Word: rice
(lookup in dictionary)
(lookup stats)
Dates: all
Sort By: most recent first
(reverse)
...even if you didn't study calculus in the ninth grade, there are steps you can take at application time to better your odds. Last spring three of the country's most selective schools--Rice University, Bowdoin College and Cornell University--allowed TIME behind the closed doors of their admissions deliberations. The one stipulation: that TIME not use the names or certain identifying characteristics of kids like Theater Boy. The insights we gleaned won't substitute for top scores and grades. But they did puncture some of the myths that often prevent an applicant from winning admission...
...would think that a flutist-cum-poet with a 1,520 SAT, an unblemished transcript and a passion for philosophy would find a warm welcome at Houston's Rice University. Renaissance Girl was involved in so many extracurricular activities--band, the literary magazine, the astronomy, philosophy and poetry clubs--that it took minute handwriting to squeeze them onto the application. Yet she never made it off the waiting list...
...parlance of Rice's admissions committee, Renaissance Girl was a "clubber," a serial joiner of school organizations who never rises to a leadership position. A Cornell applicant submitted a one-page, single-spaced addendum to his application that cataloged, as an admissions officer exasperatedly termed it, "every activity he's ever participated in." With the "spread too thin" designation on his voting sheet, even his perfect 800 score on the verbal half of the SAT wasn't enough to stave off rejection...
...most successful essays show curiosity and self-awareness. Says Cornell's Saleh: "It's the only thing that really lets us see inside your soul." While there's no one right formula for soul baring, there are many wrong ones. It's disastrous to write, as a Rice applicant did, of what he could "bring to the University of California." A self-absorbed or arrogant tone is also a guaranteed turnoff. Exhibit A: a Rice essay beginning, "I have accumulated a fair amount of wisdom in a relatively limited time of life." Exhibit B: a Cornell applicant...
Schools are also taken with good students from families with little education or money. At Bowdoin, this is known as an "NC/BC" case, for no college/blue collar; at Rice, it's an application with "overcome" factors. At Cornell, admissions readers were initially not too impressed by a student with good test scores but whose grades were all over the map. Then a reader noticed that she came from a family with no higher education and worked up to 40 hours a week as a cashier. But it was her essay that really swayed the committee, as she described being derisively...