I don’t know, what was your offense? You might be able to talk the judge down.
Don’t you understand yet? Asking that question to an admissions officer would be a red flag for the type of thing they trying to guard against.
Anyway, the answer is 2089.5 but don’t tell them I told you.
It’s not a simple mathematical function, you can’t just maximize the function of “acceptance chance” with regards to “number of community service hours.”
I would avoid “empty service hours”. Just participating in a food kitchen or picking up trash on highway 14 is nice, but not really impressive. It’s impressive when you organize something yourself related to your interests. A single 3 hour charity concert that raised 50 dollars that you came up with and organized yourself, related to your own talents is going to be infinitely more impressive than just monotonously volunteering at the homeless shelter for 3 hours every weekend.
ETA: That’s not to say volunteering at homeless shelters is a bad thing, quite the contrary, but speaking from a “making an impression” standpoint it’s almost irrelevant.
No, I mean I know that. I was just wondering if this violin charity thing I’m planning on starting counts as community service.
And when I asked for the number of hours, I was just making sure…
Okay, okay, how many do you recommend**?
Also, how would I raise money from playing violin?
Chill, dude. It really depends on the definition a given person is using. I consider raising money for charity to be community service, but some people think only things like directly working at a shelter etc count as service. Don’t worry about it.
I make no recommendation. Like I said, a few hours doing something you like for a good cause is infinitely better for you than being Service-Droid 5000 for a thousand hours.
It involves talking to a LOT of people, advertisement (fliers, school newspaper maybe), and finding a location. Beyond that, I could help you but I think it will be infinitely more beneficial for you to figure that out on your own. It’s going to be a hell of a lot of work. Good luck!
Look, I don’t doubt that you’re probably bright, but you seem to in some ways lack self-assurance and confidence, despite some of the hubris you’ve shown. I gave you an idea of something to to, which some posters might think itself is going to far. The reason I suggested what I suggested was partially because, yes, it will look good on an application. But more importantly organizing a charity event is hard work and requires some creative thinking, but if you pull it off it is immensely satisfying and looks really good on a resume or application.
I’m sure that if you’re as bright as you made yourself out to be earlier in the thread, despite it being intimidating at first you’ll eventually have a bundle of ideas. Don’t do all of them, pick a couple and run with them. If they don’t work out, oh well, try again next year! Perseverance is also a trait people admire, as is the ability to analyze what went wrong and fixing it. While logistically a headache, the concept of a charity event is simple: you provide some service (a concert) in exchange for money that you assure everyone you will donate to charity. It’s really that simple, everything else is just a matter of finding a place to give the money to, and getting a location for the service and people to give you money.
Like I said, I’m not going to help you with that stuff, that’s the important part. That’s the part that, for it to be impressive, and for it to really be something of your own, you have to work out for yourself. That doesn’t mean turn away help, ask your parents, ask your teachers, ask your friends – get help, having connections that can help you is great! You just need to get the ball rolling and start doing it yourself for it to mean anything.
And yes, I think doing this will help you come out of your shell and give you the self confidence to stop doubting yourself about whether you’re doing exactly the right thing, because even if you get mediocre results, you’ll know that you truly pulled off something difficult that you can call your own for once.
It sounds like you’re leaning pretty hard on the violin because that’s your biggest asset right now - which is fine. However if you want to cultivate your science/math/engineering/technology background keep in mind there are also other opportunities.
You could volunteer at a hospital, museum, lab, etc. You could offer pro bono tutoring services for elementary/middle school kids. I would press further, but I fear that in giving you ideas, I’m only going to pigeonhole you further into MY thoughts and MY ideas brought forth through MY experiences.
As for the violin, it wouldn’t be too difficult. A string quartet will be in HIGH demand for a ton of venues in the next month and a half. Corporate holiday parties, shopping malls… even colleges like Fraternity events
I don’t know, I gave him a single idea because I feel like he needs to do something difficult just to build his confidence on his own. Right now he’s falling into the “trap of the perfect student” as I like to call it. What’s the problem with good grades, music talent, and community service? They’re all in somebody else’s framework, they all have set conditions for “success” defined by an external agent.
To really be impressive, one of the main things is to be proactive, not reactive. That’s the problem with the “perfect student”, they’re reactive. So my charity idea was to start him on the path to something proactive with hopes that it will inspire him to do other proactive things he loves in the future. Things he came up with other than seeking out things like rudimentary community service or solving candy jar volume puzzles.
ETA: I’m not sure about undergrad, but I’ve been told by grad people at CMU that a guy with a 3.2 who missed 3 weeks of class because he was trying out some new idea or running some event they came up with is better than a 4.0 that did nothing. Obviously a guy with a 4.0 AND novel ideas is better, but they were pretty clear that there are many reasons for having a good or bad GPA, including teachers that like/dislike you for arbitrary reasons – but trying out novel things is a definite indicator of the types of things they look for.
These are all good ideas.
You see, in some way pancakes3 is right that I’m looking for careers in the math field (that are high paying but let’s not talk about that right now).
But Jragon has the point because this will really help me out, and like he said, build my confidence. I will ask my guidance counselors, maybe some of my peers at my orchestra and see what they say. This could potentially become something.
You know, one of the things I love is to bring something written into real life. Like how we are talking about all these ideas for playing violin for charity; you know quartets, soloing, etc. but what I’ll like the most about it is bringing those thoughts alive.
And as a side note, some of my brain poison as I was describing earlier is starting to be relieved, but there’s still a lot left. In case anyone doesn’t know, what I mean by brain poison is constant thoughts about, “Will _____ like this,” “How do I get into ________.” You get the idea. Apparently my brain is “poisoned” by these thoughts.
First, telling any college that you play violin because you love to do it is the right answer. That is what they are looking for; passion. They know (and most of us beyond high school know) that you are way too young to be locked into a career. Playing violin broadens you, and makes you a more attractive candidate.;
The next thing is - many of the colleges on your list are very different, and a person happy in one might be miserable in another. My oldest daughter went to Berkeley half time as a high school senior, but chose to go to Chicago and is now a graduate student at Rutgers. My other daughter went to Maryland. I went to MIT and then Illinois. All very different. You need to see if you can listen in on campus buzz, and you need to visit if possible even before you apply.
Don’t worry about asking questions of MIT or any college. You are not the only confused high school student in the world who is confused. Doing it yourself will show initiative. That is good.
And don’t worry about careers. Going to college is for figuring out a career, and a path, not for moving forward on something you decided on with little information. It is far better to and easier to switch to something you love if you are flexible, One of my friends, whose father and uncle were quite famous, went to MIT and then went off to get a PhD in folklore. He’s successful also - you never can tell.
Not only is there no “secret code” for getting admitted into MIT (or any other top college), but I think I can show that it’s logically impossible for there to be any such secret code. It appears to me that MIT admits about 1,300 new undergraduate students a year. I suspect that in addition to 10,000 or so applicants each year who probably aren’t quite good enough for MIT (some of who are reasonably smart and will do well enough later in life but who just aren’t quite up to the same level), MIT has about 4,000 people applying each year who are clearly good enough to do well at MIT as undergraduates. If the admissions office were to deliberately throw out the applications of the best 2,700 of these applicants and admit the 1,300 applicants who they considered the poorest 1,300 of the top 4,000, it’s likely that few people would notice the next year that there was any obvious difference in the freshman class. It wouldn’t be until years later, after that class has graduated and gone on to grad school and then their careers, that someone will say that there was something missing in that class. Although their GPA’s and graduate and professional school admission rates will only be a little below that of any other class and they will do O.K. in their careers, people will notice that few people in that class are really top-notch in their fields.
In addition, there will be at least another 4,000 high school students in the U.S. who will be entering college that year who are just as good candidates for MIT admission as those top 4,000 applicants to MIT. However, those people won’t have even applied to MIT. Sometimes this is for financial reasons, sometimes for logistic reasons, sometimes because they consider another college better for them, sometimes just because they come from the sort of backgrounds where going to a second-rate college is considered a brilliant achievement and going to a top college is so far out of consideration that they would never even try to get admitted. And, for what it’s worth, there are probably another 2,000 or so American high school students that year just as smart as those 8,000 (the 4,000 applying to MIT and the 4,000 who don’t) who won’t even go to college. I know that we like to believe that we live in an equal-opportunity society where everyone gets their chance to reach the level they deserve, but it’s just not true. (Yes, I know that I’m simplifying things by assuming that everyone applying to MIT is American.)
These 10,000 or so people from that one high school year in the U.S. are all smart enough that they could do well at MIT. They are the smartest .25% (i.e., one in 400) of that year. Now suppose that there were a secret code that could get any one of those 10,000 to be automatically one of the 1,300 people admitted to MIT that year. Suppose that MIT winnows down its applicants to the best 4,000 each year and then looks for those with the secret code somewhere in their applications. Who knows what that secret code must be - a phrase in their answer to questions on the application form, a particular extracurricular activity, a particular high school course, a particular sort of volunteering, or whatever. If this secret code became generally known, everybody would start making sure it was on their applications. Yeah, you say, but what if it doesn’t become generally known? In that case, why are you asking on the SDMB about it? Do you think that we’re some sort of an arcane secret society with all the hidden secrets for success in life? If the supposed secret code is truly kept secret, you’re never going to know it. If it isn’t kept secret, everybody who’s applying to MIT already knows it or can easily figure it out, so the applications committee is going to have to find some other way of distinguishing among them, so it isn’t really a secret code for admission at all.
If there’s any sort of secret code, it must be one that’s held in confidence by a very small group, and if you want to know it, they’re going to make you pay for it. Now the SDMB isn’t such a group. We give good answers to factual questions and sometimes good advice, but we’re aren’t a secret society. Well, except for me. I know the secret code. If you want to know it too, arrange to have a million dollars in small, unmarked bills delivered to me. Make sure that no one knows about this. I don’t want the IRS to find out about my hidden income. Don’t mention it, for instance, on a public E-mail message board like . . . um . . . oh, just forget the whole thing.
Hilarious. Doubly so when you consider the other threads in IMHO. What is a comfortable walking shoe? Would you bring a cup of coffee into the restroom at work? Platonic friends spoon, he gets a boner and she gets upset…
Nothing against those threads, though. It’s just funny in contrast to this particular observation.
Carry on though. However, OP, also consider this… You can get into MIT by the skin of your teeth and struggle through with a less-than-optimal GPA just because it’s very humbling to study in the company of geniuses. OR you can settle for a lesser school… a state school even and cruise through with a 4.0 and still end up with the same job or even better.
This is a very good point. I went to Berkeley for a year, was miserable there, and transferred to MIT. My parents did not want to pay for MIT, and told me I would be fine at Berkeley - they have five degrees from there between them, and loved it. But I wasn’t fine there, just because they had been, and after seeing my first year, they changed their tune and agreed I could transfer.
Oh, you know, Oxford…Cambridge…Hull.
If you follow through with any of this, it will be the single-most attractive thing on your college resume. Talk to your music instructor to see if they have any ideas.
Fwiw, my alma mater’s undergrad architecture program is top 10 in the nation (at least it was when I was in school) and I know of only 1 person out of dozens (upwards of 50ish) who has an architecture degree that is actually doing architecture.
I also know a few architecture undergrads from other schools: Wellesly, Virginia Tech, and Texas - none of whom are doing architecture.
The point is not to discourage you but rather reinforce what others have said repeatedly - don’t pigeonhole yourself especially at such an early age.
As for the OP, I just took a look at your course schedule and noticed a few things.
1 - You’re not taking honors English.
2 - You’re not taking honors [Foreign Language]
3 - You’ve doubled up on orchestra classes.
From my application process in the early 2000’s and my sister’s current application process I can say that honors classes across the board, 5 years of a language (dating back to the 8th grade) and adding on an academic elective like AP Environmental Science, AP Stat, AP Psych, Econ, and 2 of AP Bio/Phys/Chem is standard operating procedure for the hypercompetitive.
And by hypercompetitive I mean in my graduating class, only 1 went to Stanford, 1 went to Harvard, 2 went to MIT, 1 went to Hopkins, and 1 went to Princeton. The rest of us had to “settle” for lesser top 25 schools. Not really though. Most of us willing chose to apply early decision to UVa at an in-state rate and had arguably the greatest 4 years of our lives.
I know it seems pretty wimpy for me to not take Honors Spanish/English, but we have all of that set.
I’m not taking standard classes ever again! And on top of that, my guidance counselor says it won’t kill my chances as she is going to write something in her recommendation saying, “He was recommended for college preparatory classes in English and Spanish, so he made straight A’s, and took Honors classes in English and Spanish from the next year.”
She then said to me, “But this HAS to be a fact.”
I was like, “Of course it will.”
Seriously, I’m only taking AP/Honors classes after this year.
Standard classes are for wimps!
Is this book worth checking out? It has 1 good review and seems like a good book!
Doesn’t look like it. I’d recommend this. These are always really well-researched books, and written in a pretty engaging and entertaining way. If they still have bookstores near you, go check it out and see if it’s something you’d like. I have a friend who works as an editor there and they’re extremely thorough. Give it a look.
Yeah, the OP sounds like one of those insufferable kids who wants extra credit for everything because they they think perfect grades and the right combination of extraciricular activities is the path to the upper echelons of society. Yes, a good school and a good GPA are important to put on your resume. But to be successful requires a lot more than just being an excellent standardized test taker and pursuing a bunch of bullshit hobbies no one in the real world cares about.