everyone wants to know. theres so many fellowships, colleges, programs, jobs, whathaveyou that have some kind of "acceptance rate" that people go by for how likely it is for a person to get accepted into said thing. going by acceptance rates is kind of harmful to a person's perception of what they can potentially do. i notice that a lot of people just end up applying to stuff willy-nilly, letting fate be their guide rather than being intentional about what they choose. like college! applying to a college with a 75% acceptance rate is a strategy at a certain point, just because the acceptance rate is high.
berklee college of music as an acceptance rate of like 50%. that means acceptance is essentially a coin flip, right? no! if you're not a musician, your chance is zero! conversely, if you're a talented musician, your chances are much, much higher. the 50% figure really only helps people in the EXACT mean, which is not very many people. similarly, somewhere like MIT has an acceptance rate of around 4.5%. low, right? well, if you're the type of person that goes to MIT, your INDIVIDUAL chance of acceptance is much higher. again, if you are a musician applying to a particle physics program, for example, your chances are probably closer to zero than most.
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the whole point im trying to get across is that on an individual basis, all acceptance rates really tell a person is how many people get into the school out of the applicants, NOT how likely a given applicant is to get into the school. with this knowledge, hopefully some of you readers can feel a bit more confident about applying to jobs or school or anything like that knowing that there really is no way to tell how likely you are to get into something until you're actually there.
by not knowing, its easier to delude yourself. this results in a false sense of confidence that actually gets perceived as actual confidence. this can be a positive (confidence-enhanced performance by compte and postelwaite) thing for people. confidence improves your performance! be it at work, socially, etc. so, by having improved performance in an interview, your chances actually improve! by simply not knowing how likely you are to be able to do something, you will be able to do it more easily. kind of a catch 22: in trying to have heightened confidence by not knowing, you notice your heightened confidence which tells you that you have heightened chances, then your noticing of those chances means you know the magnitude of your chances to an extent, which stops or even harms the growth of confidence. that's how it works for me, at least.
just do your thing! good things will come if you do a full fucking send with yourself. if people don't accept it, whatever... at least ideally.