So it turns out that time is not, in fact, infinite, and in something like a week and a half I'll have officially left the realm of high school.

I'm not entirely sure how to feel about this: on the one hand, I'm mildly excited (at least to the extent that I get excited, which is not very much -- I'm a pretty emotionless person in general) to be "moving on", but at the same time I sort of already miss the prospect of another year of high school.

Obviously, this a big part of this relates to competitions. I've consciously made the competitive math scene the biggest portion of my life for what will, in a few months, be a full decade, so leaving it behind is closer to the "bitter" in "bittersweet moment". It's not even accurate to say some of my best times have happened while at one of these competitions; rather, almost all of them were (they were generally only tangentially related to the math though ). The realization that I will literally never participate in one of them again is one I had a while ago, but the full magnitude of which is just starting to hit me.

But probably more pertinently, the prospect of "growing up" is frankly pretty frightening, since I've never actually paid much attention to how to... well, live. My parents instructed me to put together a list of things I'd need to get before college, but I realized I had absolutely no clue whatsoever: how exactly does a Kat live a life? There's also a weird flurry of "wait, I can vote", trying to work out how normal people transport themselves from place to place beyond "Dad, I have to go somewhere tomorrow", "what's a tax form??", and other things that I definitely should have paid more attention to when I was younger.

On the topic of things I should have paid more attention to when I was younger, I'm quickly discovering that my conscious strategy of not learning a whole lot of higher math in high school ("I'll do competition stuff now; I can always do higher math stuff in college!") is sort of imploding in my face. More specifically, multivariable calculus is just really annoying to deal with, and I really don't want to have to deal with it for a semester, so I really wish I had gotten this out of the way at some point in the past (for those of you with some familiarity with MIT, my end goal here is to take 18.701 which is actually interesting math). I guess we'll see if my "study an entire subject in a week" manages to hold up as well for MIT as it did for all the standardized testing (my guess is... no).

There's also one final factor to this whole complex of emotions: college is, "traditionally", effectively the death of a chess career (besides those who go to colleges with strong chess programs such as Webster/TTU/UMBC/etc.), both because there's little time to devote to study (which, frankly, wouldn't affect me much because I rarely studied seriously) and because actually playing in events is problematic -- both because of transportation issues and the fact that serious chess tournaments last ~5 days, which doesn't work very well with school schedules. So while I plan on staying sort of into chess in the future, from a realistic perspective it's not going to be a serious pursuit anymore.

So that's where I've been for the last couple months or so: willfully ignoring the fact that everything I did in high school is -- more or less -- no longer a part of my life, and dodging the fact that I'm actually responsible for myself now and I should do things that responsible people do. Ok, this is a bit strong -- I don't plan on terminating involvement with the math competition community (far from it in fact, as you HMNTers will find out ), and I don't plan on abandoning chess completely -- but it's somewhat true in spirit.

Anyway, I don't make posts just to rant about my life being non-ideal; there's actually something of useful substance to follow One of the interesting things about going to MIT is that pretty much everybody knows what the place is -- its name recognition seems to be almost as good as e.g. Harvard's. I was on a plane back from Arizona, working on writing HMNT questions, when a couple next to me asked me what type of math I was working on. Of course, the usual difficulty in explaining competitions to laypeople followed, and basically everyone within the row (who was, of course, listening in because America!) was pretty confused. Eventually, though, they asked where I was going to college, I told them, and then everyone seemed to be suitably impressed and no longer confused (I, on the other hand, was extremely confused). A few months back, I was playing at the Philadelphia Open, when some parents came up to me and asked variants of "I heard you got into MIT, any tips?" without any real prompting (I still have no idea who most of them are, or how on earth they even heard of this). Then, finally, at the World Open I had a rather lengthy discussion with a friend's parent about the subject of college admissions, which was eventually followed up via e-mail.

Now, I'm not exactly an expert in the fortune telling business of optimizing for college admissions***, but I guess I did something right considering I got in to the best school on the planet (intentionally inflammatory ). Also, the world of college admissions has a ton of totally inaccurate information being thrown about (a search for closure, perhaps?), some of which seems to be genuinely misguided, some of which is straight up stupid, and some of which is... indicative of other motives. What's particularly interesting, however, is how much of this misinformation passes through AoPS, a community that should really know better. So, I figured I'd touch on the topic a bit on here, because I think the subject gets way more attention than it deserves and people should get back to doing useful things (like math). I also want to have something to copy and paste when I get more of these questions MY MOTIVES ARE ALTRUISTIC

First of all, there are a ton of threads about quantitative stats, especially "chance" threads, that crop up all over the place -- even on AoPS (if you want to kill a few hours of your life, you can see tons more these on collegeconfidential). These threads, almost invariably, completely miss the point. Let me tell you something that any admissions officer will tell you, but students choose not to believe for some reason: there is essentially no difference between a 2200 and a 2400 on the SAT (obviously, this applies equally well to other tests). Ok, perhaps there's some argument that the lower bound there should be closer to 2250 or whatever, but the point is the same: past a certain relatively low score, there is literally no benefit to devoting a ton of time to the test, and there is definitely no point to retaking a test to improve on a 2250 or whatever. I know people who retook the SAT after getting a 2370; some of them ended up getting their 2400, but basically wasted that time.

Similarly, there's not a great deal of difference between anything above a 3.7 GPA or so (i.e. mostly As with some unusual Bs); use the time you would otherwise spend agonizing over fractions of points doing something useful instead.

The point here is that colleges view quantitative data as a simple question: "are you academically qualified to be here?". If your scores show that you are, then how much you exceed the threshold by is largely irrelevant*. This is the source of the numerous threads that pop up sometime around decisions date positing something like "how did I get rejected with a 2400 SAT?? Affirmative action kappa", dumb stories like students sending colleges rejections of rejection letters, or dumb actions like actually suing a college over being rejected. If only people understood this really simple point...

By the way, you will get sufficiently decent scores without a whole lot of specialized studying as a result of doing useful things. I didn't study for the SAT at all (for real; I'm not fishing for respect here), but I've read voraciously and written often throughout my life as a matter of choice; as a result, when I actually took the SAT, I did perfectly fine (apparently I got a 2290, but I had to look it up to see what score I actually got). Here's a group of ten words ostensibly classified as "SAT words":

Abhor
Bigot
Counterfeit    
Enfranchise    
Hamper    
Kindle (not by Amazon...)
Noxious    
Placid
Remuneration
Talisman

I can't tell you anything resembling a dictionary definition of any of these ten, but I've used all of them in some form before (though to be fair, I've probably only used "talisman" in this context). The point is that these are things you should pick up through common usage; actually sitting down and trying to study these things is a huge waste of time and effort.

So what does actually get someone admitted? The overwhelming factors are qualitative data -- things you can't put a standardized number to. These are both things like accomplishments that can't be directly compared (e.g. AIME qualification is good, USAMO qualification is great, national debate team is great -- which one of the latter two is "greater"?) and the most dreaded part of the application: the essays.

First, some words on accomplishments/extracurriculars: if you don't care about it, neither will the college. I know it sounds overly romantic, but don't do things solely for the benefit of a college application: you'll end up viewing it as an obligation, and it probably won't end up helping your application that much anyway. That said, value to colleges is definitely a valid criteria to pay attention to -- just don't let it become the main one.

What colleges really want to see is a passion for a subject. Passion is something that's technically possible to fake, but frankly it's easier to do something you're passionate about in the first place. Besides the criteria of tangential relevance, there's not a whole lot of difference between activities (e.g. passion for video games is not interesting to colleges, but passion for math and passion for sports are probably weighted nearly equally). Obviously, the level of achievement matters as well, but the passion and dedication to something is far more important. Many people were surprised when I told them I basically only did math and chess in high school, since the stereotypical picture of a top applicant is one with a ton of different clubs/activities; what they presumably didn't realize was that I was putting the equivalent to a part time's job worth of hours into those activities. That's far more important than getting your name on the NHS membership rolls for application season.

Ok, on to essays. College essays are not very well understood by students in general (probably myself included), but it seems like this issue is exacerbated on AoPS (which is understandable, since most AoPSers prefer math to writing). The highly subjective nature of what makes a "good" essay -- let alone a college essay -- doesn't help either, especially since almost all applicants have no real formal training in writing (high school English doesn't count).

So what makes a good essay? Paradoxically, you don't want to describe yourself to the reader -- despite this being the whole point of the section. Instead, you want to tell them about youself, and let them fill in the blanks. This is a very subtle difference that's not too well understood by many (again, myself included); the most obvious place where it applies is telling a story illustrating something, rather than just saying that thing immediately. For example, here's the first paragraph of one of my essays (the prompt for which was "What attribute of your personality are you most proud of, and how has it impacted your life so far? This could be your creativity, effective leadership, sense of humor, integrity, or anything else you’d like to tell us about"): (copied verbatim to preserve historical integrity, feel free to rip it to shreds)

This type of paragraph is infinitely better than something bland like Hopefully you can see why. Anyway, you can get a better illustration of this concept here. This second of the two paragraphs is more or less the reason why you occasionally hear things like "SAT perfect scorer rejected from [Ivy]", usually accompanied by passive-aggressive use of the media ("I don't want to brag about my achievements, but...") and straight up dumb comments ("...I feel I would have gotten in if colleges were a meritocracy, because that girl over there only got a 2390 on her SAT"). Did I mention that I really hate this type of media coverage? It's also probably the reason that AoPSers get rejected; most AoPSers' academic qualifications are perfectly fine.**

Anyway, the main takeaway I want people to get from this is that the college admissions cycle gets way too much attention in general, but mostly from the students going through the process. There's no particularly good reason to do things "for college" -- while this can be done in a pseudo-sneaky way, students almost always lack the subtlety to pull this off and just end up hurting themselves. Of course there are exceptions -- some students manage to get away with this and get into elite institutions, but even they aren't living the good life: their reputation among their peers summarily tanks, and they once again end up hurting themselves anyway. This isn't to give an unqualified "do what truly motivates you", since college admissions is a very valid concern to have, but in practice it comes pretty darn close.

* For those interested: my SAT score was a 2290 (800 math/760 reading/730 writing), I took four AP tests (Calc BC, Physics C Mechanics, Statistics, Computer Science; 5 on each), 2 SAT subject tests (Math II and Physics; 800s) , and that's the extent of my quantitative data. You'll note that these are not particularly great scores -- sufficiently solid, but nothing to celebrate -- and they're relatively easily attainable by most people who manage to make their way to this blog. So questions like "will a B kill my chances for Stanford?" or "should I add my 17th AP over the summer?" are just answered by a straight up "No"; my academic qualifications were fine, and yours probably will be too.

** I put quite a bit of effort into my MIT essays, both because MIT was by far my first choice of school and because I was applying to MIT early. In comparison, I put practically no effort into my Princeton essays at all (I more or less copied stuff from my MIT essay where applicable and freewrote the remaining prompts), and was summarily rejected (I think the interviews might actually have had a larger effect -- the MIT interviewer was excellent, the Princeton interviewer not so much -- but that's a story for another day). The actual application requires effort -- make sure your essays are as good as they can possibly be. For most of you, that's the deciding point of your entire application.

*** You know who are experts? Admissions officers. Listen to what they say!