HOW I NOW THINK I REALLY GOT INTO STANFORD

As we approach Thanksgiving, I thought I'd share something to do with pumpkin pie.  First, in follow-up to my Bruno Mars posting last week, the local paper reported that he donated 24,000 Thanksgiving meals to the Salvation Army, symbolic of his 24K Magic Tour.   Then I just happened to see this on Quora:

Do Harvard and Stanford have a vastly different selection criteria? Is Stanford more willing to admit quirky, non-traditional students?

Lucinda Price, MS Earthquake Engineering, Stanford University

Updated Oct 29 · Upvoted by Brad Crystal, B.A. Political Science, Stanford University and Mikal Mann, Ed.M. from Harvard University (2016)

I can’t speak to Harvard, but assume it’s similar to Stanford. I’m an alumni interviewer for Stanford. Over 50% of those I interviewed were extremely well-qualified but less than 10% were actually admitted. Those admitted were a) brilliant students and b) truly inspiring. They literally made me want to be a better person. I was honored to listen to them for an hour about their philanthropy and accomplishments. I was in awe. One had used her local network to sell artwork of the homeless at top dollar to raise more than $20k for the shelter. She provided the art supplies and ran the art classes at the shelter. She started the classes not to make money for the shelter, but rather she thought it would be therapeutic because art was for her. She wasn’t swayed by nay-sayers about her age or lack of influence or talent or it would be too dangerous or a waste of her time. She followed her heart and amazing things happened. She knew that we make our own luck.

Unique, successful, sincere, and creative philanthropy was KEY to getting in.

I have previously posted on the difficult Stanford acceptance process and how a broken wrist was the key to my successful application.  Well, those above stories jiggled an experience that was deeply embedded in my memory, and I think now this something else might have been the real reason why I was accepted.  I was borderline okay in grades, SAT scores, public service and such.  But nothing special.

In those days when I was thinking about applying to colleges...and this was half a century ago...philanthropy wasn't even on my radar screen.  However, when I happened to write my essay for the application, the McKinley High School Aztecs Hi-Y club to which I belonged just had a disastrous Thanksgiving period selling pumpkin pies for our coffers.  We miscalculated by around 50 pies.  We could each pay for two and take them home, but someone (not me), came up with a brilliant idea that could have been pivotal to the rest of my life.  Why don't we give them to charitable organizations?  So for Thanksgiving Eve we all went around to the Salvation Army, Palama Settlement and similar organizations to donate them.  There was no intention to gain any particular credit, but somehow, the local Advertiser found out and published a short article.  My whole life possibly changed, and I'll need to find out who wrote it.

I expanded on this "debacle - good cause" in my essay, and might have exaggerated the reality.  (I don't have a copy because the one I sent was the only one produced.)  It's possible something like this made the difference.  

While I was totally out of my element on campus, as I was clearly inferior, I thoroughly enjoyed life there, matured well and somehow graduated, taking with me the prime reason for success:  CONFIDENCE.  I guess I wasn't much of a distinguished graduate, for I don't know of any McKinley High School senior following me who went to Stanford for freshman year.  Several to graduate and professional schools, but not straight from high school.  At least that experiment worked for me, and because of pumpkin pies, the future of the Blue Revolution or hydrogen might now well be on its way to saving Planet Earth and Humanity.

I'll end with another Quora entry, although he is talking about graduate school entrance:

Can I get into Stanford with a 3.7 GPA?

Christopher VanLang, Ph.D. Chemical Engineering, Stanford University

Updated Feb 27, 2017 · Author has 4.9k answers and 14.1m answer views

From first-hand experience, yes you can get into Stanford with a 3.7 GPA.

I only had a 3.7 GPA. They took me. I also had terrible GRE scores. By most of the statistical metrics, I really wasn't a strong student. Even the NSF and NIH clarified in great detail that I wasn’t a “stellar student”. In addition, I know that other students had worse numbers than me.

But I would like to say that many of the other factors made me an interesting candidate. Why wouldn't they? When we do our own selection of undergrads, the general rule of thumb is that the best student is a “strong B+ student”. The perfect student is someone much more unreliable.

Interesting that my degree was also in chemical engineering, and there is some truth to that final paragraph, but the competition for entry into the freshman class these days is unreal:

MIT, Stanford, and every member of the Ivy League, with the exception of Yale, set record-low rates for admission to the Class of 2022.

Out of the group of 10 schools, Stanford was the most selective, with an admissions rate of 4.3 percent. For the fifth year in a row, Stanford had a lower rate than Harvard, which accepted 4.59 percent of students who applied—marking the first time the College has ever dipped below 5 percent.

Next week I'll give particular thanks to pumpkin pies.  It's scary how one seemingly insignificant event, and a disaster at that, can positively affect the future of one's life.  You just don't know if that cockroach (in A Sound of Thunder it was a butterfly) you stepped on will determine whether intelligence will expand beyond Planet Earth.  And maybe this all doesn't matter.

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