I got busy and hit submit without commentary.
While there is some obnoxious not-so-stealth bragging there, my list also shows how arbitrary admissions can be as well. Why did some of those schools accept, while others rejected or waitlisted? There is a fair amount of dart-tossing and random guessing at that level once your application hits the right pile.
Good comments. Thanks, everyone.
I will say that even though I didn’t feel like I was selected based on merit for undergrad, I felt totally different when I got accepted to graduate school. There I actually exceeded the bar and was constantly reminded of it.
What’s strange is that I had the opposite experience in graduate school than I had in undergrad. During the latter, I started off feeling small and eventually “filled out”, self-confidence wise. In grad school, though, the reverse happened. I don’t know if that’s just how graduate school is for everyone or if that was just something that happened to me.
I did have the opportunity to go to less challenging schools for college, but none of them came with free tuition–which was one of the main reasons why I went with my alma mater. I probably would have enjoyed college a lot more if I had gone somewhere else, but getting toughened up was also a good thing. So I don’t know. It’s easy to say “No regrets”, but I do have them sometimes.
I got a merit based scholarship. My race never even came up. Heck, due to how nervous I was during the phone call, it wouldn’t surprise me if they couldn’t quite tell my sex. I literally had not applied before that phone call where I was told that everything else was mere formality.
Also, I suspect the woman in the OP was actually helping her chances by leaving off her race. Aren’t Asians overrepresented in college relative to their population numbers?
EDIT: so I don’t sound like I’m bragging: it wasn’t that great a school, and I only kept mys scholarship for 2 years due to taking talent based courses rather than knowledge based ones.
I went to a Korean university for my undergrad - one that is notoriously traditional and patriarchal, so my race was irrelevant and my gender certainly did not help me at all.
On the other hand, a lot of my peers in my high school thought that my acceptance was not deserved, as I got in through an early acceptance program based on my English skills (I had lived abroad as a child, which many thought gave me an unfair advantage).
I went to UChicago for my MA. I was so humbled by my experience there that I’ve always suspected I was accepted only because they needed to fill an diversity quota.
I don’t know if it still exists, but I benefited from a policy that gave students transferring with 2-year degrees preferential admission to the state universities. If we met the SAT minimum, we were a shoe-in regardless of crap like grades, extra-curriculars, entrance essays, etc.
Being a white male, I certainly didn’t get any special consideration from my school looking to meet a [del]quota[/del] diversity target. 
I wasn’t much of a star in high school, despite being top 10 in my class, having lots of extra-curriculars, and being a National Merit Scholar, but I had no doubt that the small private school I applied to would accept me, and they did.
And I promptly went from being an underachieving but relatively big fish in a very small pond to being an astonishingly lackluster C- student in a medium pond. Meh. I did better in grad school.