Jenny Han Quotes

When I was in high school, I didn't feel like I had to pile on the APs in order to look good to colleges. High-achieving classmates didn't use private tutors.

I kept up top grades, and by senior year, a flow of mailed college recruiting brochures accumulated into an avalanche on our dining room table.

American universities have never considered academic merit the sole criterion for admittance.

I started getting letters from college in the tenth grade.

I was planning that whole athletic slide into Stanford rather than actually getting a 1450 on my SATs.

The SAT is not particularly relevant to my life.

I want that three quad program! That's what's going to set me apart in the U.S.

Because I did well at the prep school, I got to have more options as some different universities gave me offers.

Though my parents were professionals and expected me to go to college, they were immigrants from India with no idea about how the admissions process worked in the United States or the importance of standardized tests.

Every year it is more difficult to get into the top four.

I have a daughter who is a sophomore in college and another who is in the 11th grade of high school.

It feels like it's the end of the world if you don't do well on your SATs.

It wasn't until my senior year in high school that I started acting.

Many high school students are under so much competitive pressure. They are sometimes taught that if they don't have a 4.0 GPA, score in the 99th percentile on admissions tests, and demonstrate leadership in sports and participate in clubs, they won't get into college anywhere. Even highly credentialed professionals get caught up in this.

It's hard when you're doing a film based on a true story to really figure out what all those relationships were.

I was completely unqualified to get into Harvard. But then I went to my interview for Harvard, and the woman asked, 'Why do you want to go here?' And I took out all of my comedy writing samples that I had done. I couldn't have been more delusional in terms of what I thought they wanted in a candidate for college.

Before high school ended, I started applying to college. It really wasn't even a choice because of the brainwashing of my parents.

I think there should be a good balance between being a good student and being able to enjoy your high school life.

I don't remember writing anything until I wrote my college application.

At some of our most competitive universities, 17 times the amount of students that can go to the school, apply. And these applicants are from all over the country, and admissions officers need ways to sort through them. The SAT is just one of those things.

I realized that the only way to get into a good college was to be valedictorian or salutatorian. So that was my goal.

The scramble to get into college is going to be so terrible in the next few years that students are going to put up with almost anything, even an education.

I'm sure that being an applicant from the American School in Vienna helped get me into all seven colleges I applied to.

I wanted to get out of Ashland, and I thought it would be pretty cool to go to school in the East. So I asked my guidance counselor what Ivy League schools were. And I applied to Harvard, Yale and Dartmouth - that was it. My guidance counselor told me I wouldn't get into an Ivy League school. So as my act of resistance, that's all I applied to.

You still remember your SAT scores. And everybody else does too. Everybody's forgotten everything about themselves, everything else about high school. They remember their SAT scores.