this so far. To put on my
"Ivy League Douchebag" hat for a second, if you meet someone "who went to
Harvard" it could mean all sorts of things, same with Columbia, UPenn,
Cornell, etc. If you meet someone who "went to Princeton" then they went there
as an undergrad, which means they survived one of the toughest admissions
criteria on the planet, or they did PhD work there, which is even tougher to
get into. The only other program Princeton has is a 1-2 year (I forget)
master's in public policy that I believe was secretly created because Uncle
Sam wants a fancy school to send future generals to so they can class up their
resumes and learn with some of the sharpest people around. Princeton is one of
the few elite schools that actively welcomes these soldiers too. The one's I
met while there as a student were incredibly smart. They were tough enough to
do the military stuff, and sharp enough to hang with the faculty at the Wilson
school. I feel pretty good about that one program. Those are the only two ways
anyone gets to "go to Princeton." and I think that's awesome.

Meanwhile, there's a plethora of ways to "go to" a lot of the other elite
schools. Anyone want a master's in higher education?

</completed a 12-month master's degree in Journalism at Northwestern, which
offers a lot of other programs that>

~~~
Nrsolis
Well...I earned a degree at Harvard via the extension program. Despite the
Ivy-League douche-bag opinion of the program, it's been a big win for me
socially and career-wise.

I ended up writing off school after leaving a different Ivy-League program to
go chase my millions during the Internet boom. When that plan didn't pan out,
I found that most of the programs offered during the times I had available
were just flat...out...bad.

At least at Harvard Extension I could take a ton of classes from actual
Harvard professors (not just moonlighting professionals looking to pick up
some teaching cred) without all of the drama of trying to game the admissions
process. At 35, I really didn't see myself living in a dorm with the other
Harvard undergraduates.

You might make the case that it's not really a "Harvard" degree, but I'm
willing to bet that my record of accomplishment since then would say
otherwise.

~~~
brandnewlow
It's certainly a Harvard degree. My comment was aimed at pointing out that
phrase is pretty malleable at most schools. I have friends who went to other
programs there. You all have "Harvard degrees." Each of you had very, very
different experiences and learned different things. It's an interesting hack
that to the average person, that distinction doesn't mean much.

Congrats on your success!

------
acconrad
"I believe applying to elite schools is a total crapshoot unless you satisfy
an instutional need of the university"

As an ex-Ivy leaguer, that is the most truthful statement in your offer. ATTN
APPLICANTS: remember this and don't get discouraged.

~~~
Alex3917
Alternatively, remember this and go about satisfying some need. This really
shouldn't take more than two years assuming you have a decent level of
diligence. Two years is really enough time to become pretty much the best at
any sport, instrument, or other activity you can think of, at least at the
high school level.

~~~
patio11
Egads, you're kidding me. If you are applying to the Ivies and are not black,
your competition had a violin in her hands at the age of 6 months, has played
in Carnegie Hall, was the valedictorian of her high school class and had test
scores in the 99th percentile, and will _still_ be rejected with the words
"Another smart Asian girl... meh."

~~~
Alex3917
That's a vast exaggeration of how hard it is. If you want to be guaranteed to
get into a specific Ivy then you're probably right. But if you just want to
get into any Ivy and you don't care which then all you really need 1250 SATs
and no Cs. And even these are negotiable if you're really good.

Also, if you get recruited then they send your applications to admissions and
tell if you're likely to get in or not before you even apply. And if you're
not likely to get in then they'll tell you to go talk to folks at the other
colleges because they don't want a bad reputation for future years. Because of
this there will usually be at least one Ivy who needs what you have badly
enough to pull some strings to get you in.

As for the violin, don't choose something like violin, gymnastics, or soccer
where people start at age 3. Just choose some obscure instrument and you're
pretty much guaranteed to at least be one of the best in your state in a
couple years if you practice enough and get lessons. It's not like you need to
be the absolute best, assuming each school takes on average 8 of X then you
only need to be in the top 80. And remember that there will be a handful of
those who are completely ineligible because of outright terrible grades or
SATs, or else they just don't want to go to an Ivy, so really it's more like
you only need to be in the top 96 or so.

Also there are a whole bunch of tricks. For example US News doesn't count the
grades of people who come from Canada, so every year Harvard will recruit a
whole bunch of folks from up there to round out whatever they need when if
there aren't enough qualified US applicants. And plus most of these schools
run massive direct mail campaigns encouraging every one to apply no mater how
unqualified they are in order to make themselves appear more selective, so
it's actually a ton easier to get in than it looks. Again you still need to be
reasonably hard working and maybe a little lucky, but it's not so difficulty
that you need to be obscenely lucky or genetically talented or whatever.

~~~
brandnewlow
Citation needed.

~~~
Alex3917
As far as I know the only one who has written anything about this is me. I
wrote this essay five years ago visiting every Ivy league school and learning
about their admission processes:

<http://alexkrupp.com/pirate.html>

I'm pretty sure the book The Game of Life talks about the admissions process
of athletes and other students with special talents as well, but I haven't
read it so I'm not sure how much detail they go into or how accurate it is.
It's also worth understanding how the Academic Index works, since that's very
important for getting into an Ivy. I don't think there is anything official
written about it, but if you do some sleuthing you can find a bunch of stuff.
For example a quick Google search turned up this:

<http://home.comcast.net/~charles517/ivyai.html>

It's only officially used for football, but I get the impression that it's
often used unofficially as a ballpark for students with special talents in
other areas.

------
smokeyj
"A good college application (like a good movie according to Siskel) has 2-3
good qualities and no bad ones."

Can you please share the qualities you look for, as well as what kind of red
flags you would spot?

------
jallmann
I am way past this point (just finished grad school), but am just wondering
what are some of the typical red flags in a college application?

------
random42
Wow, this is fantastic. I wish I had an application ready, but I will apply
next year.

I do have couple of questions though.

a. Does work experience help (or deter) admissions?

b. How often colleges give admissions on graduate seats when the undergraduate
studies have been in different discipline? (I am an electrical engineering
graduate, hoping to get admit in a CS course next year.)

~~~
HistoryInAction
For academic graduate studies, work experience rarely helps, since PhD
programs are intended for professorships. One key exception is when the
professor/PI in whose lab you are most interested in has hopped in and out of
the industry, admissions into that lab often place a positive value on related
work experience.

One key assumption underlying my answer is that labs and individual professors
have more sway on graduate admissions than the centralized admissions office
compared to undergrad admissions.

EE and CS often have significant overlap at many schools, like Stanford. At
more theoretical schools, like Caltech, Math and CS have more overlap. Just
justify your graduate study with respect to your undergrad work in your
statement of purpose essay.

------
imagii
I would like to take you up on your offer, but I'm incredibly nervous about
applying to colleges because (despite taking honors classes) I screwed around
9-11th grades, and my GPA isn't 3.0 or higher.

------
jtbigwoo
My wife leads service projects for/with high school kids. They often list
these service projects on their college applications.

How much does it matter if a student has planned or led a project versus just
going along and working? Is there specific wording that might be more
appealing, e.g. mission trip, service project, or work camp?

~~~
brandnewlow
Huge difference between the planner and the attendee.

The fact of the matter is that the Ivies get applicants who didn't plan
service trips, they created non-profits, funded them, and now are providing
clothing and education for orphans in Africa.

And that kid will probably get rejected...because there's 100 other kids with
similar stories.

So if the student is just attending service events and doesn't have an awesome
leadership story that makes them sound awesome because of it, it's not really
going to help their cause.

------
PStamatiou
Only mentioning this as it is relevant:

Some friends (3 Harvard, 2 UTexas founders) recently launched a startup called
<http://MentMe.com> that aims to partner prospective students with those
currently at or that have graduated from universities they wish to attend.

------
whackedspinach
I sent you an email with my application attached. If you respond I will post
or summarize it on my blog with a link here. After seeing those web copy
slides the other day, I believe this advice can help anyone.

------
cothinkit
Very cool - I wish I had someone to do this back when I was applying!

------
jayaram
Thanks for the help.

I do get your point regarding the application. Do you want me to send you my
SOP ? or do you want me to provide my profile(similar to a CV) and you review
it ?

------
elai
I'm also past this, but would being of "middle eastern descent" also fulfill
an institutional need of an ivy league university?

------
markbao
I'm applying to transfer and would love your input. Will contact.

------
deyan
just curious, what do you do now? what brought you to HN?

------
nopal
Which institutional need did you satisfy?

~~~
whpnyc
Good article.

