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.)

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.

(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.)

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?

<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. :)

* Each application has to be read and judged in 3 to 4 minutes. That includes the full transcript, SAT scores, all the essays, the letters of recommendations, etc. The goal was to finish 3 applications every 10 minutes.

* The admissions department gets a printout twice a day with the predicted stats of the new class, as well as the predicted U.S. News & World Report ranking. How hard your application gets graded largely depends on what the report in the last three hours said, and standards can vary wildly from day to day.

* If we came across someone who seemed like a total douchebag but who had great grades and other things the college was looking for, we were told to just let them in and never think about it again.

Yeah, but Caltech has a better rep than MIT on the issue, according to Dan Golden. I interviewed him for the Tech (Caltech's student newspaper) when the book came out, and he said that he had intended to write his "this school bluntly refuses to countenance legacy admissions" section about MIT, but everything he heard forced him to change his plans to talk about Caltech instead.

More generally, that far right on the bell curve, the differences are so marginal. Instead, the main process is surpass a certain bar of accomplishment and then stand out in some unique way that gets you noticed. There are 10 perfect SAT scores/ultra-high GPAs for every spot in an ultra-elite engineering school like the ones you list. Small variations in awesome are just extremely hard to rank.

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?

"While Z-listed students bring a wide range of interests and experiences to Harvard, many people charge that they are similar in two ways—the Z-list has long had a reputation for consisting predominantly of affluent students and Harvard legacies. Of the 28 students interviewed by The Crimson for this story, 18 have parents who attended Harvard. All but four receive no financial aid from the College, while about 70 percent of the student body receives aid from Harvard."

"According to Fitzsimmons, Harvard does not aim to use the Z-list to admit legacy students. Instead, he says, the Z-list contains a greater proportion of legacies than the class in general since legacy students might be more willing to accept a spot on the Z-list."

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.

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.

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>

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.

Congrats on your success!

I guess I wasn't thinking so much about the "brand" but the chance to get a quality education in spite of missing the admission roulette.

A classmate of mine did it. His degree is printed on the same paper mine is.

I saw it featured in a "hidden secrets of college admissions" article once and it looks like they have rejiggered things so that it no longer works, although I'm not positive about that.

I have friends who are doctors who went to fancy med schools and complain all the time about the other doctors who went to school in the Caribbean. To the average Joe, a doctor's a doctor.

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

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.

Sounds like you're referring to the 'Z-list', of rich kids who don't need financial aid or legacies, or the athletes or whatever. They might be able to get in with those metrics, but not normal kids who have 1250s, 3.5GPA, and committed to something unusual for a mere 2 years.

Having gone through the application process with more impressive marks and accomplishments than that (1400, 3.8, national science competition winner, published in NSF journal), and gotten waitlisted till the last round, before somehow finally squeezing in and finding myself close to out-of-my-league anyway, I'm pretty sure that's not accurate.

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.

Two years is enough time to become second best at anything. First best usually has talent, who also tries just as hard as you.

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

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.)

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.

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?

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.

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.

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 ?