Yeah it is a pretty weird crapshoot — other parts of my application were decent then too (eg 4.4 GPA, almost all 5s on around a dozen AP exams, hundreds of hours of volunteer experience, LOTS of work experience due to being quite poor in a single parent household, fluent / literate in multiple languages, a few more ECs that I was very passionate about, etc.). Just didn’t have what they were looking for!

(went 1/8 without interview in grad school admissions too, despite eg having a 1st author pub, lots of conference posters, summa cum laude as a double major, etc)

But I’m also now at a school (generally ranked at the top of my field) that rejected me haha. Was recently “begged” to teach a course here too!