Looking back 10 years after graduating from Harvard: a large number of Chinese children died prematurely in the "vine-climbing algorithm"

Hi, I'm Nora.

Last week, the U.S. application list was intensively released, and so far the mother group has been very lively, collecting successful cases.

I once met a mother's private collection, and the information coverage is staggering, specific to the standardized grades, which summer school she attended, the list of competition winners, etc., and the level of detail is comparable to that of a senior consultant.

The underlying logic behind this behavior is clear:

As long as there is enough data and the dimensions are complete enough, you can disassemble the recruitment techniques of famous schools. The next step is to pass on the scriptures to the children, and work hard to achieve divine skills and win offers from prestigious schools.

■A route map of climbing vines posted on the Internet

But the paradox is that after so many years of successful experience in the application circle, there is still no martial arts cheats that dominate the rivers and lakes.

Those children who successfully went ashore couldn't even figure out which six sides the "hexagonal warrior" was in the mouth of the advisor

。

Why do the kings of the volume repeatedly miss? Puwa, who is drunk and boxing, counterattacked? Today's sharer Liang Qihan provides another high-level interpretation.

She traveled all the way from the mountains to Harvard, assisted the Harvard admissions office in reviewing essays, served as a teacher at Boston University, and was a founding member of a well-known international school in the magic capital.

In the past 7 years as a consultant, she has found that more and more outstanding children are trapped in the "vine-climbing algorithm" under the Internet thinking

, become a victim on the road to chasing a prestigious school.

The "Martian" is the banker's gamble

After getting the offer from Harvard, Liang Qihan was really excited for a while, but then she was troubled by a question: Why me?

She has lived in the mountains since she was a child, and is an aboriginal of the Ami ethnic group, and was brought to live in the city by her parents when she was in elementary school. in college

He has always been the first in his grade, with a nearly perfect score on the TOEFL, and finally won the highest honor Principal Award, graduated a year early, and is already a super student.

But when she applied to Harvard, she was still not very confident, after all, the mountain was too high.

After getting admitted, surrounded by cattle and people, she was even more puzzled

The reason for your own admission.

One day, she couldn't help but ask the professor:

"Is it because of standardized grades?

」

"In the overall academic performance category, you only achieved the average score.

If you must attribute, you may see your sense of mission in education

」。

The professor spilled chicken soup that hit her in one fell swoop.

■Mr. Liang is at Harvard

She shared many "unbearable" experiences in the document:

When I was transferred to elementary school, I was punished by the teacher for standing on the edge of the podium and listening to the class because of the bottom grade, and I began to think about "how educators do evil" from a very young age;

When I chose a major in college, I got the score to enter medical school, but I disobeyed my parents and applied for education;

When I returned to the mountains to teach during the internship, I found that most of the teachers were "acting in class", and the children still lacked substantial growth.

When she was about to graduate, she gave up looking for a job and went abroad to further her education, much to the disappointment of her parents.

It turns out that those contradictions, conflicts, and setbacks are not "mistakes", and those observations, reflections, and behaviors are not wasteful, but important gravitational forces that guide Harvard and even life.

If it weren't for the professor's answer, she might have attributed the offer to "I'm a top student",

"I got a perfect score for TOEFL

」、

"I got an A+ in each subject

」。 After all, that's all she's been taught: how to be a good student, how to win scarce resources in the face of fierce competition.

However, elite schools do not value these things, and sometimes they even fail.

■As early as 2014, the New York Times coined the term Ivy League lotto, and a professor wrote a book that simulated the admission rules of Ivy League schools — as hard to guess as if you were entering a casino to find the rules.

Distinguished American physicist

Barabasis told the story of the failure of a child's vine-climbing plan.

In addition to graduating from high school with four APs and top-notch GPAs, he spent the summer vacation of 10th grade in the MIT laboratory, and the summer vacation of 11th grade attended a research project at Harvard.

However, the child was completely defeated in the application and was "Quanjude" by Stanford and other prestigious schools.

Later, Barabier wrote a book dedicated to using science and data to study success, and discovered the truth: "There is no direct correlation between success and standardized high scores and getting offers from prestigious schools, but rather the child's own ability to drive success".

■Unlike other successful books, this book contains sufficient theories and research, and the conclusions are also very practical

This point, Liang Qihan's seven-year observation coincides, and she founded the "Baya Society"

He has tutored hundreds of children, all of whom have applied to the top 40 schools in the United States without exception, including many top names

school, but she was almost never willing to summarize a "climbing formula".

she

Quotes from the

The Early Admissions Game》的一个绝佳比喻：

The U.S. application is like participating in a "Martian" gambling game

。

The table players know that their goal is to win, but the college admissions officers are like Martians, they can't communicate at all, and they don't tell you the rules, so the table players have to go to see how the other tables play first, and summarize some rules and trends decently.

As a result, when it was served in person, all the results derived from the previous plate were invalid.

Isn't this very similar to the analysis of the annual ranking trend?

However, under the summary of such an overwhelming trend, parents want to put their children into a routine, and many children will think that they are "abandoned children" at the beginning, excluded from good schools——— standardized and ordinary, not outstanding activities, and even have the experience of failure.

however

Liang Qihan believes that such a child can "bet" to win, why?

An "outcast" MIT counterattack

Alan's story may answer the question above.

Among the children that Liang Qihan has tutored, he is particularly special. He is the only MIT undergraduate admission winner in Shanghai in 2021, and he comes from within the system.

When he was preparing to go abroad, Alan had already been admitted to a 985 university in China, but the list of activities was almost zero, and he did not have any outstanding international competition results, and his goal was to be the best computer science major in MIT.

With a strong executive ability, he compiled a table that counted the records, GPAs, activities and competition results of previous MIT admitted Chinese students, and visited many consulting institutions with this table, but the results were surprisingly consistent:

You know that you don't have a chance to win, otherwise, you should give up?

■The MIT admissions website has a lot of student posts, as well as information and resources needed to apply

"Should I give up?" Alan tossed the question to Liang Qihan after visiting Baiya. Instead of answering immediately, she asked the child a few key questions:

If you go to the IMO, what kind of ranking will you get? If not

What will the time be spent on the awards of international competitions?

Why do you want to apply for a computer science major?

After chatting, she found that this child who had no competition results was extremely talented, and his love for computer science was beyond paper, and his ideological maturity was a big cut above his peers.

Alan is biased, but he doesn't "roll", and the grades he gets are based on ability, not brushing questions.

He is also actively active on the GitHub platform, has developed many practical applets, and the open source code has gained a lot of attention, and he is also an important developer in many computer communities.

■GitHub is a developer's favorite community to exchange technical information and share code

For those competition results that are considered necessary to apply for MIT, Alan did not want to fight in the past, and also tried to brush the questions. "But if I know that IMO can only win the silver award, and there is no gain in the process of brushing questions, there is still a waste of time?"

If you can't be in the top 1% of existing games, show that you have become 1%. Leung's Harvard experience taught her that even MIT would not turn down a computer fanatic who had a talent but no competition results.

In the follow-up process of tutoring Alan, Liang avoided some of the usual paths and added niche programs like SPARC to her summer school application. Not because the gold content of the project is much higher, but more in line with Alan's philosophy.

The most difficult thing is how to make a partial teenager who is immersed in his own world jump out, learn to dig out his own highlights, and learn to express himself to the outside world

。

To this end, Liang Qihan and Alan reached a consensus that every communication, whether it is academic or extracurricular activities, should be in the vernacular, rather than professional vocabulary. Admissions officers may not have a background in computers, but if they can be understood by ordinary people, they can impress people.

Such an unconventional way of playing allowed Alan to finally get an offer from her dream school. Liang Qihan commented that he seemed to be gambling back then.

"What I want to experiment with is whether or not I can get through by letting my child be completely himself."

■ SPARC is the full name of the top summer school for high school students

Applied Logic and Cognition Summer Program, California,

Tuition is free of charge,

Courses cover a variety of topics such as causal modeling, probability, game theory, cognitive science, and more.

Under the algorithm, sincerity is nirvana

Leung Qihan's confidence in gambling can be traced back to an accidental "dealer experience".

When she was a graduate student at Harvard, she participated in the selection of undergraduate admissions, and selected two students in the field of mathematics out of the 10 materials available.

But after seeing the 10 materials, she was completely confused, almost all of them were IMO medals, gold medals, silver awards, skipping students, and some had musical expertise. In desperation, she asked her mentor for help: they are all so good, how to choose?

The tutor replied to her: If you can go to the final screening stage, you must be the top players, but we should choose students who are more suitable for Harvard and have more potential. His/her material may not be perfect, but it must be true, and you can even see the future of this person, who will be at home at Harvard.

Truth is more "useful" than excellent, which is what makes Liang Qihan firmly believe that Alan can chase after her dream school.

With the harvest of being a banker, the U.S. application seems to have changed a way of playing.

The top students who were ripened missed not because they were not excellent, but because they were too good to be "real". The separation of grades, activities, and essay content leads to admissions officers only seeing a bunch of materials, but not seeing who the person who made these grades is, so naturally they can't give an offer.

Further, how can the truth be reflected in order for admissions officers to confirm that they are "potential to succeed"?

Leung sees three things in common with past successful applicants:

Passion: They do what they love without exception;

Resilience: Even if you encounter failure, you can see the experience as a story;

Critical thinking: They often think about why they do it, rather than following the trend without thinking.

Even if you haven't achieved outstanding results, as long as "thinking" can be reflected in activities and documents, even if the growth gained from failure can still be seen.

■Charlotte, a student from BYU who was admitted to NYU, shares how she plans her life and studies with clarity after a long struggle with procrastination at the essay camp

Gigi, who was admitted to Wellesley College this year in the early application stage, is a case in point.

She was rejected by almost all the American high schools she applied to that year, and ended up going to a little-known church school. The school is good at science and engineering, but she loves liberal arts, and her grades are only in the top 30%. In addition, the resources that can be provided by on-campus activities are very mediocre. Unfortunately, she ran for student government, basketball team, and a few clubs.

It starts with a bad hand, but is that all?

After in-depth understanding, Liang Qihan found that Gigi has a very strong resilience, and in the face of these "failures", she will be down for a day at most, and then immediately recover and continue to try more fields.

Even after she failed to run for student council, she still did what she wanted to do - set up an international student study group on campus, and received help from many teachers.

She wrote about these experiences in her application

In Wellesley's essay, during the interview with the admissions officer, he even amused the other party: "You are really not afraid of heaven and earth!"

Such a viable candidate,

A child can live brilliantly in any environment, and as long as such a child tries hard to let the admissions officer see it, he will definitely be able to make people's eyes shine.

Why can "sincerity is nirvana" succeed again and again? It is precisely because of the algorithm that children dare to be a living person in the system:

The vision of admissions at prestigious schools is extremely sharp, and if you regard climbing into it as the only goal, and try to cooperate with it, please it, and beg it for charity, it doesn't care. Go beyond the application goal and see it as a tool to achieve yourself, but it is more favored by prestigious schools.

"Elite schools also like to see capable people draw cakes. Look, I'm going to be a great person in the future, so why don't you gamble on me too?"

Specific to practice, how to tap students' highlights, how to guide them to know themselves, find their dreams and life goals, not be coerced in the general environment, how to present the most authentic image to admissions officers, every question here can be disassembled into a more pragmatic assist.

"All we want to do is let

Students don't get denied early, find a way to make them visible.

」

■Worktile, an application management system developed by Ms. Baya,

Organize tasks in sections (e.g., summer school, events, competitions, application season modules, etc.) to improve time management efficiency

Get admitted

It may not be me

"Can you still be admitted to Harvard?

Liang Qihan has been numb by this question in recent years:

"Today's children are really too rolled, I definitely can't roll it, but it may not be me who gets the offer in the end."

She recalls how lucky she was back then. As soon as I came, after the dark experience in the first grade of elementary school, I wanted to be a good teacher, and I have been taking action. Second, whether it is applying for a major or going abroad for further study, the big decisions on the road of life are all made by herself. Not only did her parents not help, but they even persuaded her to return to medicine and inherit the family mantle.

On these two points, today's children don't seem to be so lucky.

Many people are still planning to go abroad by their parents when they still have no ability to think. And then when I didn't know why I wanted to roll, I was urged to feed a lot of supplements.

And the elite schools in the United States are particularly obsessed with asking questions -- Who are you? Under such a growth trajectory, how can a group of seventeen or eighteen-year-old children answer?

"The reason why I can answer this question so well is because I've been thinking about it since I was 6 years old." The ability to think independently, as well as the random occurrence of life, Liang Qihan admitted frankly that these are difficult for her children to make up.

The bigger misunderstanding comes from parents.

Once, when she shared Alan's case, she was shocked by a parent's assessment. The parent saw Alan's award and said, "Then our child can also go to MIT and win the gold medal in the National Olympiad."

East Asian parents are excellent in arithmetic,

Always calculate the most labor-saving and cost-saving route to the end point, saving some effort for children. But this virtually saves the opportunity for children to try and make mistakes, but it also omits the diverse opportunities for them to gain life experience, and the child becomes thin, and in the long run, it is a loss-making transaction.

And what about children?

Either they will gradually lose in their mentality, or even unwilling to make their own decisions, because they dare not take responsibility for life, and most of them will imperceptibly implement the will of their parents, live like their parents, and give up their right to become free people, thus producing hidden psychological problems.

Whether it is the result of further education or the growth experience, there is a high probability that they will become cannon fodder and victims in the pursuit of prestigious schools.

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In the market like the stock market, analysts also say every day that they can outperform the market, but the worst losers are often those who listen to routines and superstitious experts.