Cornell Human Ecology Essay Prompt

Hi All, I am currently receiving lots of emails and messages through reddit and the Mentorverse website (which by the way temporarily crashed du to large volume). After graduating from Cornell I briefly worked at Walt Disney World in Orlando, FL and after about six months I realized Disney was not as fun as Cornell so I decided to return to Cornell University and work in the admissions office recruiting students and helping the university make admissions decisions.

I plan on responding to all of you as soon as I am able so please bare with me if it take a little while for me to get back to you. I have read many application essays and learned all about the admissions field from some of the best minds in the industry.

You would use your subjective observation skills, some data from previous years, and maybe do some research about the high schools which the applicants attend, to get a better understanding of which applicant's grades mean a little more than the others.

The process is really like splitting hairs and it has to happen rather quickly.

This means that many qualified white, international, Black, Latino, and Native American students had to be rejected every single year.

So how does the university decide who is offered admission and who isn't?I don't really have any plans to leave my current university but I'm just curious.Hi topheruknow, Thanks for the insightful question.Straight As, did sports and a few clubs at state and national levels, high test scores, lots of community involvement.Come from an upper-middle class family, both parents went to graduate school.As you can imagine Cornell is an extremely competitive school and every year it gets more competitive.Out of the applications I read while an admissions officer, I read many whose grades made them academically qualified for the university.No longer are good grades enough, that is just the bare minimum.At a school as competitive as Cornell, and as you could imagine all the other Ivies, the applicant pool is filled with students who have written research papers, have built computer programs, have founded their own businesses, are national award winners, are number one in their state at a sport, are the number one ranked student academically in their state, have some really interesting and unique experience that makes them a good fit for the university, or just wrote a truly amazing essay that made the admissions officer say "I want to meet this kid." Usually these amazing essays are really candid, clever, employ some sort of creative or sophisticated metaphorical or otherwise intellectually/emotionally stimulating literary device.In the end what it often comes down to for students whose academic achievements are similar, is "likability" and to put it in simple terms "level of awesomeness." Admissions officers are proud of the work they do, they love it and find enjoyment in combing through an applicant pool searching for really awesome students.Those are students who have done really cool things in their high school or in their communities.