[Mick]

I think that might be true if LSJU had a 100+ strong piano team, and actively recruited 25 players/year to that piano team (or artist team, programmer team, debater team, crossword puzzle team, etc.).  In such a hypothetical, that #10 pianist might be important enough to the "team" to give him (or her) some admissions slack, but I doubt if it would be very much slack at all.

When I was a student, a professor in the Communications Department told me that the Admissions Office sent over some applications every year, asking, what do you guys think of these? The professor understood that to be asking what the department thought of the communications-oriented achievements and/or potential of the applicants. I've always assumed that other departments were similarly solicited.

Of course, that was a long time ago. Things could have changed.

That definitely happened with my sister's application to SUSE (Stanford University School of Education).  Graduate admissions distributed the application to several profs who actually reached out to my sister and asked her to explain her somewhat odd background, which she did to their delight and ultimately, to her acceptance.

[Mick]

I think that might be true if LSJU had a 100+ strong piano team, and actively recruited 25 players/year to that piano team (or artist team, programmer team, debater team, crossword puzzle team, etc.).  In such a hypothetical, that #10 pianist might be important enough to the "team" to give him (or her) some admissions slack, but I doubt if it would be very much slack at all.

When I was a student, a professor in the Communications Department told me that the Admissions Office sent over some applications every year, asking, what do you guys think of these? The professor understood that to be asking what the department thought of the communications-oriented achievements and/or potential of the applicants. I've always assumed that other departments were similarly solicited.

Of course, that was a long time ago. Things could have changed.

That definitely happened with my sister's application to SUSE (Stanford University School of Education).  Graduate admissions distributed the application to several profs who actually reached out to my sister and asked her to explain her somewhat odd background, which she did to their delight and ultimately, to her acceptance.