Sigh. So I'm in the 1% of the readership of this forum that is unable or unwilling to view your posts properly?
With sincere respect - my post above is not intended as a personal attack. Clearly you viewed it as such - for that, I apologize. I appreciate your role in this forum. And more importantly, I appreciate your service to the USNA and our nation. And ironically, I totally agree with your point that the applicant must own this process and show that ownership by taking primary responsibility for most if not all tasks involved, with my added caveats -- to the extent possible given schedules, the complexity of the task, etc. I get that, in the military world, you'd be my superior and I wouldn't be in the position of offering you advice because I'm not your equal. Nonetheless, I HAD thought that, given the nature of these forums, it would be okay for me to offer feedback. After all, you ARE the expert here. But I am an intended recipient of your truly expert advice. Surely it is useful to get a feel for HOW a member of this forum is "hearing" you, an action that is not really chosen but more based on human psychology? Even if I AM that absolutely CRAZY 1%!
The issue of "flags" is a tough one - looking for signals of lack of commitment on the part of the applicant can be tough. Speaking in my own profession's jargon - this "thing".......commitment and true desire to serve.......this really can't be observed or known with certainty by the admissions committee in the same way that academic achievement or physical fitness can be measured and thus known. It can only be guessed at, in a sense, and the committee does its best, based on the information at its disposal. Realistically, how would the committee ever have information about whether a parent called an admissions counselor once, during business hours, to ask a time sensitive question?
I guess my concern about how this thread evolved is this: Collecting all of those "flags" would be an impossible data collection effort. The admissions committee doesn't know these things, even if it WISHES it could know. But, again using the jargon of my profession, even if the committee could observe these "flags," how useful or reliable an indicator of applicant commitment is each one of these flags? If Mom calls the medical folks on behalf of little Johnny, nobody is jotting that down and notifying the admissions committee. And if they WERE, my goodness what a "noisy signal" of commitment that would be! The issue with flags is that they are everywhere. Each applicant will "trip a flag" every now and then. And each one of those flags is not equal - a parent calling a BGO surely is ill-advised at best; a parent logging into an applicant portal to look for information is an action that is invisible to the admissions committee and surely irrelevant in that search for reliable predictors of applicant commitment.
All I know is that, when I read your post on flags, it made ME feel defensive, which diminished the effectiveness of your advice and I thought it would be useful to convey that to you. Or maybe I was just annoyed and so convinced myself of the usefulness of my response. Either way, I conveyed my feelings to you, which generated your response above. I was surprised by the tone of your post. I regret my role in this exchange. And I graciously concede defeat.
GO NAVY!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!!