大学申请季结束，也来为儿子求祝福，希望WL被捞上岸 - 2022年4月24日北美华人网存档 (第 3 页)

3 年多

前几天在reddit 看到的 Asian male gets saved by Berkeley EECS... still can't help but feel disappointed deep down
Gender: Male Race/Ethnicity: Chinese Residence: Bay Area, California Income Bracket: 200k+ Type of School: Highly Competitive Public Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Geographic, Legacy, etc.): None Intended Major(s): Computer Science Academics GPA (UW/W): 3.94 UW, N/A W Rank (or percentile): N/A # of Honors/AP/IB/Dual Enrollment/etc.: 9 AP courses (+ 6 exams self-studied). Took AP Calculus BC in 9th grade; AP Chinese, AP Statistics in 10th grade; AP Lang, AP CS, AP Chem, APUSH in 11th; AP Lit, AP Physics in 12th; 3 concurrent enrollment courses (Multivar, Diffeq, Linalg) Senior Year Course Load: AP Physics, AP Lit, Economics, Japanese, TA, Diffeq (CE) 1st semester Standardized Testing List the highest scores earned and all scores that were reported. SAT I: 1600 AP: 5 (10), 4 (3) Extracurriculars/Activities List all extracurricular involvements, including leadership roles, time commitments, major achievements, etc. Pokétwo — Sole creator & developer of Pokémon Discord Bot w/ 3.6 million registered users across 950,000+ communities. Originally made for my friends to replace the defunct Pokécord bot, and expanded over time. I also reported a monthly revenue number which I am not posting here. ~20 hrs/week on average, year-round. UCSB Research Mentorship Program — Attended summer program after junior year, produced novel deep learning research “Unsupervised Loss Modeling for Noise-Robust Multimodal Networks.” 12% accuracy improvement over state of art. 40 hrs/week for 6 weeks. ContestDojo — Developed a math competition platform from scratch to be used by the Stanford Math Tournament and the Berkeley Math Tournament. Expanded to 4 other tournaments including JHMT, CALICO, GMC, MMT and more to come. Served 3,000+ contestants total. ~6 hrs/week, 20 weeks/year. Mobile App for my high school — Founded & leading team to develop app, which is actively used in cooperation with ASB. Kept students engaged during the pandemic through online events. ~2 hrs/week, 30 weeks/year. Project Code Foundation — Founded 501(c)(3) organization in 8th grade to teach classes to the community. Taught 1,000+ youth total. Recently directed our 3-day workshop Code2K with over 300 participants. ~4 hrs/week, 20 weeks/year. NanoMath — Founding member of this organization, we run online math competitions for middle schoolers. Our focus is on making contest math more accessible. 700+ total participants. I managed technology and built a custom platform for our contests that later led to ContestDojo being built for a broader use case. FBLA — Placed 9th nationally in E-business in 9th grade, 10th nationally (and State Champion) in Computer Game & Simulation Programming in 11th grade, State Champion in Networking Infrastructures in 11th grade. ~4 hrs/week, 15 weeks/year. Science Olympiad — Member of my school's Team A team. Most of my medals are this year, after college applications, but I did place 1st at GGSO in 2020, beating the national champion team. (It's fun, don't feel like this means much to colleges though.) ~2 hrs/week, 20 weeks/year. Anime Club — Vice President. Fun thing that I enjoy. Not sure what to say here. I did write some custom software over quarantine to handle simultaneously streaming to all club members. Not very significant though. Boy Scouts of America — Life Rank during college apps (Eagle now). Served as Senior Patrol Leader during the start of the pandemic and had to quickly adapt our activities for over 60+ scouts. Developed lots of leadership experience here, was really valuable to me in general. Went on lots of backpacking/outdoor trips too. Awards/Honors List all awards and honors submitted on your application. USAPhO Semifinalist (top 400 in nation) USACO Platinum Contestant 3x AIME Qualifier (rank 300 in 2021 AMC 12B) Ranked #34 globally out of 150,000+ people in Advent of Code 2020, a 25-day programming competition challenge. Ranked #39 out of 200,000+ in 2021. Pokétwo voted #4 Discord bot worldwide on Top.gg with 3M+ users Letters of Recommendation AP CS teacher — Participated in his class a lot in 11th grade. TAing for him this year (12th grade) and I built a VSCode Extension that the entire CS department (serving hundreds of students) adopted into their curriculum and will likely keep there for years to come (they used to use Eclipse, had been looking to switch for a long time but never had the tooling needed, my extension enabled them to switch). He likes me a lot and we talk all the time about whatever. Would say 9-10/10. AP Lang teacher — Less strong of a recommendation, would have picked another teacher if MIT didn't require a humanities rec. English is not a strong subject of mine. However, I did make a large effort to participate in class whenever I could (even if I was a bit unsure) and I wrote 4-5 essays for practice on my own that I asked her for feedback throughout the year, so I hope she could see my efforts. Would say probably a 6-7/10 but honestly I am not sure. Interviews MIT — Interview went well, we went over everything I wanted to talk about (all my extracurriculars) and I was able to stress heavily about my beliefs in doing what I'm interested in, taking whatever opportunities I come across and seeing where they lead me. Interviewer seemed to like me a decent amount (he took us over the set time by 30 mins). He gave me a good amount of advice regarding college and MIT in general and it was really interesting talking to him and learning about him. Penn — This was the most hilarious interview I've ever had. I applied M&T so the interviewer was also an M&T alum. We only spent like 15 minutes talking about my activities and accomplishments before he spent the rest of the time ranting about how I was the only person he interviewed who was actually qualified for the program, shitting on and glorifying Penn at the same time, and complaining about Bay Area kids who wanted to go to Penn and come straight back to the Bay Area. Essays Personal Statement — About my love for connecting with other people, and how my experiences working on Pokétwo and my school's app over the pandemic led me to discover that enabling other people to build connections was just as rewarding. I spent a lot of time on this essay and I like it (though my writing isn't the most sophisticated, I like how my voice shines out) though maybe it could be written slightly better. MIT — These were some of the first essays I wrote (since it was EA) but I like them a lot despite that. I spent sooo much time on these. Not really sure what else to talk about. Stanford — These were my favorite essays ever. First one (reflect on an experience where you were truly excited about learning) was about watching the Monogatari anime series and being sucked into the extensive Japanese wordplay, leading me to a broader interest in the Japanese language and pushing me to actually start self-studying Japanese (I was able to enroll in level 3 after half a year). Third one (something meaningful to you) was about windshield wipers as a totem for noticing problems in life and actively taking initiative to solve them instead of just acclimating to them (I know it sounds kinda weird but there's a brief story of windshield wipers were invented that demonstrates this). I thoroughly enjoyed the essay writing process (I learned so much about myself!) and I'm pretty happy with most of my essays. Though the quality of the essays for schools I cared about less varied... If you would like to read my essays, I'd be open to sharing them. Shoot me a message. Decisions (indicate ED/EA/REA/SCEA/RD) Acceptances: UC Berkeley (EECS) UC Santa Barbara (CCS Computing / this is quite a nice program, actually) NYU (Engineering) Purdue (CS) Acceptances, but...: UW (Pre-Sciences / not CS, so not great for me) UC San Diego (Undeclared / not CS, so not great for me) Waitlists: UCLA (CS) CMU (SCS) WashU (CS) Georgia Tech (CS) UC Irvine (CS) Rejections: MIT (CS / EA deferred, then rejected) Caltech (CS) Columbia (CS in CoE) Stanford (CS) UIUC (CS in CoE) USC (CS in Viterbi) Cornell (CS in CoE) Penn (M&T and also CS fallback) Additional Information: My
MIT Maker's Portfolio
. Thoughts: Berkeley is a great school, and EECS is a great program. I know that I'll be fine there. I know that I'd probably be fine wherever I went. Deep down, though, I can’t help but still feel disappointed. My philosophy has always been to explore what I'm interested in. I've never done anything "for college." And that's what colleges like MIT tell you to do. It just hurts that often the people who follow that advice to heart don't end up being the ones getting into those schools. I wrote this reflection after college decisions ended that details my feelings. It's somewhat personal, so I would appreciate it if you only read it if you're actually going to read the whole thing (and not just skim over it). Thanks.
落地无声发表于 2022-04-24 19:03