Naomi has been accepted to Stanford!

 Did years of chess pay off?

Naomi just got accepted into Stanford University.  She will study Computer Science.  

It's an Early Action admission; regular admissions will be known only in April 2021.

As customary nowadays, we video-recorded the immediate reaction to the message:

2020-12-11 Naomi Stanford acceptance reaction video

Stanford is ranked 2nd in the world and is the most selective among all US universities:

Did all those years of impressive chess achievements pay off big time?  

As a Woman International Master, Naomi is the single highest-titled American female chess player applying to colleges in the 2020-2021 admissions cycle.  

Her being the World School Girls U13 Chess Champion, and North American Junior Girls U20 Champion, and many-times US Girls champion might have helped as well.

Or maybe it's the perfect ACT test score 36?  Plus GPA 4.0, SAT Math II and Chemistry 800, AP exams 5-s?  National Merit Semifinalist, National AP Scholar?

Or being Head of Programming at FIRST Robotics Club; an intern at UW Computer Science Makeability Lab; knowing multiple programming languages?

We'll never know for sure.  Naomi's chess might have provided that whompf factor that tilted the scales.  Especially in the era of The Queen's Gambit chess glamour.

Naomi - National Merit Semifinalist

 Not chess... but close

Naomi is in the Seattle Times, again.

The National Merit Scholarship Program is an academic scholarship competition for recognition and university scholarships.  It uses the PSAT/NMSQT scores to select 16,000 Semifinalists (who become Finalists after submitting SAT scores) out of 1.5 million high school students.  

The selection process is long (takes many months) and complicated (with state-dependent cutoffs), however the honor is real because Semifinalists are approximately the top 1%, and the program gives out some scholarship money.

From the Seattle Times article on WA National Merit Scholarship semifinalists:

- BELLEVUE -

Newport H.S.: Bashkansky, Naomi; Chen, Justin K.; Gao, Daniel; Hu, Daniel; Jain, Stuti; Jiang, Kelly; Kim, Athena Y.; Ma, Kenneth; McClelland, Kai L.; Ouyang, Diana; Pham, Leanne; Yang, Richard Z.; Zeng, Julia W.

One of the Semifinalists in her school, Richard Yang, is also a chess player.  We've known him since he and Naomi were little.  He played with Naomi on all her chess teams: Spiritridge ES, Odle MS, Newport HS, both locally and nationally.

From Naomi's 2015 Nashville Nationals chess team, three players became National Merit Semifinalists: Naomi, Richard Yang, Brian Chen (now at Interlake HS).

From Naomi's 2016 K-8 Indianapolis Nationals chess team, five players became National Merit Semifinalists: Naomi, Richard Yang, Brian Chen, and previous year Semifinalists Benjamin Mousseau and Derek Zhang.

As the xkcd.com/552 hover text says, "Correlation doesn't imply causation, but it does waggle its eyebrows suggestively and gesture furtively while mouthing 'look over there'."