Good interview. It really surprised me to see a Stanford undergrad fail at anything to be honest, much less admission to a similarly ranked school for a specific PhD concentration they are known for.
I guess in this circumstance it actually was their loss.
I did my undergrad at Cambridge University and I was surprised at how normal people were. Of course, there were a couple of utter geniuses, but they were the exception.
I think an undergrad friend of mine put it best: "Cambridge doesn't take the top 1%, it takes a certain type of person from the top 10%"
How many of your friends had anything less than 3 A's (A* since 2010) at A-level?
There's 424,000 students got into university [0] and Cambridge enrols 3,480 out of 17,000 applicants [1]. So they don't take even 1% and only the top 4% of students even bother applying.
Edit: I suspect that 3,480 includes overseas students which makes the the percentage of UK enrolments is even less.
Further [1]:
> In 2006, 5,228 students who were rejected went on to get 3 A levels or more at grade A
Perhaps being surrounded by the top 1% makes you feel very normal/average, but there's certainly nothing normal about the Cambridge applicants and your figure of 10% definitely isn't correct.
I got accepted at Imperial with predictions of ABC (+ no extra curricular) to do Maths and Computer Science there's no way Oxford or Cambridge would have looked at me without 4 A's + a significant amount of extra curricular activities.
> So they don't take even 1% and only the top 4% of students even bother applying.
I went to the college with the highest number of state school students. After participating in outreach events to get more people from a variety of backgrounds to apply to Cambridge I honestly think the biggest bottleneck is people from state schools not applying. They hear all the stories about strange interviews or being surrounding by posh people they have nothing in common with and just don't bother.
I was the only person in my (rather large) school year to get into Cambridge, and only a couple of people applied. I was told all sorts of strange things about the application process which turned out not to be true. I imagine it must be far easier to apply if you go to a school where almost everyone does and the staff are well versed in what to get ready.
When my son interviewed there one of the tutors told me he thought they should abandon the interviewing and select at random from a pool of the top 10%.
If you are Indian you need a 1500+ + 4.0 + good extra curriculars and there is a very good chance you are not getting in. It might similar for other folks, but I don't know. So if the people getting into Stanford are average not sure who you are comparing them to.
You probably need better than a 1500 these days. Closer to 1600. For what it's worth, I got a 1500 out of 1600 with a 4.0 and went to my safety (My EC's were nonexistent and never applied to Stanford though..)
Because Stanford is incredibly selective, and is one of the 4 premier CS institutions in the world?
I dunno, as someone that went to a public school with a 50% accept rate it seems difficult to imagine “academic superhumans” struggle with anything, ever.
I'm sure you believe that there's something special about Stanford. Many people believe that.
What I'm saying is that, in my experience, the belief doesn't hold up. If it were possible to reliably identify "academic superhumans" and concentrate them in one place, we'd have absolutely indisputable evidence of it. The fact that we don't suggests that perhaps your beliefs about how Stanford's admission practices correlate with quality of graduates may be mistaken.
The best performing students I've ever met weren't ridiculously smart. They were slightly above average, but they excelled at finding out exactly what the teacher was going to test and drilling that ruthlessly. They also worked harder than most of their peers.
They also know how to present their answers well, and I think teachers subconsciously give them more credit when they're not exactly right. As a funny anecdote, once I let a top copy my homework because he had just come home from a family emergency. He actually got a higher score on that homework than I did, despite the content of our answers being the same.
> it seems difficult to imagine “academic superhumans” struggle with anything, ever.
I know a person who went to a comparable institution in my country, who was considered something of a prodigy by his peers (and me) both before being selected and after joining the institution, and who struggled a lot with his academic responsibilities. In fact, I know a few of them. One of them had to drop out of the institution after repeatedly trying to finish his academic programme, and after two years of extensions.
People struggle with things, in general. Everybody has their struggles, everybody has their demons. Even "superhumans". What we should be aiming for is not the lack of struggles — for that is merely the absence of effort — but perseverance in the face of it and growth from going through it.
I forget who, but in (99% sure) Werner Herzig's Lo and Behold there's a (Stanford?) professor who says when they first did some MOOC they had all the kids in the Stanford course taking it as well, and of the 50,000 or whatever number of people taking the course, the top Stanford student finished like #430 in the course.
I guess in this circumstance it actually was their loss.