Academic stuff from hs

College admissions in high school --------------------------------------------- Among a small group of students in my high school, getting into a top college was the absolute most important thing. We spent hundreds of hours reading about and thinking about college admissions processes and trying to understand exactly what it takes to get in. We all took as many hard classes as we could, did as many clubs as we could, played sports, played instruments, tried to win competitions, tried to make teachers like us, and so on. There was an acronym HYPSM (Harvard, Yale, Princeton, Stanford, MIT). These were considered the top 5 schools, and the ideal places to get into. In particular, HSM (Harvard, Stanford, MIT) were considered the best, especially if you were interested in STEM (which was everyone in this group). This process was extremely competitive. It was generally perceived that there are soft caps, as in MIT probably doesn't want to admit more than 2 students from our school each year. So, it felt like we were directly competing with each other. Especially those who satisfied the following criteria: -Asian -male -interested in computer science and/or math -from middle class / upper class family because if you satisfy these 4 criteria, you are at a massive disadvantage in the college admissions process. At my school, and especially among this group, people's value was strongly associated with what school they got into. We would always look up to the older kids who got into HYPSM, and everyone knew their names. I felt a strong pressure to get into top schools to be perceived as valuable/intelligent/desirable. In the end, with college admissions, I ended up doing very well with admissions by general standards, but not well by the standards of this group. My main options were: -Yale (I received a likely letter here—that's a special letter given to ~100/2200 admitted students that Yale really wants to recruit) -Caltech (very strong STEM school often compared to MIT, but much less known by people outside of academic/scientific circles) -UPenn's M