Deb: My son went to UVA, but it has been 20 years ago now. You are right about the admission there being tough; my son had to fight his way through the Maryland quota at the time.
It's a long application, every bit as much as the Ivy League schools. There were 3 essays; 2 shorter and one long. Obviously, you know that you need top grades, a challenging HS curriculum, and a pretty solid SAT score. School activities are an emphasis but it is easy to pile up good and diverse sounding, low effort ones. High schools are scored for academic rigor, and UVA does size up the academic competition. You mess up the last part of your senior year with senoritis- after acceptance - and you are dead. The essays seperate the wheat from the shaft among a huge contingent of high flying applicants. They are what can make you stand out in the crowd. Choose carefully and thoughtfully; be innovative but not patronizing; do them absolutely perfectly in the best possible writing style, rules of grammar, and format. They read thousands of these so find a way to become memorable. They are too important to leave to the student; I personally wrote them after much thought ( choose an adjective to describe yourself - self-reliance; why do you want to come to UVA; the societal impact of motorcycle helmet laws) , just like I recently did his daughter's essays for her college applications.
I'll tell you what the acceptance letter said, which might give some insight. The letter was personal - not some machine generated sterile entity. It said congratulation for being selected......... Earning 19 college semester hours of Advanced Placement - AP- credit is an extraordinary achievement. I enjoyed reading your essays, and your writing skills are remarkable.
This tells me that their selection process is an organized, personal, and in-depth process. Hope this old data helps and good luck.

 

Yeah, my son did that too.

 

Thanks...all good advice. I'm getting some from current/former UVA students on the Mid-A Forum, also.

 

A list of 20 activities is all well and good, but a demonstrated commitment to one thing is better. Five lines on one thing showing how you took on increasing responsibility and even gained some recognition is really the best.

 

Deb,

Don't believe all the hype. The college admission process is very badly broken, and much of the fault lies squarely on the shoulders of the high school college advisors. We went through the process four years ago with our son Andrew who was at best a slightly better than average student and who participated in almost no extra curricular activities. That said, he was accepted and is enrolled in Rutgers, and was accepted by six of the seven schools that he applied to. He was rejected by NYU, but in the year he applied, NYU received 34,000 applications for less than 8,000 seats. (Liz is an alumni of NYU, and even that didn't make any difference.)

When Andrew was a junior in high school, Liz and I started to attend the meetings put on by the high school grade advisors and guidence counselors. We heard about the need for a three page resume, about how schools would only consider the student if he/she had participated in school and community activities, about how the student had to belong to clubs and about how the student had to apply to a minimum of 8 schools.

At first Liz (and to a much lesser degree I) was very afraid that Andrew wouldn't be able to get into any school at all. After a while we came to realize that the high school advisors had a bloated sense of self importance and three quarters of what they were saying was just pure nonsense. I've also read lately (in the New York Times) that university and college admission people are putting less and less emphasis on the student's portfolio of extra curricular activies. Partly because they really don't mean as much as the high school advisors would lead us to believe, and partly because they found that many of the student's portfolios were bloated and full of exaggerations and lies.

If his grades are good enough, if he is reasonably articulate and can write well enough to produce well written essays on his application, he stands a very good chance of getting into the school of his choice. I also happen to agree with Dean that a good SAT prep course could go a very long way.

As the economy continues to worsen, and as more and more young people have difficulty finding employment, the competition to get into college, especially state schools has increased, but the bottom line is still that good grades and good scores on the SAT trumps most everything else.

 

I think the essays may have more weight now days. There are so many applicants with good grades and good SAT scores, there has to be something that makes the selection committee throw a borderline candidate into the pile. But I'm shooting my mouth with no back-up.

 

[QUOTE=RC - Ryder,Aug 31 2009, 11:21 AM]Deb:

 

Rob,
some schools are drifting away from the SAT as a baseline.
WPI has even made them optional. If you feel your grades are more representative of you, you don't submit SAT scores.

 

Thanks for the additional comments. I really have no idea what he is going to do regarding college. He says UVA, but who knows. It seems too bad that at the time most kids (especially boys) are going through all the craziness of the teen years, that they are required to try and focus on the other craziness associated with college admissions. I'm hoping he doesn't find the process too overwhelming and give up. To be cont'd.

 

I wasn't going to say anything...