Webinar Transcript: Building A Well Balanced College List
Elton Lin
Anthony Su: Thank you everyone for joining us today. Saturday morning – great time to be talking about your college list! And a little bit more about admissions as a lot of students are getting started with school and classes. Time starts slipping away a little bit with the admissions process. So I’m glad that we can talk a little bit now.
Today, we've got Katie and Jon joining us to tell us how students can think through their college list a little bit more strategically, or find different ways to research schools and things like that. Katie, do you mind introducing yourself, and then Jon?
Katie Young: Yeah, sure. Hey everyone; good morning. My name is Katie Young. I'm an associate consulting director here at ILUMIN. I’ve been working as a college counselor for about nine years now. I went to USC and got my degree in English a very long time ago – back when dinosaurs roamed the Earth! And I'm happy to be here to give you guys some advice and guidance.
We’ve done a college list webinar before. We're going to go a little bit further this time. So, hopefully, this information will be valuable.
Jon Castro: Hello Katie. Hi everyone. My name is Jon. I graduated from Middlebury College with a double major in history and Chinese. After that I went to China for five or six years. And my work there was the same as what I'm doing for ILUMIN – which is college consulting: helping students, international and American, get into different colleges.
I hope today that we can give you some sort of value information so you can get started on this process.
Anthony Su: Yeah, we've got a ton of information to go through today. So without further ado, Katie, can you get us started here?
Katie Young: Yeah. Here it goes.
Agenda
Katie Young: First we're gonna talk about finding your best fit school – so some strategies for that, and some resources for that. Balancing out your list so that it's not too full of reach schools or safety schools – so that you have a wide variety of options. We're going to go through a case study of helping a student build and refine a list. Then we're going to move forward into prioritizing applications – how you should, once you have your list, get started and how you should make a plan for the fall. We're going to go through a case study of that, and then we'll have Q&A at the end.
Finding best fit colleges
Searching by rankings
Katie Young: There are a lot of methods by which we can build our college list. I think the most common one, and the one that a lot of students use, is a rankings list.
I think it makes sense to look at a rankings list. Otherwise how do you know how good a college is, and how respected? I don't have a problem with rankings lists. I do want you to be able to use them in order to identify colleges for further research.
But I would really caution you against building your list just because a school has a high rank. I want you to be really careful, and review the criteria that that list is using in order to do those rankings. Some of them are a little bit weird – a little bit shady! They weigh some interesting things. I don't know if any of you listen to Malcolm Gladwell's podcast called “Revisionist History,” but he just did a two-episode show on how the U.S. News rankings are flawed. Go listen!
There are old versions of lists. Every year they update it, right? And you'll notice that schools move around by leaps and bounds every year. They'll go from number 20 to 40 and then back to 30. So I don't rely, necessarily, on what's happening this year. Try to see if this college is always ranked where it is.
And then review multiple lists and compare. Maybe USC is number 23 on one list, and it's 85 on another. You want to understand what those factors are that's putting that school there.
Some of the common sites: U.S. News, obviously. Niche. Princeton Review. Times Higher Education. And then Forbes. They're all flawed in their own way, and they're all helpful in their own way.
The one that's the easiest to search through and compare, for me, is the Forbes list. That's my recommendation.
Searching by statistics
Katie Young: Another common method that students will choose is to search by statistics. Obviously you want to understand: what are your odds for getting in? What are the numbers that these students have that are getting into these colleges? So searching by statistics is helpful.
It’s helpful, again, to identify colleges. And also to filter out schools that are way too high for you: you’re not going to succeed there. Or way too low for you: maybe you're going to be the smartest kid in the room. And maybe that's good for you, but maybe that's uncomfortable at the same time.
There are different websites where you can enter your GPA – and your test score, if you have it – into a search engine that will then spit out schools that are “good matches” for you, and tell you whether they're “reach,” “target,” or “safety.”
Naviance is something that a lot of high schools subscribe to, where they have scattergrams, which are little dots showing the test score and GPA ranges of students — students from your particular high school who have gotten into the college, which I think is a better metric than looking at the whole country. At least you can see, “These are the types of students that I'm competing against, and where they are getting in.”
And remember that test scores are optional. Normally test scores and GPA would both be huge factors in this statistical analysis. This year, because testing is optional, you really can rely on your GPA. We'll talk a little bit more about test-optional in a minute. But previously, if you had a high GPA and a low test score or vice versa, it was really hard to calibrate where you should be applying. Now you don't have to worry. You just go by your GPA. It's totally fine.
But admissions is holistic. So even if you're above the 75th percentile GPA or test score, that doesn't mean you're going to get in. They're going to look at a lot of other factors, and compare you to students in a lot of different ways in order to decide if you should have that spot.
Searching by major
Katie Young: So you can search by rankings and statistics. These are the more concrete, evidentiary searches. A lot of the other ways to search are pretty subjective!
Another way to search is by major. I know a lot of students are undeclared, and that's totally okay; you can just choose a college that you love and apply to a major that's interesting there. Don't worry about it. But if you already know what you want to study, this is a good way to refine some options, or to get started. If you just look up “best colleges,” there are tons and tons of things. But if you look up “best colleges for psychology,” that'll be a totally different list of schools!
QS is a ranking system that goes major by major – and it's actually the whole world! You can look up colleges in Asia or Australia or Canada on that website too – which usually don’t come to mind for a lot of my students. U.S. News and Poets and Quants have different lists for different majors. So, again, cross-checking – seeing where schools end up on these different lists.
You can also find which colleges offer your major. Let's say you want to study something a little bit more obscure, like exercise science or food science. You can go on Big Future – which is a Collegeboard website – search up your major, and find colleges that offer that major. That'll help you refine your options a little bit more.
And then, lastly, if you're looking by major, be careful you’re looking at undergraduate programs. A lot of my students will come in and say, “I want to go to Stanford and study business!” Business is not an undergraduate major at Stanford. They only have MBA programs for business. So you need to be careful: are you looking at graduate programs? MBA? Master's programs? Or are you looking at undergraduate programs that you can enroll in right now?
If you can't find a rankings list for an undergraduate program, check out the graduate programs. If a school has a really strong computer science masters, the likelihood is that those same faculty members are teaching undergraduate classes too, or are involved in some way. So you can use that as an indicator. But don't rely on graduate rankings to tell you the quality of a program.
Refining by cost
Katie Young: Another method that students have been asking me about – a little bit more, lately – is cost, and how to sort of search for colleges by affordability.
A lot of students who come to ILUMIN are looking mostly not at need-based aid but merit-based aid. So the conversation I'm having right now is around both. I'll talk about merit-based aid in a second.
Net price calculators are tools on every single college's website. They have to have one. It's a policy at this point, from the Department of Education. So if you google “Gonzaga net price calculator,” you'll find it. You enter some basic information about your family and income, and it will tell you what your likely sticker price is going to be for that school without you ever filling out the FAFSA or any other documents. So you can get an idea. If your family's income is fifty thousand dollars, but the tuition there is more than fifty thousand dollars a year, what is that really going to look like for you in terms of cost? It's kind of hard to tell without this.
If you don't feel like entering that information, you can go to a website called College Scorecard, which is a government website. You can look up each individual college, scroll down, and you can see the net price by income level written right there.
There's also a cool system called the Western University Exchange, where California, Washington, Oregon, Hawaii, New Mexico, Nevada, Arizona, and maybe Colorado are part of this network of colleges. [Here’s the full list: Alaska, Arizona, California, Colorado, Guam, Hawai’i, Idaho, Montana, Nevada, New Mexico, North Dakota, Northern Mariana Islands, Oregon, South Dakota, Utah, Washington, and Wyoming.]
If I live in California, but I go to one of these colleges in Colorado, I can get in-state tuition for that college in Colorado. It makes it a lot cheaper! A lot of colleges are not part of this, but if you can find one that is part of this program, it's a really great deal. So you're not limited to California public colleges. UCs are very competitive! But if you want that price, take a look at Western University Exchange
Merit-based aid
Honors programs are a great way to be eligible for merit-based scholarships. For maybe a safer school – let's say Arizona State or Ohio State; those would be a safe school for a lot of my students – joining their honors program will make you eligible for a lot of merit-based money. Merit-based money is money you don't need, but they love you and they want to give it to you so that you'll come to their school. Applying to honors programs can get you there.
And then there are colleges with Highest Merit Aid, which I'm going to talk about. But please note that, if you want to apply for merit aid, you have to walk through the financial aid process. You still have to do the FAFSA. You still have to fill out the materials. Jon will talk a little bit more about that later.
If you're looking at merit-based aid at colleges, more than 40% of students of these colleges get merit-based aid. This is just a list I found on U.S. News. You guys can probably find it pretty easily. But some surprising schools are there – some you wouldn't think of as super rich schools are giving out a lot of money!
Searching by “What will it take to get a job?”
Katie Young: Now we're going to go through some uncommon methods for searching for colleges. If you're looking at colleges and you're thinking, “I don't really care where I go, I just want to make sure I get a job when I get out,” what are the factors that different employers are really looking for?
This was a survey that was conducted a few years ago of a lot of top Forbes 500 companies. And they mentioned that internships and employment during college were two of the biggest factors that they considered when they were looking at hiring. So if we want to make sure we go to a college where we can get internships and get jobs during college, we want to look at colleges with internships and co-ops. Co-ops are essentially semesters, during your college experience, where you work. You get a job in a company. And you're actually working. You're getting professional experience.
So these are the colleges that have the best internship and co-op opportunities. If you're looking at rankings overall, you're probably not going to get these schools coming out at the top. If you're looking for colleges with great internship opportunities – so that you can build your résumé, so that you can get a job – here you go.
Searching by “How do I get into grad school?”
Katie Young: If you're planning on grad school, medical school, or law school, there are definitely some things that you need to do during your undergraduate years in order to get there – to get to the level where you're going to get hand-picked by these grad programs. For medical school, according to the Association of American Medical Colleges, they're looking a lot at your GPA and your courses. They're looking a lot at your test scores, which are something that you can take regardless of where you go to college: the MCAT, the GRE, or the LSAT. And then letters of rec from professors.
We’ll just look at two things – the GPA and letters of rec. The other ones are more like personal qualities. And then the test score, which is not really something we can control. The two things that we can control when we search for college would be:
How easy is it to get a good GPA, and get the courses that you want?
How easy is it to get strong letters of recommendation?
In that case, let's look at the best undergraduate teaching. So we're looking at colleges that have the best academic atmosphere, the best professors. We're looking at colleges which, again, might not show up to you if you're looking at just a normal, overall rankings list.
Some surprises on there actually for me. Big public schools are not usually known for having strong professors and strong teaching. So I was excited to see University of Maryland and Arizona State on there.
Searching by what it’ll take to get rich
Katie Young: Another uncommon method: “I just want to make money!” Go to a college where they produce the highest-paid graduates. These are them:
https://www.payscale.com/college-salary-report
I think if you really take a close look at these, you'll notice Harvey Mudd, Stevens, Colorado School of Mines, and Albany College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences. These are schools that are geared towards specific career pathways, like medicine or engineering. So, obviously, these students are going to make the most money.
But if you visit Payscale, which is where I got this information, you can actually search for the highest-paid graduates by major. So you can go and see where the highest-paid psychology majors are going to school.
So don't worry about this. But I thought this was fun. There are some schools you would never otherwise see. I've never heard of SUNY Maritime before in my life!
Balancing and Refining your list
Katie Young: Okay, so you've built your list. You've used some common methods, or some uncommon methods. You have a lot of schools you want to apply to. Usually my students come in with thirty-five to fifty! Now we're going to work on balancing and refining that list. So how do we do that?
How many colleges should you apply to?
Katie Young: You're going to have a few factors to consider when you think about this one. One is limits imposed by your high school. Some high school counselors or teachers will not give letters for more than a certain number of schools. The English teacher of my student last year said, “I'll only do 15 schools,” and that was that.
Or limits on application platforms. The Common App hosts about 900 colleges, but they only let you apply to twenty. So you have to be pretty selective with the schools that you're choosing.
Cost is important to consider here. Each application is going to cost you between 50 and 100 bucks. Plus if you send your test scores, that's another $12 per college. It racks up! If you're applying to thirty colleges, you better kiss your mother's feet, because that's a lot!
And then workload, obviously, is something to consider. My students will come in with ambitious lists, and then I'll show them all the essay prompts, and they'll be like, “Never mind!” So take a look at all the work that you're gonna have to do and make sure that it's feasible considering your senior schedule and everything else that you have going on. Can you really write thirty essays in three months? I don't think so.
Our advice is to stick to twelve to fifteen schools. No fewer than ten, I think. With fewer than ten, you're really setting yourself up for not having a lot of choice when you get all your results back. My goal for my students is for them to have choices of where they go, so they don't feel like they have to choose path one or path two. They have lots of different ideas, and they can compare and contrast and visit and check them out.
More than twenty is just too much – you're not paying enough attention. You don't have enough factors that you're considering on your list. You need to bring in some more criteria and narrow it down. Like, does it rain there all the time? Take it off the list!
How to determine or define “reach,” “target,” and “safety”
Katie Young: How do we really define that? I think if you talk to any counselor on the planet, they're going to have a different definition for this! This is the one that we tend to stick to:
Dream
Dream schools or colleges are hard for everyone to get into. They have less than a 15% acceptance rate. Some of them have 4% acceptance rates. So a school is a dream school for you if it has this very low acceptance rate, or your grades and scores are well below the averages. So if you're looking at Stanford, which has a four percent acceptance rate, and their average GPA is 3.9 and yours is 3.3, this is a dream school for you.
Reach
Reach schools or colleges you might get into, but they're just still a little bit of a risk. 15%-30% acceptance rates would be generally defined as a reach school. And then your grades and scores are still below the averages. Maybe they're in the middle, but close to the bottom.
And remember, you can just use your grades if your test score is low; don't hold yourself back from applying to schools this year. This is your shot! You guys are lucky in a lot of ways and unlucky and many more ways, but this is one small way in which you're lucky – that you don't have to worry about the test score stuff. So if you're not happy with yours, just rely on your GPA.
Target
If schools have a 30% to 60% acceptance rate and your scores are on average or just above or just below average, this is a target school for you. I'll do these little mini categories that are like “reach/target,” because it's kind of in the middle, but I think that gets a little complicated. So we'll just call that a target.
Safety
And then safety is a college you will almost definitely get into. I would not call a college safe for someone unless I was 100% sure that they were going to get in. So a 60%+ acceptance rate, and your grades and scores are above or far above the averages.
Other factors affecting your admissions chances
Katie Young: Those statistics – the acceptance rate, the average GPA, and the average test scores – those are just the baseline. And then we've got to pull it up or pull it down depending on some other factors.
So let's say that a school is target for you based on your GPA and based on their acceptance rate. Now if you're looking at your high school graduating class, are you in the top 10%, 25%, 50%? A lot of high schools don't rank, so it's hard to tell, but if you look at different colleges they share it. They don't really share the GPA of their applicants, but they share their class rank.
So for Harvard, for example… I don't know why I'm using such top tier schools – sorry everyone! For Harvard they say like 98% of their admitted students are in the top 10% of their class. Something like that. So it's important to know where you're at, even if your GPA is good. If there are people at your school that are better, you might need to pull your chances back and call this more of a reach school than target.
In-state versus out-of-state matters too. Being here and applying to the UCs, you have an advantage as a California student. They accept a higher enough proportion of California students. If you're trying to apply to an out-of-state school like UW or UT Austin, you're gonna have a harder time. So if you look up UT Austin, it says it has like a 50% acceptance rate – something like that. But their out-of-state acceptance rate is closer to 10%. And UW released their computer science statistics – which are some of the scariest things I've ever seen. For out-of-state applicants, it's around 4% now!
So you have to look a little closer. Try to find that information. It's not available for all schools. But again, if UW was a target for me, but I was applying for computer science, now it's a reach. Way too low of an acceptance rate for me to call that a target.
Consider the popularity of the college. If you're looking around and every single one of your friends is applying to this school, your odds are lower you're getting in over all of those people. So try to choose schools that nobody else has heard of, or nobody else is looking at.
And then they're going to look at your résumé. They're going to look at your subjective factors, like your teacher recommendations and your essays. And then, of course, your major is a big one, which we're going to talk about in more detail
Jon Castro: I recently had a meeting with a client, and they mentioned that their child's school doesn't have a lot of resources when it comes to AP exams. They were a little concerned with how other schools, who have more privileges and more resources, might be compared. Because a student from that school might have 10 different AP exams!
I would say that how admissions officers would look at this is that they'll look at your child's standing within your school. They understand that not all schools are equal. Not all schools have the same amount of resources, and so on. So it's okay to not stress out so much when you feel like your son or daughter doesn't have a chance of getting into a school because they're competing with other schools in that same location. They do look at your school first. Your class ranking, as Katie just said. And that's what's important – and how challenging the courses that your child is taking in that school are.
Katie Young: It’s context. They're going to evaluate you within your context. And that's what I mean when I'm saying here, with the extracurricular résumé, if you're at a school where everybody just goes to school and goes home, and you're the president of sixteen clubs and you play four sports, obviously your résumé is going to stand out compared to other people from your school – if you're that kid who goes home.
We take the original list with the stats, and then we're going to add the context of all of this stuff, including the high school. Thanks for that point, Jon. And then we're going to calibrate the list from there. It's surprising to students and families, sometimes, when they see that I'll put a school as a reach school that they were expecting to be a target school. These are some of the reasons why I might do that.
Selecting your major
Katie Young: The big one is major. Within California, we've got the UCs and CSU campuses. They're full. They're impacted. They're capped. What that means is they have to put additional criteria on students who apply to those majors, versus students who apply to the school in general.
If you're applying to be a philosophy major or an anthropology major or a creative writing major, you're probably not going to run into the issues that a computer science or an engineering or a pre-medical student is going to run into in admissions. Strategizing around major will also bring your admissions chances up.
When we talk about majors, one of the statistics that really blew my mind last year was at UC Irvine. This was an article that was in, I believe, the L.A. Times. UC Irvine said that 50% of their applicants selected one of the same six majors. There are 85 majors there, and 50% of the kids who applied only applied to six of those! So of course not all those students were able to get in. They don't have that much room in those majors.
People will say, “Why don't they just increase the size of the program?” They're trying. They're doing that incrementally. But they're trying to keep other departments going, other professors employed, and other research going on. They have to consider a lot of other factors versus just how many students want to get in.
And if they increase their admission rate, the school will go down on the rankings lists. This is the trick that they're playing with you! They want to keep it difficult to get in, so that they'll be sought after – so that they will remain popular and remain cool on the rankings lists. It's pretty mean.
Point is: pick a major that not all your friends are picking. Pick a major that's not obvious. I think people say, “I've taken biology, and biology is my major.” When there are like fifteen different types of biology that you could choose from – and get around a lot of the crowd! So just take a closer look at the majors being offered, and try to pick something that's more unique.
Jon Castro: Do you know which six majors?
Katie Young: Yeah. It was biology, psychology, nursing, computer science, business, and actually the last one was “undeclared” – that’s a popular one. So those are always in high demand. I was surprised that engineering actually didn't get into this. I think, usually at a UC, engineering would be the most popular. I guess at Irvine they have slightly more liberal artsy, social science-y majors that are getting applied to.
Always put a second choice major. Everyone thinks, “But if I put a second choice, they'll put me in there.” No. They'll consider you for your first choice first, and if you're not right for it, they'll consider you for your second choice. You're not sabotaging yourself by giving yourself a second chance! They're gonna look at you again
Here’s one thing we noticed last year in the admissions trends, and we mentioned this – you guys can find that webinar on our website. We did a webinar about different trends we noticed in admissions. And we noticed that students who differentiated themselves by showing overlapping interests stood out. Students who were like, “I'm interested in psychology and I'm interested in computers. How am I going to combine those two things into sort of a future goal or a future career?” Those students had really interesting résumés and really interesting ideas in their essays that I think helped, versus just, “I am very skilled at computer science.” Something to think about.
And then show some direction. I'm fine with people picking “undeclared” – I get it; you're 17. you don't know; you're not sure. But you're interested in something. So think. Look at your résumé. Look at the classes that you selected. Try to think, “Where could this lead me to?” An article I read lately said that applying undeclared is not a strategy. It's something you should do only if you really are not sure. But it's not going to make your chances any better, as we just noticed at UC Irvine with a billion students applying undeclared.
Jon Castro: I would also add, for the undeclared major “strategy” here, a lot of students think about it because, as you said, they're young, and not really sure what they want to pursue. But when you have your college list and you're dealing with those essays, many colleges are going to ask you, “What major are you interested in, and why?” So if you pick “undeclared,” you do want to highlight two to three different interests and hobbies that you do want to explore in school. Just because you don't know what path you want to take as a major, you should still really talk about different ideas and disciplines that you want to potentially pursue.
Katie Young: Totally.
A note on test-optional/test-blind
I said we are going to talk about this a little bit. I don't have too much to say. I just wanted to clarify the test-optional/test-blind thing.
A lot of schools this year are test-optional. Which means if you submit it, they will consider it. If you omit it, they will not. It is not a disadvantage to not submit a test score. It’s supposed to move testing to a different category.
Usually what it would be is GPA and test score are up here, and then all the other factors are down here. Now GPA – your academic profile – is up here. And testing just becomes one of those other factors that are on your résumé. It's like a résumé item. You can think of it as an award that you won. You can think of it as like a score on USACO or the AMIE, or any of those other types of tests that are not admissions tests.
So if you feel like your score is strong – compared to the averages at the school from past years – submit it. It can only help you; it's not going to hurt you. If you feel like your score is well below, and you don't think it represents your best abilities and your best chances to get into the school, don't send it. It's really no problem.
There are a few schools that are going to be test-blind this year. Meaning they're not going to look at scores – even if you send them. The UCs are one of those systems that is going test-blind this year. If you have more questions about that, let us know; we can do some Q&A on that at the end.
And then I just wanted to give an example. Submitting a score is not an advantage unless it's a strong score. So being a member of DECA is great. Put that on your résumé; there's no problem with that. You're not going to get points taken away for being in DECA. But you are going to get points added for being a DECA international champion! I want to put test scores in that mindset – put them in the mindset of an activity versus a grade.
How many reach/target/safety schools should you have?
Okay, back to the list. We were just talking about how you decide what's a reach, target, and safety school. How do you calibrate and move things around? Now that you've got in your head, “Okay, these are my targets; these are my reaches; these are my safeties,” how many of each should you have?
The majority of your schools should be in the “target” category. The reason for that is to give yourself as many options as possible, give you flexibility and choice in the spring, and also maximize your effort. If you're spending days and days and hours and hours working on only reaching dream schools, you're not going to get a huge payoff! Make sure that you're focusing your time and energy well.
Your list should look like a bell curve. Try to just put the majority at “target,” and then everything else on the sides. This is flexible. If you're a really stellar student – you're top tier, in range for the top 10 schools – you can have more reaches and fewer safeties. We know you're going to be okay.
If you're a little bit lower, and concerned, pad yourself with safeties. It's really not a problem to apply to safeties most of the time because they don't require a lot of extra work. It's mostly just submitting an application form. I would recommend you pad yourself with some safety schools. Do your Hail Marys – do your dream schools. But just don't make that your focus.
Case Study: MC
Okay, this is a case study of a student that I helped with their college list. I just want you to see what our conversation was like – where we started, and where we ended up. So this is a real student, but I've changed a lot of the details. Hopefully they don't know I'm talking about them!
They want to go into engineering. They have a 3.9 GPA, and a 1490 test score. Their activities résumé, because I usually ask for their top three to five activities, has music, tutoring, sports, robotics, and then they did a research project this past summer.
The student’s preferences were to be on the West or East Coasts, to go to a large college, to focus on undergraduate research, and possibly to minor in music. And then be surrounded by some fun, outgoing, and driven students.
The original list
When this family first came in, they brought me this list:
Johns Hopkins
Stanford
Duke
Georgia Tech
UCSD
University of Pennsylvania
UC Berkeley
Harvard
University of Michigan
Rice
Cornell
Boston U
UC Davis
University of Wisconsin
Case Western
CMU
UIUC
Northwestern
Columbia
UCLA
Cal Poly
Santa Clara University
Arizona State
My assessment of that list was that it was way too top-heavy. Many of those colleges have less than a 20% acceptance rate to start with. And looking at the student's résumé, of course the GPA is great, but they're going for engineering. That's a little bit scary! And then their résumé doesn't have a lot of shiny, fancy things on it. So I was a bit worried that this list was too top-heavy for them.
They do have some UCs on there, but STEM majors are really impacted at the UCs. And then there's Cal Poly. I was worried about the student’s chances there. Then public colleges out-of-state have a lower percent of students from California, and they have more restrictions on STEM. That takes out things like UIUC, which couldn't really be a target school necessarily for them, for that reason. There was only one true safety school on here, and that was Arizona State. I felt that this list was just way out of balance. The factors I looked at, again, were just the GPA, the résumé not being focused, and the major being competitive.
This is a typical list that a student will bring in – especially a STEM student. Because, again, they're looking at their friends and their family and their cousins, and they're looking at the internet. They're seeing that these are the high-ranked schools. So they're picking them. And that's fine. I'm not going to deter anybody from this list. But what I did help this student with was updating it and refining it.
The updated list:
ASU
Boston U
Cal Poly + other CSUs
Georgia Tech
Johns Hopkins
Santa Clara University
Case Western
Ohio State
U Arizona
UCLA
UC Berkeley
UC Davis
UC Irvine
UCSD
UIUC
University of Maryland – College Park
University of Michigan – Ann Arbor
University of Washington – Seattle
University of Wisconsin – Madison
We got down in terms of the number of schools. Now we have 19 colleges – but 15 applications, which is still in that 12-15 range that I’m trying to target with my students. Now they're only working on 15 apps instead of 20.
We kept some of those selective schools, but we added in some safeties. They were already going to do Cal Poly, which is on the Cal state application platform, so I suggested adding San Jose State to that to give them a safe option. We have Ohio State, and Arizona. We removed a lot of the Ivies, after looking at the profiles and realizing that those are just Ivies. They don't actually have that strong of engineering programs! So we took some of those out, but left the one that the student really loved, which was Johns Hopkins.
I added some additional options through the middle, which are down here. The Maryland through Wisconsin options. I advised the student to apply early to some of these out-of-state programs to make sure they got priority consideration. Again, my goal is to make sure they have choices!
I think that any of these schools could potentially be targets, verging on reaches, for this student. Some are safe. Some are the big reaches. So that’s that; I'm going to go ahead and move on to Jon.
Jon Castro: I do have a question, first. Given today's environment, where a lot of tests are optional, and schools are test-blind, if you had that student again this year, would you recommend that they submit that 1490 SAT score?
Katie Young: A 1490 for engineering I do think is a bit low. I don't have it in front of me, but I would say if they had already had AP scores in physics and calculus or things like that, they probably shouldn’t bother to turn in the test score. Those AP scores will prove their mathematical ability, which is really the important thing here.
A 1490 is not bad in any universe. To most of these schools, like Wisconsin, Case Western, UIUC, Santa Clara, and Arizona, I would turn it in. I would probably avoid turning it into Johns Hopkins and Georgia Tech.
PrioritiZing your Applications
Start with core applications
Jon Castro: Katie just went over how to build a school list. And we do want to give enough time for Q&A, because I'm sure a lot of you have questions about particular cases. So I'll try to speed this through a little faster than I was planning!
I think once you have that initial school list of let's say 10-15 schools, I think you should start with the UC essays. We have an upcoming webinar about the UC essays, where we’re going to go into much more depth than I will today. But typically there are four different essays that you can pick from a longer list of eight prompts.
We recommend that two of the essays be anything that has to do with your major, interest, and community. They typically focus on creativity or leadership. The last two essays that you decide are up to you. This is something that you can talk with your counsellor about to see what matches.
Why do we recommend students start with the UC essays, even though the deadline for the University of California system is November 30th? It’s because a lot of these essays can be adapted and used for other schools. This saves a ton of time. If you're starting now and you have a list of 10 to 15 different schools, you have 30 or so essays! Starting with this can save you a ton of time – which is great for stress management and any activities and tests that your school might have for you.
Next, search your school list to see what matches. I think this is a good plan once you have your school list – to categorize the essays that the schools are asking for. The essays can be “Why this major?” or “Why are you interested in this particular major?” For engineering, business, sociology, or psychology, “Why do you want to do this, and what do you see yourself doing in the future?” That's one category. Another category can be, “Why are you interested in this particular school or program?” And you can have leadership essays, or ones about creativity and community.
Once you have all these different categories, then you can start with those essays that are asking the same type of question over and over again. All of a sudden schools, with 25 different essays, you can cut that down to maybe half if you categorize well, and you plan it out in advance.
Another essay that I'm sure everyone's heard about is the Common App Personal Statement, which is the largest essay that you're probably gonna do. And this essay is sent to every single school that you're applying to in the Common App application system. I would say that one week before the early decision and early action deadline is fine. Typically anywhere from November 15th to December 1st, we have the ED/EA deadline. For different schools, the deadlines and dates vary.
Completing the UC essays first, followed by the Common App Personal Statement, can really help you manage a lot of these essays
For ED/EA schools, there are two different early decisions, EDI and EDII. Typically early decision one is November 1st. That's what most schools typically go for. And then early decision two is anywhere from January 1st to January 15th. It depends on the school.
I would say apply to one school as ED, and then to at least three as EA. If you have a school list of 12, this is a good starting point. You could do more EA. You could do less. It’s up to you and your counsellor how many you want to do, and how much time you have in order to complete this. But starting now in August and September, I think you have enough time to apply to these four different schools. This is also in addition to the UC schools and essays.
Which school should you apply for early decision? I think you should apply for the school that you really, really want to get into. Or more difficult schools because it does increase your odds by at least 10 to 12 percent, depending on the school that you're applying to. This is a good strategy to utilize. The only thing with ED is that you have to go to that school if you do get accepted.
Reach applications
Jon Castro: One of the reasons we also mentioned to have a bell curve for your list – meaning if you have ten schools, you have maybe two to three reach and so on – is because these reach schools do require a lot of effort and a lot of essay writing. Schools like Brown University and University of Chicago, oftentimes, will ask really obscure or random questions. They are really fun to write about, but they have no connection with any other school so you can't utilize those essays for other schools. You have to really put out all that effort.
If you have University of Chicago, Brown, Notre Dame, University of Michigan, Wake Forest, and so on, these types of schools require more effort than other schools. They can't really be adapted from other essays. So really understanding what essay requirement your list has can really help prepare you.
Major deadlines to remember
Jon Castro: For ED and EA, early decision and early action, there's really no difference from regular decision. It's just that you're applying early and getting that decision back early. The dates can range from October 15th to December 1st, but most of the schools are November 1st.
So it's a good idea to get your ED and all three EA schools’ essays done before November 1st. And then you should have your UC essays completed by this month too. That gives you November and December to focus on the other schools. The UCs are due on November 30th.
For rolling admissions, the difference between rolling admissions and regular, or any other type of application status, is that once you submit the applications, that’s when these schools start to take you into consideration. And typically those deadlines are longer.
But I would really encourage everyone to do research into their school list. For example, Penn State has rolling admissions for most of the departments, but for their nursing program and their pre-med track, they typically have deadlines for those. Just because the school's rolling admissions doesn't mean that you can just wait on that. You have to really research and understand what program you're applying to, and if that has a different deadline from the regular deadlines. It's really important to do that research.
The regular deadline is January 1st, but some schools are January 2nd or january 5th. And a lot of the liberal arts colleges are January 15th. Really considering when your school's deadlines are can really help you plan ahead for these different schools.
Interviews and financial aid
Jon Castro: For the interviews, there are other deadlines to really consider. For financial aid, the application process opens between October and February. And this is also something – that for different schools, they have very different dates for that.
Once you have that school list, the first thing you should do is start to categorize your essays. Understand what essays can be used in multiple things. And start to categorize the different dates of importance. Financial aid is one of them. Interviews are another one.
For the Cornell architecture program, I had a student who applied last year. They had to spend weeks in preparation for this architecture program interview because the program puts a lot of weight into that interview. It took us two weeks of preparation. The student was a student whose English ability wasn't the best, but they were passionate. We had to really plan how we can leverage their language ability to express their ideas and be more specific to that program. Understanding the different types of requirements is important for interviews.
For financial aid, the deadlines for early action and early decision and rolling admissions are going to help you prioritize which essays and tools you should apply to first.
Strategizing the application season
Jon Castro: You can find all this information in an easy-to-read document if you look on the Common App website, which is the application system that you're going to use for most of your schools. If you go to the search section where you can search for different schools to add them to your application, in the top right corner you're going to see something called “Application requirements.” Once you click on that, you can see a list of all the schools that the Common App has to offer. I think there are like 950 different schools.
Once you search for your schools, it will tell you all of the major deadlines. It'll tell you the deadlines for EA and for ED. It'll tell you if your school requires an interview or not. It'll tell you if it requires different testing, the testing status, and when you should apply to the different programs.
So this is a great resource to use. If you have a list of 10 schools, now you can start an application and get this information in a PDF. That's going to help you as well.
Case Study: Jenny UPenn
Jon Castro: This is a case study. I think it’s slightly different from the case study that Katie just mentioned. This is a student that I helped, last year, get into the University of Pennsylvania M&T program, which is a really difficult program to get into, especially for a student who is interested in computer science!
As we mentioned earlier, if you think about UC Irvine, the top majors for that were business and computer science. So if you imagine combining these two, it’s even more difficult to get into. We have to plan well in advance. If you have a dream school like this, or a school that is more difficult to get into, I think starting with this school first is key.
This is her profile. She was interested in computer science and business. But her major activities were robotics, model United Nations, or MUN, and a virtual reality (VR) internship program. Which is going to be something that we really leaned on when it came to her “Why this major?” essays. This is something that she put most of her effort into, and that she used in her interview process later on to describe her passion for computer science.
Her main problem here is that she could easily have gone for undeclared because she had a lot of different interests in several different activities. She did community service, dance, and backlighting crew for theater. She was interested in multiple different Red Cross charities. And robotics. So there was a wide range of activities that she was doing. But that was the issue – that she had too many things to write about!
Our main goal to fix this, or help her, was to combine multiple different aspects of her activities list so that we had different disciplines that we could talk about and use in her essays. What we did was that we combined virtual reality, robotics, and community service to build a product that I'll talk about a little bit later. You can see how we leveraged that project in order to help her get into UPenn M&T.
Jenny’s progression
Jon Castro: So how do we follow the different steps to help this particular case? We first built that school list. The school list, for her, was 15 schools. She didn't follow the bell curve; her school list was more top-heavy. But this is what she insisted, and her mother insisted – that we follow this. It gave us a lot more effort and work throughout.
First what we did was we categorized all of her essays. For the UCs, we found her community essay, her “Why major?” essay, and her leadership essay were the essays that we had to polish as soon as possible in order to apply that to her UPenn essays later on. Because UPenn asked very similar questions when it came to how she used her leadership experience to help other groups in need.
And that's what we did to prepare her for these different essays. Starting with the UC essay first. Afterwards, we categorized all her essays. Once we categorized those essays, it was much easier for me and her to spot any of her weaknesses. We noticed that of her 15 schools, maybe 40%-50% of those were “Why major?” and community essays. They asked those questions over and over again.
So she had a lot of different types of community service. But not really much that had to do with engineering and business, which is what UPenn Management and Technology was asking for. That program combined what you do in school and engineering together to see how students can use business and engineering to excel.
She had a lot of interests with engineering, and a lot of interests with business but not many when combining those two. So for the months of August and September, what we did is that we decided to brainstorm a project. Because we knew those were the types of essays that we were going to encounter the most obstacles with in the future. We knew that we had to find some way to combine her different interests in order to prepare for that particular essay. That was something that we could foresee after we categorized and planned everything together.
I knew we had to find something to combine engineering and business. One brainstorm activity that we did was we combined virtual reality – which is something she's been dealing with – and psychology. She was in a program in robotics where she helped students build LEGO robotic kits. But during that time she noticed that a lot of her students had anger management issues or emotional instability. What she decided to do was to build a product using virtual reality – cheap headsets that are really affordable – to build a therapeutic room to help those students deal with that emotional instability.
And we knew that one of her UPenn essays asked how she used her products or her skills to help a community. I knew we had business and engineering. We decided that the next step to that project was to present her virtual reality product to different middle schools in her region in North Carolina, where she went to high school. So now we had a product. We had a process line. And we had the ability to demonstrate that and give back to the community. Now, because we were able to plan in advance, we had all her UPenn essays ready.
Another thing that I think you can do with your kid is to work backward. For Jenny, what we did is that we looked at what UPenn wants. They literally tell you what type of student they're looking for, if you go to UPenn’s “About us” section. And you can look at any school’s “About us” section, not just UPenn. I believe you can go to any “About us” section and they'll tell you something like, “We're a school for students who are in a close-knit community, entrepreneurial in personality, and innovative.”
So for Jenny we had to highlight those three different qualities – in order to make her as close a fit to that program as possible. You can think about any other school, and you look at your school list. Look at the “About” section on the website – and they'll tell you what their school philosophy is, and what they're looking for. And you can plan in advance how you're going to answer those questions to cater to that a little more.
Another point for the interview process is that it became a lot easier once we were able to write the “Why us?” essay. Why you're interested in our program. And the “Why major?” essay. Because a lot of the questions in the interview process are questions that you've already written about in your essays.
So I think if you start the essays first, finalize those, and then go into the interview process, it's gonna be much easier for you to answer those questions. A lot of students who come to me, I'll ask, “Why are you interested in Brown? Why are you interested in NYU, or in Penn State?” And oftentimes they can't tell me why. They'll tell me that it's a great school because it's rank 4 or rank 15 or it's located in this area. But that's not good enough in order to really tell me why you're interested in that program.
Things that you should focus on are resources that they have to offer, such as professors. Like Katie said before, any type of internship opportunities that they have. Once you have that list of two to three different things that you can really draw from, and how you can really utilize those resources in the school, then the interview process and essays become much, much easier. Really understanding the school by starting with the essays and then going into the interview is a good approach here.
Katie Young: I think that was a great example of taking someone and working with them. We're not just providing advice. We're making sure that students are positioning themselves in the best possible place for these opportunities. So I appreciate that you were able to show how we do that. I don't think it's easy to do!
How can ILUMIN help?
Katie Young: So how can ILUMIN help you? There are a lot of different ways:
Personalized interviews to determine preferences
In-depth research on potential colleges/programs/majors
Assessment of chances for admission
Help with cutting and refining your list
Plans for attacking college applications/essays
Individualized guidance throughout application season
Now let’s do Q&A.
Anthony Su: Definitely. We just had a couple of questions.
A question about the supplemental essays. Jon, you were talking about diving in and really being able to dissect and see how the essays line up. The question was asking, where do you search for this information? Is there a particular portal? Or do you just have to create a Common App account, show your interest in the school, fill out the info, then just look at the prompts there?
Jon Castro: I think the best way is to create your Common App account, add those schools, answer those questions – like what major you're interested in, and what program or what department do you want to apply for? Do you want to do ED/EA? Because sometimes a school might ask you a particular set of questions.
They have different categories. One of them is essays. You can just click on “writing,” and it will show you an entire list of those different questions. But sometimes they don't reveal all of the questions that you might be interested in, because if you all of a sudden click “engineering,” a different set of questions might pop up. If you click “sociology,” a different set of questions may also pop up. So going through the Common App at first is a good approach.
Katie Young: Yeah, definitely. You’ve got to be really careful. Like Jon just said, clicking different buttons brings up different things. At Cornell, just as an example, there's the College of Arts and Sciences, the College of Hotel Administration, and the College of Engineering. Depending on the college you select, it's a different prompt.
So it's important to plan ahead. And, yeah, you can find all of those by just adding the schools on the Common App. The Common App also has a site where you will be able to search a school here and see the writing requirements for it.
If it's on Coalition, it's a bit more difficult. You do have to finish the profile section before you can get into the individual colleges’ requirements. UT Austin and UW are the really big schools on Coalition, and they're really transparent about their essay prompts on their websites.
Anthony Su: And then a question about ED, asking if you could do EDII without applying to EDI, if the UCs are one of your top choices. I don't believe it works that way, right?
Katie Young: Yeah. If UC is one of your top choices, you still won't hear your results back before you have to do the EDII. So it's not really going to help you. If you get in on EDII, it'll be February. Your UC results aren't going to come out till March. You'll have to withdraw your UC application.
So if UC is a top choice for you, don't do either of those programs. You'll lose out on UC just because of the way the timeline works. You have to commit to attend on ED, and you have to withdraw all pending applications when you're accepted.
Anthony Su: And then just another more generic question, I think that'll be helpful for a lot of students. What is the best way to research a type of school that a particular student is looking for? If a student is interested in flexibility around their major, or internships and job opportunities, how would you recommend students dive into that a bit more?
Jon Castro: The first thing that you can do is really just understand the school's philosophy, and what type of students they are looking for. Go on the website and check the “About” section. They'll tell you their history, and the type of environment they have,
So, for example, UPenn – and I’m using that because that's an example we just reviewed – they're looking for a close-knit community. They're looking for innovation and entrepreneurship. If you can highlight that in your application, then that's gonna be better for you. Whereas if you don't really have that in your application, it's gonna make for a harder case in order to convince them that you are the best type of student for that campus.
Another way is to understand what type of internship opportunities they have. If you go to the school website, they have different categories. They have student life on campus. They'll have student activities. They'll have courses. Go through each one and really understand, “This school has this type of community service. That school has that type of volunteer opportunity.” Then you start to get a good sense of what type of students the school is looking for.
For example, at Brown University, they have an open curriculum. Meaning they really encourage students to try different disciplines. Perhaps a student who's undeclared, or a student who has many different interests, is a great fit for Brown.
Anthony Su: Teacher philosophy is a good approach there. And then there's, as Jon was talking about, working backwards from what the school's looking for. He also mentioned this idea of looking at school lists – for if you have something more specific you want, like the opportunity to study abroad, or opportunities for a job placement. You might be able to find a list going in that direction.
I really appreciate everyone joining us today. I know that we went through that pretty quickly! But I want to thank Katie and Jon for joining us this morning. And stay posted – we'll also be doing a webinar on the UC essays pretty soon.
Thanks so much for joining us. See you guys.