Please keep this market private; don't send it to people or discuss it with anyone who isn't on the market! Maybe it’s irrational, but I've just been sort of anxious about making it for awhile now, and don’t want it to be super public.
I've compiled a table of relevant statistics about each college for forecasting. Feel free to ask questions, but I may opt not to answer them. Don't worry about the tiers, they're just my rough effort to quantify my interest in attending each of the colleges.
General App Information (god it feels weird to write this all out publicly)
Demographics: Bay Area male; upper-middle-class; legacy at Stanford
Achievement GPA: 5.0 (with advanced coursework, especially in math)
SAT: 1590 (800 math, 790 verbal) (still can't believe this, Black Book ftw)
APs: US History (5), Statistics (5), Calculus BC (5, with AB subscore 4 lmao), Physics C: Mechanics (4), Chemistry (4)
Activities: NYT-published puzzle creator; puzzlesforprogress.net; Camp Lemma / Strategy & Puzzles Camp counselor; Manifold miscellany; OPTIC coordinator; Yearbook Assistant Editor; piano lessons; LMI puzzle contest co-creator; Zephyr Philosophy Club; Proof linguistics minicourse TA
Honors: IOL first alternate; CDB scholar; NACLO invitational round qualifier; AIME qualifier; Manifold election forecasting tournament 3rd place
Recurring essay topics: puzzle creating; nice numbers; camp counseling and CS1 student teaching; my Ultimate Personal Spreadsheet; Manifold contributions; interdisciplinary interests. A theme is parlaying my intrinsic academic explorations into positive experiences for others
Recommenders: Kathy (counselor letter), Eric, Josh - all teachers I have good relationships with
General narrative: I definitely failed at a lot of productivity goals, and felt pretty bad as a result during the college app process. But I think the end product came out pretty good! We'll see...
I initialized the market percentages to what CollegeVine said, even though CollegeVine may not be fully trustworthy and doesn't incorporate all information, just to decrease the free money. I won't bet much more, if at all, for the sake of my own well-being.
See also
General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.
Related questions
@JuniKim Thanks!!! I am so excited and surprised, truly. 93% ish chance I’ll go to Stanford, only uncertainty is MIT/Brown waitlists (idk what I’d do if I got off) and some weird red flag / change of heart that leads me to CCS/Berkeley.
@a I considered it! wasn’t a fan of the lack of course freedom ultimately… but I know some people who go there and are quite happy
@traders Lots of decisions dropping on Thursday. Only a few days left to get in your last-minute bets!
https://mitadmissions.org/pages/wait-list-faq/ if anyone’s interested. Some takeaways:
They say about 2% of applicants are waitlisted, making this rarer than an acceptance.
That implies 500ish waitlist members by my calculations. Presumably not everyone stays on the waitlist.
They say they historically have admitted 0-32 people off the waitlist. MIT “overbooks” so they admitted 0 last year.
I think this puts my chances at some single digit percent. If anyone wants to go through the numbers more, they could probably make some expected profit?
[redacted] I can't read
@JuniKim would’ve applied to more, but I wasn’t satisfied with my personal essay and I felt that the extra effort would outweigh the signaling benefit (which I think was right)
@MichaelWheatley There’s a school of thought that applying early increases your chances because of yield protection (colleges want to have a high % of accepted applicants actually attend, so it is worthwhile to signal to colleges that you actually want to go there). More of a thing for ED (where you promise to go if you get in) than EA (which is more just for fun), and less of a thing for top-tier universities (where they assume you’ll probably go)
Another classical benefit of early apps is that you get a decision earlier and are possibly less stressed, but I felt like that didn’t matter much compared to four years of college
@BoltonBailey ...yes. Some of my friends applied to more. Note that the UCs all share an application, so it's practically 15
@Eliza The latter. I've heard it happen! (In particular, I believe I meet the academic threshold where I have to be accepted to a UC, so if I'm rejected from the seven I apply to, I'd likely be accepted to Merced even though I didn't apply)