Tempests, Stress, And Chances: "The Play's the Thing:"

"We are such stuff 
As dreams are made on" The Tempest

I was asked to answer the question  below on the website Quora.com

While the question is quite specific in terms of details that apply to a particular student I hope my answer address some issues that apply to many students who hope to be admitted to top universities in the US.

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What are the chances of an international student getting into a good university in USA with these credentials?

I am an 11th grader from India. I wish to apply to the political science or the international relations program (My long term goal is studying law and so I would select an appropriate major for law school).I am  also clear on my purpose of taking up law as career Given below are my achievements:-

1. Selected for the prestigious Harvard US India Initiative Conference. (I am the youngest one to be selected. Most of the applicants are college students from some of India, UK and USA's best universities)
2. Scored a perfect GPA of 4.0 and above 95% since class 4 to present. (My 10th class percentile was 99.98 and state rank was 2). My class is hyper competitive. All these years, I have been ahead of my peers only by 3 to 4 marks in the examinations.
3. Scored first positions in numerous public speaking competitions (7 as far as I can remember) at state and national level. (Despite the fact that I have a terrible stuttering problem since childhood).
4. Developed the website Fight Your Stammer to help all those who suffer from speech disorders like stuttering by providing valuable tips.
5. National rank of 5 and State rank of 1 in the Xpress Math olympiads.
6. Awarded the "Best Entrepreneur" by the Entrepreneurship Development Institute of India Summer School.
7. Awarded the "Gem of Art" by the Korasala's wonder art gallery (a national painting championship)
8. Volunteered in various cleanliness drives, cloth donation camps and visits to the schools of mentally retarded and blind kids.
9. Scored 1st rank at the Skateboarding championship (State Level) and several other local and national competitions. I have also taken the initiative to start a skateboarding club in my school.
10. Certified scholar of Sanskrit and Hindi language.
11. Awarded "Student of the year" by my school consecutively every year.
12. Collected nearly 45 trophies (academic + extracurricular) and 25 certificates till now (I have only mentioned some of my top achievements with the fear of boring you out).  
13. I have also given a speech in a news channel on the independence day (about patriotism).
14. I am currently pursuing a few MOOC s like "Law and Society" and "Justice" conducted by Harvard University. 
15. I have also received a few awards for Yoga and Meditation. Yoga is a subject at my school and I have scored straight A's every year.
16. I am also a United Nations online volunteer.                                                                                                                                  Being realistic, I am unsure about the Ivy leagues or the top 10 but can you recommend be some good universities that I can make to with these credentials. I have not yet given the SAT or ACT so please analyse my profile on the basis of my achievements. Thank you for your time and patience. 

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Congratulations on your strong academic performance. Your grades will help you get the attention of highly selective schools in the US.  Your test scores will be very important, however, as you will be competing against many of the top students in India who will also be applying to the same selective schools.

The list of your activities and awards is impressive; however, you will need to decide which of these will be most useful to representing you. The schools you are applying to use the Common Application and you only have 10 activities you can list.

By the time you apply, you should make sure anything you list comes across as professional and impressive. In visiting your website, I noted there was only 1 blog entry which, as you probably know, will not come across as an ongoing blog.

If I were reading your application and I clicked on the links to your blog and only saw one entry I would make the assumption that you were padding your resume a bit. I might well be wrong about this, but I am just being honest about how I would interpret this.

In addition, the speech you have on youtube is good, but it is from 2013 and while patriotic and given with gusto it may not come across  as among the best in India or the world to those who follow speech and debate. (I say this having profiled students who finished at or near the top of the world debating championships when they were applying to college
(Parke Muth, consultant: Confidence, Passion and Opportunities: Global Citizen and Champion Shares Wisdom:)

What I would advise you to do is to narrow your focus  so that you can continue to improve on the things you are passionate about. It is not the number of activities that matter, it is your time, effort and success in activities that will help you stand out.

The other factor to take into consideration is that US schools limit the number of international students they offer admission to. No top 20 university will have more than about 15% international students. In addition, the number of students applying from India is second only to the number applying from China. I mention this as schools wish to spread their international offers across the globe, something I have talked about on Quora before (How hard is it to get into a top tier college as an international student?)  You will have to be very near the top of all the students applying from India and that is quite a task.

As someone has already mentioned, should you require financial aid this may hurt your chances at all but a literal handful of schools that provide full aid for international students. (There are only 5 in the US that do this.)

I do not think compiling a list of schools at this point will be that useful to you  as your test scores will determine to some degree the range of schools you should look at. I would encourage you to look outside of just the very top schools so you have a range of options ready once you get ready to apply. There are many wonderful schools in the US that will prepare you well to be an attorney. No matter how strong you are as a student, universities that admit fewer than 10% of the applicants are a long shot for virtually everyone who applies.

I wish you the best of luck.

Link to Getting In Podcast

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For students who are hoping to be competitive applicants to top colleges and universities in the US, the process can seem mysterious, unclear and incredibly stressful.

The student who has asked this question clearly has done exceptionally well in his classes and has a range of activities and honors that demonstrate he is more than just a student who studies and earns high grades. On the other hand, despite his strong performance and his resume, I do not feel qualified to suggest what kinds of colleges and universities he should focus on for his search. I mentioned to him that testing is important, and foe students who hope to get into top schools they must have a record that stands out, in almost every respect: academic program, grades, testing recommendations, activities, essays and honors and awards. In the case of international students from countries like China, India, Korea and Singapore they must compete against the best in their country for a number of spots that is far smaller than those who apply from the US.

For some, my comments about this student’s website/blog might seen harsh; I am simply basing my response on my experience reading applications over many years at a highly selective university. I do not wish to discourage students from trying to reach for elite schools, but I do not wish to gloss over things that may be a potential negative in the evaluations process. The competition for spaces at the most selective schools continues to increase each year. Many who were admitted to these schools even a few short years ago would now have trouble getting in. There are many reasons for this, but perhaps the most important factor is that schools have been very successful in their efforts to increase application numbers from around the US and the world. More students think that the name of the school will determine their long term fate. The evidence is out there to show that this is not accurate (there is some truth to it but not nearly as much as most think), but perception matters more than statistics, data, and the stories of those who have had great lives and careers who never went to a highly ranked university. Most CEO’s of Fortune 500 companies fall into the latter category

Finally, I want to add that the desire on the part of students to find out their chances of getting into certain schools is a rational choice. Companies like prachment.com, Naviance and websites like College Confidentials’ immensely popular “chance me” option and  entrepreneurs like Stephen Ma who charge millions for giving a secret formula for predicting who gets in are only the tip of a very large set of businesses devoted to winning The Admission Game. Not surprisingly, what most of these businesses  show is that  numbers matter—a lot. Students whose numbers are in the top 1% tend to have positive outcomes. Those outside the top 10%, unless they are in a special category that schools value (athletes, legacies etc.) don’t have much of a shot at all.  Given this, what about 90% of all students should do is to look at schools where they can receive an exceptional education and where they have a good chance getting in. Students who start from this premise will have a lot less stress in their lives as they approach the application process.

 Every day, it seems, at least one  book, article or blog comes out about  how stressed students are these days. The stress to get into a small set of schools is, so most think, not just unhelpful, it is unhealthy. The most recent, From The Atlantic, is  what I would call the next generation of stress tomes (Stress 2.0). Instead of focusing on how we must get rid of stress and return childhood to some  prelapsarian time in which play and  free exploration  and was all any child needed (Jean-Jacques Rousseau is one who helped make this myth gain traction as fact), the Neo Realists are coming out and saying that we live in times in which only the 1% can be confident that will thrive and  that they need to get their kids up to speed if they next generation will continue to live in this tiny Celestial  enclave. Neither of the  heirs of Rousseau or Thomas More applies usefully  to most of the students who are going headed off to college. These student are the middle of a bell curve and they need not be obsessed with the names of colleges, But the people who read these books and articles and blogs are often the parents who want their children to either stay near the top or be able to rise near the top. They will continue to push for their children to compete, to do more and to live a structured life that will prepare them for  their  success and survival in the global coliseum. I wish I could predict that the gladiatorial games of choosing the champions were not going to be around much longer, but as long as the elite schools are still elite and as long as people want to be apart of this small subset of humanity the competition will continue t until, perhaps, the sentient robots take over and we can relax let them do our living and competing for us. O brave new world!