I really feel sorry for your admission results. And it must be painful.
I'm quite sure you will get over it once you start your university course.And it doesn't deny you are intellectual really! It seems you are smart enough to be successful for your future study and career for sure
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I don't want to pour salt into your wound, but I want to respond a bit, if you don't mind.
Although I don't know your profile at all, if you are British, applied to US top schools, and expected to be assessed based on purely academic merit, then the chance will be ridiculously tiny.
Let's take Harvard as the example of US admission. Roughly speaking, Harvard gives 2000 offers every year, and about 11 percent are international students. As you may know, International students will be assessed independently in a different pool for international applicants, so the number of seats for them is only 220.
Though it's not clear what exact ratio is, based on world population, 10% of the international students' seats are likely provided for European students (Though I think this number is much higher than 10% in reality). In this case, 22 places are for European applicants.
Furthermore, like Dr. Pinker mentioned above I linked, only 10% (or even less) of Harvard students are selected based on academic merit. For European candidates, this means 2 seats.
So 22 seats for European candidates will be likely divided as follows: 2 seats for academic prodigies, 5-6 seats for exceptional cases like legacy or sports, and 14-15 seats for students with mixed profiles of excellent academic merit and excellent extracurricular activities.
If you don't have interesting extracurricular background enough to grab their attention, then you will be forced to compete with other British/German/French etc applicants for one of 2 seats. Even among top 10 universities, there are only 20ish seats in total for British academic experts. This is one reason why often international students complain that perfect SAT with GPA above 4.0 is even not close to US top schools.
But the situation is quite different when it comes to domestic students aiming to get one of 1800 seats (still very hard, but not as much as the one for internationals). In fact, the acceptance rate in early action cycle for example is 16.5% for Harvard, which is much more realistic than regular decision acceptance rate with 3.2%. The highest percentage in the early action cycle among IVY is 27.2% for Cornell (composing 41% of new entrants).
Even the situation is completely different for internationals from a country with fewer applicants to US universities. 3 people for example apply to Harvard from some area where not many people go to US colleges. This will be a much higher chance to be accepted, that you may feel unfair. But this is how US admission works AFAIK.
So I can say, British applicants are forced to be into the theoretically fiercest competition pool along with candidates from China and India.
But I think applying to US top schools as Americans are comparable difficulties with applying to British top schools as British. (I mean for example UK top 2 admissions are comparable with American top 10 universities and equivalent LACs, if I consider that US is 5 times more populated than UK.)
I think so too. UK counterpart for HYPSM is Cambridge. LSE and UCL are more comparable with US top 20 to top 30. And if you compare UCL to NYU(32nd) for example, NYU's distribution map above shows more variety of academic backgrounds than UCL (acceptance rate of 31% at NYU is also similar to UCL's one(36% in total and 31% for Home students, according to the following page)).
Breakdown of Undergraduate Admission Statistics - University College London I think it highly depends on which school. And yes Chicago is famous for its stricter assessments. Though I heard the grade deflation there has been much improved compared to its past, and not too different from other schools any more.
Anyway, let's see how things will go after your entrance. Everything may go well there. Most likely university life and study are very different from what we imagine before our attendance. You can find nice friends/gf, study hard, go to a graduate course in some US top school or Oxbridge, and get a highly paid job in wall street or city
. The past is the past, there is always a chance to be successful at any point in your life, if you don't forget to be positive
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