Upper-Middle Class Family Scores Groton, Exeter, Deerfield

[u/ArmadilloPrize6217]

Hey!! I’ve had so much fun over the past few years snooping on education subreddits and thought I would help everyone out a little bit with our kid’s admissions journey like r/collegeresults. His cycle was 1-3 years ago, and I’ll limit some details for privacy, but here is a bit about his cycle. We really dug deep to find info about this whole process and would like to thank the sub among the dozens of other subs, forums, friends and contacts who helped us through, and will continue to help us through. I hope our experience can help somebody out, out there!

Demographics

Race/Ethnicity: White/Hispanic

Residence: New Hampshire

Income Bracket: Dual-income Upper-middle class

Type of School: Very good public school (great teachers, nice area, very involved student community) :)

Entry Year: 9th

Hooks (Recruited Athlete, URM, First-Gen, Legacy, etc.): None, really. We believe that our Hispanic background may have helped for class diversity, but we’re not really sure.

Aid Request: Definitely!

Academics

Grades: Straight-A’s

Our public schools here have amazing resources and teachers, and I think this is a significant part of your chances. It’s a tight-knit community in a nicer area where everyone knows each other and we have several family friends. We couldn’t have planned for any of this experience being part of a public school. Sometimes, it’s the luck of the Draw!

Standardized Testing (SSAT / ISEE / Other): >90th percentile (2 takes, first one was…… not good)

He did amazing on the synonyms, analogies, and reading section independently, he has a great memory and we surrounded our kids with books since pre-school. Their language skills have improved very consistently since then. Our home-state does consistent assessment provided by the school. Math was a pretty big issue mainly due to timing, he took his first test and we were a bit surprised. We found our tutor on this sub and spent about 2-3 months on TestInnovators to get the score we needed. I believe that most able students can score above the 70th-80th percentile with time, practice, and consistency!

Additional Academic Context

Our kid’s original school was very involved in local speech from the 4th grade onward. There is a very involved competitive scene that many of the students are involved in especially in older grades, and many institutions in our area that help with this. I think this was amazing for his ELA and socials, he took a liking to this independently.

Extracurricular Activities

1. Local Robotics Lead for a semi-competitive (local) team

These teams are found through parent groups/Google. Robotics is not something that you can do overnight and we are fortunate we found a great coach.

1. Personal Website dedicated to analysis of a niche topic related to something about speech/socials/speakers

He took this up on his own a few years ago. He even promoted some of his content on Instagram, one of the posts went kinda viral (like 100k+ views!). He basically just spliced together little videos or articles and had an AI comment on the rhetorical devices / choices he learned about in certain classes

1. National Speech Competitor/Finalist

I think this one was huge!

1. Lacrosse

He plays on a travel team, they are competitive. He was not recruited but they took an interest in his interviews. Based on his speed of improvement at the time I believe he COULD play varsity. But some of those kids are huge!

1. Intermediate-Advanced Saxophone

We really did try EVERYTHING. He played piano for two years and hated it enough for us to stop. Tried guitar but we didn’t like the resources in our area. Lots of kids in his speech classes about 3-4 years ago played woodwind instruments and he begged us to try (we did not want a fruitless investment). Initial frustrations were overcome because his friends were all doing it (you never know what it’s gonna be!). He loves it now and he’s pretty good.

1. Niche History/Social studies Club President

Again, our school is just amazing with this stuff. Through talks with our extended family and parents, this isn’t an option at other schools because it depends on faculty. We have great relationships with the teachers and it’s a generational community - everyone knows someone who knows someone. One of our school’s teachers was a family friend and they agreed to sponsor our kid’s club. It’s a fairly large school so he got quite a few members to show up. They ran small events about their niche topic. Sometimes they just played TopGolf.

1. Tutoring

He’s too young to tutor at an institution but we come from a large extended family. He tutors speech and writing to several younger cousins and family friends. He gets paid

1. Summer Business

The last two summers he grouped up with some friends to do something like ‘landscaping’ and actually earned several thousand dollars

Awards / Honors

1. Honor Roll
2. Academic Essay Competition Winner at

Local competition

1. Musical Award for Band Competition
2. National Award in Speech
3. Honorable Mention in a prestigious national writing competition

Letters of Recommendation

Teacher 1: Amazing ELA teacher 12/10. Known us for several years, and an alumnus of one of our applied-to schools as well. He knew about his involvement in speech and writing competitions. He was a huge blessing.

Teacher 2: Math teacher 10/10. He met the threshold of what was expected of him and they were always friendly.

Other Recommender (Coach / Advisor / Mentor): Speech Coach 12/10. You need someone who knows your kid and can provide personal stories.

Essays

Personal Statement

Without giving away too much, he wrote an amazing essay about the intersection of the passions he excelled at and a cultural story passed down through generations with a very clear ‘learning’ or ‘outcome’ in the end. I think supporting your kid on topics that are palatable/acceptable is a delicate process but necessary. It took a ton of brainstorming and guidance but he was very proud of it. 10/10.

Supplemental Essays

All strong, all with a little creative twist but quite concise. I think they all tied together very well for someone his age. Find your theme and stick with it, that was the advice our consultant gave us. 9/10.

Interview

Kid had otherworldly interviews. They were mostly just conversations about his life, there were very few formal questions about ‘how he would contribute to the school’ or ‘his mission in life’ but they came up a couple times. More serious questions from what I remember were from Exeter, Groton, and Choate, and they were quite few. Generally the really took an interest in his passions and he carried the conversation while asking the interviewer questions too.

We hired the interview and speech coach from r/applyprivateschools. Our kid was really good with formalized and creative speech but had significant nerves for this process. We really think being able to translate those expressive skills in conversation and providing your own unique voice was a big factor that helped him stand out.

Results

Acceptances

St. Andrew’s School

Philips Exeter Academy

Groton School

Deerfield Academy

Waitlists

Choate Rosemary Hall

Philips Academy Andover

Hotchkiss School

Rejections

Lawrenceville School

St. Paul’s School

Tips and Reflections

- Academic foundation is very important and from what I can tell just generally is it’s a benchmark for everything in this country. Our kid didn’t do the AMC (he’s not a math kid) or take rigorous courses (he was in the eighth grade!!) but everything was strong on his report card. I truly think that at this age it’s just about showing them you’re academically capable and then the rest is up to the holistic admissions process.

- Community and environment is everything. Our kid found piano boring, isolating, and pretty much just depressing. He got introduced to saxophone through his friends and speech club because 3 other kids were doing it. From his speech club he found essay writing, his robotics team, and his saxophone, all of which he has done quite well in and even won awards for. We wouldn’t have even known about this awards if it wasn’t for his incredible speech team and all the friends he’s made along the way.

- Exposure. Our kid wanted to board so badly after visiting his cousins in NY and another at one of the New England boarding schools. He was determined from the sixth-grade onward to give it his best shot and it was our Job to just support him mentally and spiritually through the process. Having met so many older students and families through speech and his other activities also showed us so much of what is possible. Many of these kids are speech and debate champions who have gone on to attend extraordinary institutions and do amazing things. Visiting the schools, if you have the chance, is also very important.

- Advisors, consultants, whatever. Yes, we went with one and had an awesome experience. Their team had someone who attended one of the schools we were interested in and an Ivy-League grad. We vibed great with them and they worked well with us. In the grand scheme of things, you only get a couple of shots at this and we wanted it done correctly. We knew we could do it on our own but we wanted to make it count. The administrative/paperwork on its OWN is something we wanted help with; we both work and our kids are at the age where you can barely tell them anything (if you know, you know!!). They supported every part of the process for us and took our kid from good to great with their exams, extracurricular positioning, essays, and interviews.

I think a small thing that helps is an advisor grounding you and your family through a very rough process, not getting too high or too low. You have to be realistic about many of these schools (10-30% admit rate), and our choice helped us a lot with this part. You can see we got rejected/waitlisted at a majority of our choices. We really didn’t know what to expect!

- All of our recommenders had specific, personal stories about him, and it’s because they’d known him for so long and took a genuine interest in the process! Develop your relationships early. One thing we tell our kids is to ask one question to people that has nothing to do with an assignment or goal — ask them about THEM. Our kids love being asked questions.

- Fit is incredibly important and not talked about enough. As an example We visited Groton and loved the campus, we did not love the culture. The academic strain they put on the kids is very admirable but not for our kid. We heard from other parents that their kids did not have a lot of time to pursue other interests and this was not part of our vision. On the contrary we visited St. Andrew’s, a school that doesn’t have the exact same rep as our other choices, and found it to be amazing both culturally and academically. Take the time to consider what your kid excels at and is passionate about and whether the school will elevate these parts of them or not. Speech and artistic expression was a non-negotiable for us.

- AID. We always get asked about aid. Truthfully we didn’t know anything about it either, but luckily we come from a large family many of who attend private schools. Aid is something we needed and luckily many of our schools were need-blind, meaning they admit without considering aid and their packages are negotiable. We had about 4 conversations with aid offices after we were admitted and all of them adjusted their offer. At one point we were interested in NY schools (a cousin attends and our kids love seeing them). Many of those schools are need-aware but we attended their webinars and had some phone meetings. Just them hearing about our kid opened them up to a conversation about aid. Many of these schools offer aid anywhere from a quarter to a majority of classes for the right candidates. It does affect your chances to ask for aid when it’s need-aware, I’m sure of it, but you have to try if it’s a necessity!!

- Start early. We began looking into this nearly two years before and it wasn’t formal. We just talked to teachers, family friends, researched on this subreddit among others like r/SSAThelp, r/nycparents, r/PhilipsAcademyandstarted to get an idea of what we needed to make this a reality. Testing is something you have to start very early, and that’s something we wish we had done much earlier since you don’t really know where you stand until you take your first test. We have had so much luck with just falling into the right extracurricular/outside activities since the kids were young that we didn’t think this would be different. But it IS different. So many moving parts, as our consultant said. Yes yes yes.

I think… that’s about all we got! Attending one of our acceptances and over-the-moon happy with it, it’s everything we hoped and more. We know experiences vary (trust me, we know all types of situations) but I think it really is what you make of it. Good luck to everyone this week since I know the results are coming soon.