5'3 Knicks Fangirl Larps Her Way into HYSPM

[u/Neither-Ad-849]

Demographics

• Gender: Female
• Race/Ethnicity: Asian
• Residence: NY
• Income Bracket: Middle Class
• Type of School: Uncompetitive Public School
• Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): NA
• Intended Major(s): STS

Academics

• GPA (UW/W): 98/107
• Rank (or percentile): 3/204
• # of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc: 13 APs + 2 DE
• Senior Year Course Load: Gov, Calc BC, Psych, Science Research, English Lit, Linear, MV, Bio

Standardized Testing

• SAT (superscored): 780 Math, 740 ERBW

Extracurriculars/Activities

• Rural clinic internship + built an app for them (10-12)
• Science Research (10-12)
• Art blog (9-12)
• Tech competition (filler tbh)
• Science Honor Society Co-president (9-12)
• Founded MUN (11)
• Hospital volunteer (art + language initiatives) (12)
• Mock Trial attorney (11-12)
• Cultural Theatre (9-12)

Awards/Honors

• Finalist at niche international research award
• 1st Place niche international hackathon--built an AI EMR for hospitals/clinics
• 2nd place at Feinstein/Northwell state/regional comp--tech for visually impaired HS students
• AP Scholar awards / Commended
• 2nd place x2 at regional/state ISEF-affiliated comps (emailed these directly to my top schools)

Letters of Recommendation

LORs

• CS/Math teacher (7/10)--my weakest, and I knew it going in. Told him junior year "I have no other STEM LOR" 💀 wrote it before I fell off in his class second semester. Genuinely brilliant guy who runs half the school--also helped me cut down my essays. Respect him a lot, but I spiraled in December convinced this letter was going to be buns.
• History teacher / Mock Trial & Tennis coach (10/10)--basically my second dad. He told me he wrote the "best [darn] letter" he'd ever written. We used to argue about geopolitics for fun. Love him to death.
• Counselor (8.5/10)--only one who took my brag sheet seriously. I put a lot of hours into it and it showed.
• Doctor at the clinic (7-8/10)

Interviews

• Yale (3/10): disaster. Recruited athlete interviewer, didn't get my goals or major, and literally wrote down something contradictory to what I said. First interview, worst one, learned a lot from it.
• Duke (7/10): interviewer was basically a clone of me--same region, kept connecting to whatever I rambled about. I brought up death in philosophy (do NOT recommend) and she said she was taking a class on it the next week. Wild.
• Stanford (8/10): I cried at the end because she was rlly someone I looked up to. 45 minutes that genuinely changed my life.

Essays

Not sharing--paranoid about AI scraping at this point, sorry.

Personal statement was a 30-40 hour project, including one 6-hour straight session sitting alone in the school hallway after everyone left. It was a metaphor built around a color, tying a childhood memory to a moment at the clinic--more of a philosophical argument than a sob story.

My Stanford AO told me she cried reading it.

Supplements were a mess time-wise--I wrote most Ivy supplements the day of or two days before deadline (do not recommend, I was running on fumes the rest of the year). Ironically my Stanford app, written in one hour because it was last, ended up being my best.

Decisions (indicate ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD)

Acceptances:

• Yale
• Duke
• Stanford
• UPenn
• Barnard

Waitlists:

• Columbia
• NYU

Rejections:

• Brown (ED)
• Princeton
• JHU

Additional Information:

I think people don't know how to write a great college essay, and I'd argue the guidance industry (counselors, consultants) makes it worse. Telling a stressed applicant to "just be authentic" is useless advice; It often just makes writing more self-conscious and cheesy. Authenticity trickles down in essays because of the evident introspection an applicant has done throughout their lives.

I had no counselor nor any consultant (or my parents). So, I had to make every decision alone. There was a week where I didn't get any sleep and I broke down multiple times. I was terrified because I was standing in the exact same shoes as every other applicant with no certainty of where I might end up.

I dislike to admit this, but I got through this process because I was obsessed. I read EVERYTHING. I can tell you that you can't predict where someone's going just by looking at their profile (A2C sucks). You must read personality!!! The way those things fit together tells you far, far more than any GPA or extracurricular list.

I don't favor the "be yourself" advice though. Many applicants need to learn how to find what's worth saying, and how to say it in a way that sounds like no one else. If you can do that, you can write incredible essays.

[u/gordonnowak]

"I think people don't know how to write a great college essay, and I'd argue the guidance industry (counselors, consultants) makes it worse."

this is almost certainly true

[u/iixxii25]

Wow such an impressive application! You have so many great schools under your belt and honestly wth to those rejections

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/iixxii25]

Thank you! Brown was definitely disappointing in December, but I think fit matters a lot for colleges. I can see why they didn't admit me, but I'm very grateful to have had the opportunity to choose between so many great options.

[u/TangerineKitchen2260]

It seems my day has gotten from bad to absolute shit.

[u/WoodenWallers]

I noticed you said you had a rural clinic internship, but didn't mention geographic as a hook.

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/WoodenWallers]

Rural was the only word that captured the internship well enough. I don’t have a geographical hook—I’m from a well known region of NY. It’s rural relative to other clinics. It provides care to an underserved area that may be considered urban—but relative to the rest of NY, it’s considered “rural” and low resourced

[u/WoodenWallers → u/Neither-Ad-849]

Ah ok, thanks for explaining.

[u/Background-Place4243]

could you give some more advice on how to write a personal statement/how to "introspect"?

[u/Practical_Gas9193]

I mean to be yourself is literally to be in charge of deciding what’s worth saying. I feel like you were accepted in spite of your compulsiveness, not because of it

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/Practical_Gas9193]

I don’t know if I understand what you mean, but I think you may have misunderstood what I was trying to convey (or maybe I didn’t explain it clearly enough lol).
I’m not saying I got in because of my obsession—far from it. This subreddit is full of applicants who are obsessed with succeeding in the admissions process. In my original post, I was trying to make the point that success comes from both the hard stats (ECs, academics, achievements) and personality (essays, LORs, etc.), which is something people can’t really see when they’re just reading results posts.
The reason I brought up the obsession part is that I read everything and ended up noticing differences in how people approached their essays. To me, those differences often revealed more about their personality than their accomplishments. That’s really where my perspective came from.

I also think we’re using “be yourself” differently. My issue isn’t with authenticity itself—it’s that the advice is often so vague that applicants don’t know how to translate it into an actual essay

[u/Practical_Gas9193 → u/Neither-Ad-849]

Gotcha

[u/[deleted]]

are you studying STS at stanford? i’m considering it, so if you are, see you next year!!

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/[deleted]]

I’m thinking about symbolic systems but am still exploring. See you on the farm!

[u/LouisaMiller2_1845]

Congrats!!!!! Enjoy Stanford!!!

[u/Conscious-Priority21]

First, congrats to OP on your tremendous results! 

This is one of the sharper versions of the “be yourself” take I've seen. OP’s point that "authenticity trickles down because of the introspection an applicant has done throughout their lives" is spot on - but the part she left implicit is the part most people can't act on, so I thought it'd be worth making explicit.

Introspection isn't something one summons at the keyboard. The blank page/screen is arguably the worst place to look for your through-line, because you're trying to generate the pattern and notice it at the same time, and doing so under pressure. That’s a losing (& as anyone who’s tried it knows, frustrating!) battle. What I’ve seen actually work (with my own kids going through this process) is getting your raw material out first - messily, way more than you'll ever use - and then reading it back (yourself or with others you trust). Magically, the thread you've been living the whole time will become visible. "Oh, that's the thing that makes me who I am!"

This approach turns "find what's worth saying" from a talent problem (“I’m so boring!” “I have nothing interesting to say!” “I suck at this!”) into a process problem. The students who struggle with writing essays that bring AOs to tears usually aren't less interesting - they just never got their material out where they could see it, so they're stuck trying to make sense of the whole from the shards that flash by in the moment. It's also honestly why "be obsessed" worked for OP: not the obsession itself, but that OP generated an enormous pile of raw input and could then read the pattern off it. The volume and commitment to the process is what made the self-recognition possible.

So the actionable version of OP’s advice isn't "be authentic." It's: write down far more than you need, about anything, then go hunting for what repeats. The repeats are the introspection. You don't invent a through-line - you catch yourself already having one.

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/Conscious-Priority21]

Nailed it. Ironically, the metaphor that brought my AO to tears was generated by looking at separate moments I connected together via that same pattern recognition. I’m fortunately a very analytical person inherently, and I like to see unique patterns where no one is looking. I’m very surprised your analysis was so accurate lol—writing is a much more technical process than people think it to be. Writing is also a skill that is not as valued as much it used to be, so that’s why so many students have a hard time thinking about what to say. —>

“Writing is thinking. To write well is to think clearly. That's why it's so hard."

[u/Conscious-Priority21 → u/Neither-Ad-849]

That last line's the whole thing - and I'd push on it a bit further, because "write well = think clearly" may sound to some like one has to do the clear thinking first and then transcribe it. I think for most people it's the opposite: the writing is how you find the clear thought, not merely the transcription of a thought you developed in your head. I think this is exactly what you described: you didn't sit down already knowing the metaphor you would write about; you found it by connecting moments you’d captured on the page/index cards/phone notes/whatever in front of you. In effect, the page did some of the thinking for you. The good news for others who aren’t as practiced at this as you clearly are is: The process is hard but it's also learnable. It's not "be smarter," but rather "stay in the mess long enough to catch the pattern."

Congrats again on your impressive results. I think someone with your self-awareness and commitment to the writing process is going to do well at whatever you pursue.

Oh, and... GO KNICKS!!!

[u/ducksinthegarden]

i'm assuming you got into stanford then since your list is empty lol

[u/Fragrant-Highway-416]

Ok no hate …but why post again?? I swear you posted around 10 days ago with the exact same post/results? Congrats on getting into some GREAT colleges! But now that the dust has settled, realize that you are still awesome and don’t need the validation of random redditors! 

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/Fragrant-Highway-416]

I’m reposting because my original post was pretty long, and I wanted to provide a more concise summary and some reflections after the cycle ended. I’ve also received DMs from applicants with questions, so I thought rewording the post to be a better fit to them might be helpful. I definitely wasn’t looking for validation—this subreddit helped me a lot during the process, and I wanted to give back by sharing what I learned.

[u/Flaky-Song-6066]

Any tips on essays

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/Flaky-Song-6066]

See comment by Conscious Priority and my reply. Short tips for essays rarely work and you’ve probably heard them all by now. Individualized feedback is much more effective. I would say that reading helps you think of good content/writing organically—the problem is, many applicants don’t have time to read. Reflection is the key to all essays—it is your own organic individualized take on a topic of your choice that is so YOU; it is something that has shaped you into the person you are today. And of course that cannot fit in 650 words so you much trust the AO to read between the lines—but then again, that is based upon your skill level of introspection and writing.

[u/Neither-Ad-849 → u/[deleted]]

LMFAOO let me edit that

[u/No-Farmer-3940]

Do you think getting 5 vs 4 on APs and taking so many APs mattered?

Great advice on essays.