3 ms·
Getting into Harvard, Princeton, or Yale as an undergraduate is just super tough. A sufficient condition is to give the university, say, $10 million and be som
by graycat 13y ago
Getting into Harvard, Princeton, or
Yale as an undergraduate is just
super tough. A sufficient condition is to give the university, say,
$10 million and be sometimes awake.
Having a parent
who went can help but not necessarily
enough.
Being a straight A student
with 800s on the SATs is not sufficient.
I never got anywhere trying to get into
Princeton as an undergraduate,
with average SAT scores over 700,
but did
get accepted in the math (or statistics)
department
as a graduate student. I'd read
lots of John Tukey's work --
uniformity in topology
(in the back of Kelley's 'General Topology'),
Tukey's lemma in axiomatic set theory,
stepwise regression,
power spectral estimation (Blackman and Tukey),
the FFT (Cooley and Tukey),
and 'Exploratory Data Analysis',
had been working in applied math
and computing, wrote G. Watson,
and got accepted. I also got
accepted in the Division of Applied Math at
Brown and in Operations Research at
Cornell.
I went to Hopkins.
- hef19898 13y agoOut of couriosity, is this true for other majors, too? Because if it is, it sounds like a great "backdoor" to an Ivy League degree. Kudos for being accepted by all the big names!
- sidww2 13y agoMaybe you were just a more distinguished candidate during graduate admissions? Also, if you're international, PhD admissions are a lot less biased against internationals compared to undergrad admissions (most top universities have 8-10% internationals for undergrads vs. ~50% for PhDs)
- hga 13y agoGetting into an Ivy as an undergraduate is very tough if you aren't a potential legacy admit, that is, a child of an alum. Once all those slots are filled, there aren't all that many left over.
- RabbitAngstrom 13y agoAnecdotal evidence to be sure, but I went to an Ivy League School (Penn) on just straight-As and 700s (!) on the SATs. I was not a "legacy" student of any kind. I knew many such people there, and only about 10% of my colleagues admitted to being a legacy -- maybe it was just my social circle? Or that I didn't major at Wharton, which is stereotypically legacy? Your point about graduate school is spot on, though. The game completely changes (though I think it's still mostly a game). I especially love the "don't buy this muffler..." quote!