槑

上次请教申请大学之道，大家告诉我申请州大，于是我们申请了UIUC，结果被拒了。

大家说，我娃适合Caltech，而且Caltech认USAMO，USACO，，，于是我们赶紧报了Caltech

报上AMC12, AIME, USAMO，USAxO 成绩，还有AP，SAT等等上去，被Caltech斥责：为公平起见，所有这些成绩都被扔纸篓里了，不要再寄了！

打电话问，哪你们怎么选招啊？ 答：holistic！

问：成绩都不看，怎么holistic？答：看GPA，看Essay

Caltech虽然很小，招的很少，但是近三年在本校招了6个，每年2个。娃的GPA奇高，于是信心满满。

刚刚开箱验货一看，又是铁面冷拒。难道Essay太差了？

打开common app，我看了一下娃的Essay，觉得比我写的好多了。怎么当年连我都收的学校，偏偏不收我娃呢？既然Caltech不喜欢，就给大家看看吧

Essay 1 - Tell us about a time or experience in which you encountered failure. (250 words maximum)

When considering failure it’s important to consider context: specifically, ask what’s the cost of failure and what’s the probability of failure. How I react to failure depends on these two parameters.

I encountered type-I failure in my research on COVID-modeling that had been stagnant for 3 months. I researched various epidemiology models to predict the spread of COVID throughout various countries: SIR, statistical models,…but none satisfactorily predicted the trend. These were “intelligent failures”, with low cost and high probability. My strategy was staying calm, motivated, and analytically sharp, communicating with other scientists, because each new attempt had more experience and ideas. By continuing to make failures. I learned gradually and gained concrete every attempt until I finally developed a successful fractional calculus model to predict the trend. 

Fatal failures are costly and unrecoverable, sometimes even inevitable. I encountered such a failure after graduating from an art middle-school: I was rejected by all three high-schools I had applied to. I had no school to attend. In response to this fatal unrecoverable failure, I re-applied to my public feeder immediately to control further damages. I took 8 APs and won many national competitions(USAMO/USACO) during freshman and sophomore. In junior I was invited to transfer back into the best school which rejected me at my first application. My junior grade GPA at this best school in my state was 4.923 out of 5.0 which set a new historical school record. I didn’t seek this failure, but I worked hard to circumvent its effects.