I picked David because his achievements seemed more concrete. The "marketing" and "sustainability" stuff sounded like fluff to me. I didn't read much more of the article after I found out he chose the other guy.
I thought Steve was impressive because he was uncommon. By definition, every high school with a track team has a captain of the track team; you're likely to see hundreds of Davids in a given college admissions department. It's much less likely that you'll encounter someone who worked with an NGO or the UN--even if Steve's abilities or perserverance weren't exceptional.<p>Still, I think there's something to the model. It <i>is</i> difficult to envision how one might become an advisor to a UN NGO! That was definitely a factor in my evaluation.
This is particularly exaggerated among Stanford undergrads, presumably by intent of the admissions department. I didn't do my undergrad at Stanford, but I've heard many stories from undergrad friends about the guy down the hall who didn't seem particularly outstanding or bright, until he turned out to be e.g. the #2 model airplane builder in the world. This line in particular stood out to me:<p>>Admissions officers would agree. They’re not looking to build hardworking and diligent classes. Instead, they want to build classes that are interesting.<p>The emphasis on this elusive impressive/unusual quality over raw academic prowess also explains the quality of some of the problem sets I've graded...but then, doing well on problem sets and starting successful companies (or becoming an outlier by some other metric of success) are completely different things. Stanford optimizes for the latter.
A better way of saying this is: “I worked a lot on X” is less interesting/impressive than “A bunch of adults acted on something I did.”<p>To be honest though, this article’s premise (I should figure out how to efficiently get into college) seems pretty stupid. It’s just as stupid as college counselor’s premise, and really basically the same.<p>Instead of <i>“drop the 5th and 6th AP course from your schedule and put your attention toward becoming an insider”</i>, how about trying to learn as much as you can from your classes (emphasis: learning not some irrelevant number), build cool stuff, and try to make it have a real-world impact because they are intrinsically valuable things to do?
<i>Steve called and e-mailed reporters, eventually scoring a few big hits, including a mention in Time Magazine’s Green Issue</i><p>Okay, it was at this point where I switched and picked Steve over David.<p>Captain of the track team sounds impressive, until you consider that there would be 400 other captains sitting in an academic reviewer's inbox. Now I'm not really sure if this is impressiveness, but it sure stands out if I had to sift through a hundred or a thousand applications, and this one guy writes about his experience in the UN.
In the mind of a typical high school student, being a team captain is a known path with many known examples. Being a part of UN is not so obvious thus it's a risky path and it may take many failures before stumbling upon the right path.<p>Sure, the right path may be simple. But so are many successful start-ups ideas. Yet you can't just discredit the skills of the founders just because the ideas were simple. Because simple ideas usually came many iterations of bad ones<p>If I am an investor I'd invest in Steve because, he is, as PG once said, relentlessly resourceful.
Love this quote. I can deeply identify with it. I don't have to be good at something to enjoy it. And you'll improve over time, even if that's not the purpose you seek.<p>The Magic of Time - The Last One Standing:<p><a href="http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-one-standing.html" rel="nofollow">http://www.unlikelysalsero.com/2007/08/magic-of-time-last-on...</a><p>> When her best friend tried to get Kara to drop a difficult linear algebra class, Kara, to her friend’s horror, simply shrugged and replied, “I like linear algebra.”
The concept of failed simulation is very interesting. I wrote a post about how the capability to simulate is important to programmers and designers, where the failure to simulate is produces bad code/products.<p><a href="http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-for-the-daemon-or-are-you-a-good-simulator/" rel="nofollow">http://www.alwaysontechnologies.com/blog/2010/03/16/empathy-...</a><p>This article is about the inverse effect, which I didn't even think about at all.
The whole concept of highly selective schools is distasteful. I can't imagine myself in the position of choosing between prospective students for one. The selection process is highly arbitrary just like hiring. I wouldn't accept the responsibility of turning away prospective students who actually want to come to a school to learn.
With a solid C average coming out of high school, I got into Carnegie Mellon (not Brown, though...), but wound up going to a state school that gave me a free ride for 4 years. There are lots of ways to hack the admissions process, but none of them include Japanese calligraphy (unless you become a cultural ambassador to Japan).
Ha I see. In other applications, this is the "hook", the elevator pitch. Or the quick bio when networking that gets people coming back to hear the story. I'm not quite sure how this applies to the "startup story".
By now it's pretty well established that college admissions are a crap shoot so why is this guy wasting time on failed simulation theory and applying it to college admissions.