Do you need to be special to get into Stanford?

Question

I mean out of the academic world. I mean in extracurricular activites. Do you have to be a national or state or international winner in something? (assume i am well balanced academically)

Answer 1

Absolutely.

At the level of Stanford, every applicant of theirs is gonna have a GPA around 4.0 and 700 on each section of the SAT. They're almost all going to be taking advanced courses. Stellar academics.

Stanford gets tons of these kids with great academics. They only have so many spaces. How do they weed them out?

Extra currics is a main way. They've got plenty of smart kids to choose from. Now they can afford to pick the ones who do more than just study all day. They know kids join extra currics just for school, so everyone is going to be in a bunch of clubs or sports teams.

Again, they need to pick out the best of those. They look for the state/national/int'l ranked player rather than the kid who just joined the crappiest team his school has so he can say he's a varsity athlete. They take the kid who organizes a big charity event and turns it into an annual thing rather than the kid who's just the pres of his community service club and did soem hours. Things like that.

So, yeah, you need to be special. You can stand out and be seen as "special" without really doing some spectacular extra curric thing, but that's just the easiest way to give an example of how to be special.

Answer 2

The short answer is yes.

Do you need to be national, state or international something...eh some people here are but not everyone.

Special can mean a number of things: leadership, community service, public speaking, business, spiritual, etc.

So special yes, winner of some competition like you mentioned no (probably wont hurt though)

Aton Gutierrez
Undergrad, Stanford University

Answer 3

it helps to stand out in some way among every other applicant who is valedictorian of their school