Idaho Application: Fill & Download for Free

To paraphrase JFK: because it’s hard. People don’t ask how you get into University of Idaho, because for the most part they know people who are perfectly capable of getting into Idaho, and it doesn’t seem remote or unobtainable.But getting into Harvard or some other elite school? That’s hard. I would venture that a substantial number of college applicants don’t even know anyone who has gotten into Harvard. But they know it is really, really hard - because they can see the stats. Hence the enigma.Then before you know it, the enigma starts to feed itself. Because it is so hard, it must be the pathway to something great. Surely Harvard grads are all millionaires by the time they are 30 and married to supermodels (two other popular questions on Quora). It’s fine to believe the fantasy because most people don’t know otherwise. They don’t peer behind the curtain.The worst thing about your dreams is when they come true. When you get to an elite college and you discover there is no magic. Just more hard work. And when you graduate more hard work. Nothing gets you nothing. But that’s ok. If kids want to dream, and their dreams make them work hard to try and get into an elite school, then I guess that’s a good type of dream.

We had a developer who built a web application and copied lots of “common” code into each page so that there was massive duplication. It was unmaintainable.(This sounds like a rant about the developer. That’s not my intent.)Then he needed the website to handle a variation in the data. Think blue widgets instead of green widgets. It was difficult to modify so he copied and pasted it in its entirety. (This was for a small set of internal users so he could get away with it.)So now, when users needed to work with blue widgets they want to one site, and when they needed green widgets they went to another. The business rules were 99% identical for both. Because of all of this duplication, a minor change could involve performing nearly identical edits to every single page in two websites.Then we needed to support green and blue widgets in a different market. Think green and blue widgets in Oregon instead of in Idaho. Again, the business rules were 99% identical.The solution? Copy and paste both websites, so now we would have four.Except this time the aforementioned developer was too busy to do it himself. He was working on the next project (which he also ended up copying and pasting for pretty much exactly the same reasons) and at the same time was busy trying to fix bugs in the same two “green and blue widgets in Idaho” websites that we “needed” to copy and paste.So my manager gave me the work of copying and pasting his applications.The last time I was asked to copy and paste one of his projects I determined that not only was it incomprehensibly over-complicated, but it actually didn’t work at all and hadn’t in the year since it went to production. (It was copied and pasted from another division of our company.) I don’t mean that it didn’t work well. It didn’t work at all, failed silently, and managed to create significant performance issues affecting seemingly unrelated processes.I built that new application from scratch in a week, complete with unit tests. It’s still running without a bump years later.This time I was given strict instructions that I was not to rewrite any of the other developer’s work because his job title indicated that his code was good enough to copy and paste.This wasn’t just two duplications. Each site internally contained dozens of code duplications, and now I had to double it, even as he was trying to figure out why the code I was copying and pasting didn’t work.I did it as quickly as possible, explaining that since there were no automated tests of any kind I could only verify that it compiled, pages loaded, and it integrated with its back-end services. I could not verify that it worked as expected because I had no idea what “expected” was.I was forced to deliver bad software that didn’t work without knowing what it was supposed to do. That is evil. It is like being a sculptor and being forced to “create” by squeezing Play-Doh in a mold. Except instead of Play-Doh it’s crap.Happily the story didn’t end with me quitting in frustration. I was rather vocal about the problems with the approach we took, and for some time the quality of work improved. The manager was encouraged to seek work elsewhere, and did. I eventually left anyway, but on very good terms.

No extracurricular gets you into MIT or Stanford. That’s not how it works.You shouldn’t do an extracurricular because it might look good on a college application, you should participate in sports, clubs and service projects because its something you are passionate about. Do something/anything that is fulfilling and makes you a better and more interesting person.For more details on the 7 things top universities look for in an applicant (including extracurricular activities), click on this Quora response I wrote a few months ago.The Dean of Admissions at a Top-10 university told a story once to a group of 300 alumni that had volunteered to interview students from their local area to help the Admissions committee make better decisions. He described the recent process selecting the final applicant for the school’s next class. They planned to accept 4,000 but were at 3,999, so the committee discussed who to pick out of the batch of remaining outstanding candidates.They first checked to make sure they had selected applicants from at least 150 countries out of the world’s 195. Yup they had 153. Check.Next they checked if they had all 50 states included. Nope, only 49. Aha! Which was missing? Oh, New Mexico! So he asked “Is there a NM student in the final batch of twenty outstanding applicants?”No. Hmm, darn.Okay, let’s look deeper into the New Mexico folder and review the one that just missed the cut. The committee member responsible for the southwest states rummaged through her folders and pulled out the top, previously rejected, applicant from New Mexico. This high school senior had great grades, recommendations and test scores. Next the member read out the students extracurricular activities: track - freshman year, basket weaving: sophomore year, homecoming party committee: senior year.The Dean asked the audience “So what do you think I did with that applicant?” The audience shouted out “Accepted!” The Dean replied “Nope. Rejected!” The audience was puzzled. The Dean simply stated that the activities, all likely less than a year of commitment, didn’t show passion, and “we don’t want students at our school that aren’t passionate.” He also mentioned that the applicant didn’t mention any activity or volunteer work in their essays that demonstrated passion (in track or basket weaving or helping the needy or whatever).Instead, the dean stated that they went back to the remaining 20 top remaining applicants and selected a young lady from Idaho that was a rodeo star and had participated in this activity for over a dozen years and had a hilarious essay about her championship ride on a bull named “Bruno”. The Dean finished with a question to the attendees: Who would you rather have had as your roommate in freshman year: a 1-year basket-weaver or a 12-year rodeo star?Bottom Line: it really doesn’t matter what extra-curricular activities you do, just pick and commit to things that you are passionate about and makes you a better and more interesting person.