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i am semi-disgusted to be doing this, and everyone's stats are scaring me right now (from viewing all the resumes, one suddenly wants to be a pessimistic skeptic of honesty in teenagers). This is, with no doubt, for purely selfish reasons. however, i might as well give it a shot and procrastinate on my actual work for apps much, much further.

Also, I'm an Asian female.

First, my list. I need more safeties.
1) Harvard (EA, but it's looking more and more like it'll be RA...teacher rec deadlines)
2) Columbia
3) UPenn or Yale
4) Brown or Princeton
5) Wash U in St. Lou
UChicago (this is a tie with Wash U)
7) Duke or Emory or Case Western Reserve
8) UToronto
9) Amherst or Brandeis or Wesleyan
10) University of Texas-Austin

I want to go pre-med with a focus in the humanities (as I seem to have little talent for the other side of thinking). I am also considering J-school (journalism) or pre-law. Interests include phil, peace and conflict studies, anthropol, neurosci, psych, econ, public policy.

RESUME

Education
Public High School
Skipped 4th grade, 7th/8th combined in one "subfreshman year" at former high school: I am graduating at 15. It's not really an advantageous thing right now, as I can't drive...[incoherent sound of general frustration]
Class Rank: 9/357
PSAT (October 2002) Combined Index Score: 222 / 72 Math / 80 Verbal/ 70 Writing
National Merit Semifinalist, Finalist Candidate
SAT Scores (January 2003): 800 Verbal / 790 Math
SAT II Scores (June 2003): 780 Biology M / 650 Math IIc / 800 Writing
SAT II Scores for October 2003 pending. took math IIc again, lit, and history. I am fairly certain have a 700+ in at least one of them, with math being the least likely.
AP Scores (May 2003): 5 Biology / 5 English Language
AP/College Level Courses: English Language, Biology, Calculus (AB), English Literature, Physics? or Chemistry? through Stanford EPGY
As many higher-level/honors classes as I could conceivably take.
Health Science Tech II class (and this is one of four real classes I'm taking this year)- clinical rotations helping and observing in area health/medical organizations
Harvard Secondary School Program (SSP, summer 2003): Comparative Functional Anatomy of the Vertebrates (BIOL S-21, B plus);
Biomedical Ethics (BIOL S-167, A); Reality, Desire, and the Epic Form: Homer, Dante, and Joyce (COMP S-109, noncredit audit)

Extracurricular Activities
National Honor Society (NHS) – Vice President, (Grade 12)
Panther Press (Student Newspaper) – Assistant Editor (12), Reporter (11)
Health Occupations Students of America (HOSA) – Vice President, 12; Member, 11 and 10
Academic Decathlon (12, 11)
Speech and Debate – Lincoln-Douglas and extemporaneous events (12)
Mu Alpha Theta (ΜΑθ, National High School and Junior College Math Honor Society) (12, 11)
French Club (12, 10)
Literature Club (12, 11)
Mentoring (11, 10)
Academic Octathlon (10)

Random Addendums I need to Addendum-ize
Currently working on a piano opus, and I am the most mediocre of pianists.
Read a lot of philosophy, especially appreciate Kant and Rawls. I am working on an online phil reading group with a friend.
Amnesty International (the international human rights promotion and awareness organization) - Member, Activist, and aspiring Student Coordinator for my school's chapter (12, 11)

Yes, I am a dilletante.

Academic Recognition and Awards
Societé Honoraire de FranÇais (National French Honor Society) (12), Honorary President (11)
National Student Press Association Honor Roll (12) and National Quill & Scroll Induction (11)
Harvard Crimson News Internship (summer 2003)
National Honor Society Induction (11)
National ΜΑθ Induction (11)
HOSA Competitor – Rating of ‘excellence’ (top 10 finishers) in Kaiser Permanente National Health Care Issues exam; State 6th place in Anatomy and Physiology knowledge test; Area 1st place in Anatomy and Physiology (11)
Academic Decathlete – Area awards of 5th place overall team finish, individual awards in eight events (detail upon request) and 5th place overall for ‘scholastic’ (A student) group division (11)
National Journalism Convention – Honorable Mention in newsmagazine layout category (11) - I had never seen a pica sheet before, and I work on a newspaper, not a newsmagazine. go figure.
Academic Octathlete – Area awards; District awards (detail upon request) and gold in overall performance ‘scholastic’ (A student) group division (10)
University Interscholastic League (UIL) Academic Competitor – District awards of 1st place team finish, 2nd place individual finish and Regional competition advancement, participation in District editorial writing competition (11)
Texas French Symposium – 6th place in ‘guided speaking’ event (10)

Community Service and Leadership Activities
Houston Hospice Patient Contact Volunteer (11)
HOSA Volunteering – with Houston Juvenile Diabetes Walk 2002; Habitat for Humanity; Northwest Assistance Ministries; Tomagwa (low-income health clinic); in-school activities (12, 11)
ΜΑθ Volunteering – in-school activities – (12, 11)
SSP Summer Servers Volunteer – in Cambridge, MA area, with East End House (community center); Greater Boston Area Food Bank; On-the-Rise (transient women’s shelter) (Summer 2003)
National Student Leadership Conference (NSLC) – Medicine & Health Care participant (July 2002)

I don't have any impressive science internships or lab work. Well, bah-humbug.

WRITING SAMPLE - My UPenn Essay, stream-of-consciousness style. (Kudos to James Joyce!) I'm really really sorry if this is in the wrong place.
the prompt: you have just completed a 300-page autobiography. please submit page 217.

Twenty-Three ¯217¯ “Flight”

sky was falling. Volante. Raindrops poured onto the windshield, corporeal little parachuters tumbling over cold glass, the molecules sticking (in Bio-AP I would learn about the properties of water and decide my family demonstrated adhesion as opposed to cohesion), spreading, welcoming impact. I can’t watch them plummet-race down, potential fulfilled, for they patter so quickly, a tap dancer’s rhythmic reverie until you can’t distinguish the individual beats, but only the crazy-maybe motif of wholes, of wonder in what can’t be put into discrete terms. Remains scattered and scattering, gaudy neon lights bouncing about, and it looks like some manic-hyperbolic Van Gogh painting to me, La Rue à Nuit or, Il pleu(v)rait comme mon coeur, perhaps. We’re moving again, the fourth time, although it’s all shrouded within the murky haze of dance-fighting brushstrokes, just above a smokescreen I developed for memories. I could be numb, but I know I should be feeling otherwise. There’s something of a fire teasing the bottom of my consciousness. It’s no inferno, but expect a melodramatic nine-year old to fan the flames and then whine about it. Fifth grade, my Darwinian year, as indicated by libelous character studies aforementioned. I needed to make a fresh start, away from all the social turbulence that bruised my gossamer, unworthy ego.
Yet, one regret about leaving: I have not had the pleasure of seeing the Yale art museum since. Other regret about leaving: I never had a chance to grow enough to reconcile myself socially, adjust and make them adjust (then or now) to my being a rite-of-passage late and a year short. To this day, when my “true” age comes up, I’ll try to explain that I’m missing ten and, to a much lesser extent, twelve, not sixteen and seventeen. I didn’t want to become a little sister stereotype. Then again, it’s not a little bit to be missing... especially when it came to not driving. Ah, the joys of moving your ideas in the suburbs of Houston – I always end up leaving some motivation behind...
The Second Law of Thermodynamics: All energetic exchange tends toward decreasing available free energy. So everything (fluids, chemical reactions, stars, life, your consciousness), hurtles or inches toward creative chaos, a precarious balance of entropy. I had no clue then (despite my innately nerd-core habits of watching Bill Nye the Science Guy), but I was watching Newton’s First Law manifest in front of my eyes, on the windshield of a U-Haul. My parents, as immigrants, couldn’t help it. If our family was to be reunited, we all had to make difficult sacrifices. “What doesn’t kill you makes you stronger.”
The I Ching says, “The universe itself is flux,” and thus it’s in your ancestral Han lineage somewhere, even when your parents have never read the I Ching, as it was banned during the better part of their young lives, which happened to correspond to with Mao’s brutal cultural cleansing (I understand their suffering as thoughtcrime now, a ragged rent torn in the Chinese soul, unrequited). Besides, Daoism is atrociously ambiguous as such. Jonathan Safran Foer referred to a “sixth sense of memory” in the Jewish culture. Gish Jen compared being Chinese to being Jewish, what with both cultures placing such value on education and personal history, and what’s more, cleaning your plate no matter how distasteful you find it, especially our mothers, and definitely the sense of heritage. A good translation of “Ai-ya!” Would be “Oy-vey!”
So, like some “Happy Family Platter” and the Asian tradition, we would stick together. Later and before, gluing the broken dishware and mugs wouldn’t be so easy. It’d be futile. It was hard seeing all the roots you could spread down, the ownership of a place in heart and mind, torn up beneath you and carried off from foreign soil to more foreign soil. To lose faces and conversations, local clichés and inside jokes, indelible trauma. It’s awful seeing the only constant bulwark behind you crumble into a million preciously delicate shards amidst childhood baggage, under guise of conjugal strife. Still, we persisted. And I prolong the semi-delusional afterthought that maybe, just maybe, we can prevail. For Andy’s sake, I think we must.

= Twenty-Four (the Alpha and the Omega) =

Stephen Dedalus - “I cannot sleep here tonight. Home also I cannot go… Shut your eyes and see.” In July and August of 2003, I enjoyed the most amazing intellectual episode of my life thus far, which is to say, a bunch of kids eating Chex Mix and discussing the idea of Kant in re: Berkeley in re: Joyce in re: Mozart in re: Kandinsky in re: Radiohead in re: the glorious elegance of this math proof, the religiously reductionist sphere’s most brilliant, tour-de-force integration: “eiπ + 1 = 0,” amid grand imitations of South Park (“KENNY!”) at 4 in the morning. We left by 4:30, as the sprinklers in the Hurlbut courtyard turned on then. Another vivid memory from my Harvard Secondary School Program phantasmagoria, compacted and form-fitted into a holographic slideshow: One night, we had to get back to Harvard from the Boston Pops on the T (like a genius Ivy League student, I suggested we go to the farther, more crowded, worse viewpoint for the July 4th concert) and we had to make this train. Whenever I have lost something, which is what I often do, there’s a haunting hollow in the gut that whines, “You screwed up!” For once, I knew I wasn’t going to lose this one. We ran and made it, and caught the raindrops of a college summer in our sieved, cusped hands. The cohesion took my breath away and gave it back, effervescent.

again, i'm so sorry you have had to go through all this text. thank you so much for any advice.

By Futureal (Futureal) on Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 07:10 pm: Edit

wow

you need fewer safties

By Zephyrmaster2 (Zephyrmaster2) on Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 07:20 pm: Edit

*faints*

Hey... um... I pwned you in MathIIc by 30 points... yeah...

Just kidding, wow, if you don't have good shots, who does? Seriously...

By Giovanni (Giovanni) on Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 07:49 pm: Edit

Why would you graduate at 15? That must suck.

Pfft, I'm glad that I can go out and party sometimes. Ha.

Screw the Ivies, I'd much rather go to some big State school for free.

But umm... good luck to you. You sure worked hard. About 5000 billion times harder than me.

But I don't see the perks of Harvard... I can go to Med school somewhere else and make just as much, can't I?

Yeah, I'm bitter. But I'm lazy too.

I bet you'll get in.

By Rubenizm (Rubenizm) on Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 08:13 pm: Edit

"everyone's stats are scaring me right now "

ooooh i have a 1590 and yet i'm everyone's stats are scaring me!!!! Ooooh ladida.

By Giovanni (Giovanni) on Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 08:37 pm: Edit

Your essay seems a bit... forced. I read Joyce and Ginsberg "Headlines from Mars" too, but I'm not going to go for the "I just came down from a bad trip" writing style on my college essay. Unless UPenn wants it that way?

But if you can't get into Harvard, I don't know who could. Good luck girl.

By Jjsmom (Jjsmom) on Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 09:27 pm: Edit

Well, your stream of consciousness writing style leaves me cold. I think this type of essay will take away from, rather than add to, your impressive stats.

By J_Shen (J_Shen) on Saturday, October 11, 2003 - 09:42 pm: Edit

thanks everyone. and i may have a 1590, but i really don't think test scores should matter. even if they do as much as they're hyped, i hope i'm more than a test score.
i like harvard because it's not as elitist, dorky, or in general as ivory-tower-esque as i was expecting. when i was in cambridge, i met a diversity of people and had a wealth of experience that i can honestly not match. it's not that everyone was a genius: it's that everyone was free to be whatever they wanted. I don't know how I can convey it. anyway, i shall keep the essay advice in mind. I am considering a total re-write, so your advice is well-appreciated.

By Sadeyedlady (Sadeyedlady) on Sunday, October 12, 2003 - 12:43 am: Edit

if a person was reading the essay very quickly (which they do) it's kind of hard to grasp exactly what you're saying and why you really need to use some of the words you do. I also wrote a stream of consciousness type essay but was advised not to use it.

By Collegeguy (Collegeguy) on Sunday, October 12, 2003 - 02:30 am: Edit

BE REAL with your essay. Get personal. But PLEASE stay away from the stream of consciousness - it's not really for a college essay.

And I have read the I Ching.

By Sephora (Sephora) on Sunday, November 02, 2003 - 01:54 pm: Edit

god, you're a child prodigy.