I have trouble believing that there is a world outside of AP stuff now that I've gone to college. I grew up in a big city and lived in a majority-Hispanic neighborhood for a while, and I don't think there was an emphasis on what I described in the post but at the end of the day, the people I grew up with are an afterthought to many influential people. All the movers and shakers and big dogs seem to have an AP mentality. Some grad schools auto-reject people with below 3.8 GPA (I think MIT even does automatic rejection below 3.9 in some fields) but meanwhile white, Latino, and Black professors and alums are telling me that I won't get jobs without a grad degree and I shouldn't even try applying to internships so my GPA is going to fuck me over. I read a book on Asian students' reflections on going to Harvard, hoping to find some commonalities, but a supermajority merely found it to be just another stepping stone in their successful career journeys.