Stanford Application: Fill & Download for Free

The one of my friend :GPA - 4.65SAT - 2400Extracurricular :Varsity football, basketball and tennis playerSpeaks 14 languages fluentlyCan play the cello, saxophone and pianoEstablished an NGO which provides food for 25000 children everyday8 pack absRuns a marathon every SundayCreated a 50 million dollar supermarket onlineMarkets his own brand of underwearSpoke at the united nationsWon numerous prizes for his essaysRejected by Stanford - there is no perfect resume I'm sorry, and nothing can truly get you in!

I was accepted to both Harvard and Stanford and I chose to attend Harvard.With that being said – I feel that I have some insight into what makes a really great Stanford Application.A big thing for their applications is that you have to be unique. No way around it. You have to be a Fruit Loop in a world full of Cheerios.Here’s an example:One of Stanford’s essay questions was “Use 5 words to describe yourself”. The max word count for the question was 5 words.For my response? I wrote “I-am-going-to-use-hyphens-to-avoid-the-max-word-count-because-technically-this-all-counts-as-one-word-and-I-am-not-a-big-fan-of-limiting-factors.”Annoying? Maybe. Did it actually count as one word in their online application? Heck yea it did.My point here is don’t let any questions be throw-away questions. Even something as simple as the usual “5 Words to Describe Yourself” can be transformed in a way that’s memorable.Oh, and don’t try using my answer in your Stanford application. Because guess what? It’s no longer unique.Photo Credit: Flickr

Several things irritate me about this story, mostly about what is not said:To apply to Stanford you have to write eleven (yes, eleven) additional essays plus the general Common App essay. One of those 11 has the prompt is write 100 words on a cause which is meaningful to you (which he did, in a highly unconventional way).Most commentary I have read seems to assume this was the only essay that he submitted - he of course submitted ten others, plus the Common App essay. But for some reason nobody is curious about what he wrote in his other eleven pieces of submitted written work. It is the very definition of taking a tiny part of an application and judging the whole application on the basis of that tiny part.Mr Ahmed was also admitted to Yale and Princeton (for whom he didn’t write about the BLM movement). So by all accounts, most elite universities seem to agree he was an outstanding student regardless, whom they would have liked to see enroll.Mr Ahmed was an otherwise a generally outstanding candidate. Top grades. Long history of community service and other extra curriculars. In 2015, he was named among MTV’s Top 9 Teens Changing the World, and in 2016, he was named one of Business Insider’s Top 15 “young prodigies”. Very, very few of the press reports take the time to make this clear.I dislike the misleading slant the media has taken pretending that writing BLM 100 times was what got him in to Stanford. That is almost certainly false, but it is an appealing narrative for journalists because (a) it will provoke an emotional response from some people (most people?) - key giveaway: why mention that he is a Muslim unless you are trying to trigger a response? Religion has nothing to do with either university applications or BLM. And (b) it feeds into idea that there is a “hack” that if you think of a clever trick like writing BLM 100 times (and nothing more) then you too could have gotten into Stanford.This Muslim teen wrote '#BlackLivesMatter' 100 times as an answer on his Stanford application — and he got in