At the end of 1993, I applied to six schools – Harvard, Yale, MIT, Columbia, Brown, and Georgetown. Unlike most high school students, I didn’t apply to any “safety” schools. I knew that there was a chance that I’d be left high and dry with nowhere to go in the following year, but I was arrogant enough to think that I would get in somewhere. In hindsight, that was pretty stupid since there aren’t too many good jobs that a high school graduate can get. Luckily enough, I got accepted into MIT, Columbia, and Brown. But I got waitlisted at the Georgetown School of Foreign Service (it sounded like a cool program) and flat out rejected by Harvard (twice, early admissions and regular) and Yale. I decided to go to MIT because I thought I was going to be the next Alan Greenspan, but I ended up majoring in English Lit (more on that later).
Unlike many of my classmates at MIT, I thought high school was kind of hard. Some of my MIT friends were devastated when they got their first “C” on an exam; not me, I had plenty of practice in disappointment in high school. One time, I even got a D on an English paper (it was actually a B+ but I handed it in two days late). I was pretty bad at history and got mostly B’s, and I did very poorly on the AP exams. Still, I managed to get A’s in my math and science classes, so I kept my GPA high enough to be in my school’s top ten. And since I attended a pretty good high school in NJ, being in the top ten meant that I had a pretty good shot at getting into the top colleges.
Of course, since grades aren’t everything, even being in the top ten of a good school didn’t guarantee admission into a top college. Not everyone in the top ten of my class got into the really competitive colleges (admission rates less than 20%), while my classmates with a lower class rank would get into them. Some might say that it’s dumb luck, but I’d be willing to bet that it was their extracurricular activities.
I stretched the most mileage out of my extracurricular activities – golf and academic decathlon – and I believe that was a very big part of why I got into three top schools. Before high school, I was pretty good at baseball (I’d play in summer all-star leagues and was even an MVP once). But I knew that there was a chance that no matter how hard I tried, I might never win a varsity letter in baseball – since that growth spurt thing that everyone was talking about never happened to me. Well, I was pretty good at golf, and I got a varsity letter my freshman year. This was pre-Tiger Woods, so golf wasn’t that popular. I ended up being a four-year letter winner and was team captain senior year. While I was applying to college, I visited the campuses and met the golf coaches there. Some of them have a little pull with the admissions office, so it’s worth a try. The golf coach at Yale sent me a letter addressed to Ms. Kim E. Young, and he explained how excited he would be to have me on the women’s golf team there. To this day, I wonder what would have happened if I didn’t correct him by saying that my name is Mr. Young E Kim.
