Comment by wyager
9 years ago
> and do little of note besides the following:
What do you think the average person in the world does? 99.9% of people are even more boring than the person you described. It's hard to find people who are more interesting than that.
> other very self-serving pursuits
There's no relationship between boringness and self-centeredness. It sounds like you might be incorrectly conflating "boring" with your own definition of "meaningless" (in a moral sense). I don't think charity work is likely to be less boring than any "self-serving" interest.
If these people's personal statements reflected their true intentions for what they want to do with their Stanford education after they graduated, they wouldn't have gotten in regardless of how good their grades, test scores, and extracurriculars were. Stanford isn't for these people. They could just have gone to some other university, still achieved their personal goals, and made room for people who really mean it when they say they want to make a mark on the world.