PETER: Sounds good, Katie. Nice to meet you, everyone. Thank you for taking some time out of your evening to hang out with us. My name is Peter. I am a lead college admissions coach here at Prepory.I’ve worked with the company for five cycles now. As far as my background, I went to the University of Rochester for undergrad, studied neuroscience. I have a master’s from Brown. I went to law school after Brown, and then I’m now in medical school, finishing up my MD/JD. Though you didn’t hear business there, I’ve worked with a lot of business students in my time at Prepory and outside of the company as well.

So I’m excited to talk to you guys today a little bit about how to build a competitive application for some elite business programs here in the US. But I will turn it back to Katie to give you a little bit of an intro to Prepory before we get started with the talk.

KATIE: Of course. So like I said, I’m a senior enrollment manager here at Prepory. So when you have a consultation with Prepory about working with us through your college admissions application process, that will be with me and my team. So what does support look like at Prepory? What’s our experience like?Prepory has been in this industry for over a decade. We’ve helped over 14,000 students through this process, and ninety-four percent of our students get admitted to one or more of their top five choice schools. This is what matters to us. These are the schools that you’re excited about, that you are striving towards, and these are typically the reach schools on your list. So the most competitive schools that you’re looking at, that’s where we focus our energy and attention.

We want to get those results for you. We’ve had great results with business students in particular. So I’ll show you a few of those here, just a smattering of fantastic schools. Go blue, Michigan representing up on top there. And you’re seeing not just, of course, a wealth of top institutions, but also specific business programs.

So at some schools, you’re applying to the main college and planning to study business there, and at other schools, you’re applying into the particular business school, and that’s going to have different types of application components. But we have success across both fields and can help you navigate what is the best fit for you and your goals, and happy to answer your questions throughout here and talk more in an initial consultation with Prepory. But for now, I’ll let Peter set the agenda for the rest of our talk tonight.

PETER: Thanks, Katie. So, yeah, the agenda for our talk tonight, we’re going to be basically touching on all of the major parts of your Common Application, which you’ll eventually be submitting to colleges, the business schools that you’re applying to, and that’ll include your extracurriculars, so your activities list, your personal statement, which people are always very interested to know about and what goes into it, how to write it, things like that. What business schools and business undergrad programs are really looking for out of this application, so out of your essays, out of your experiences, what you can be doing now in high school to prepare. And then kind of the only thing we’re not touching too much in-depth on today is like letters of recommendation. That advice doesn’t change too much there from business to STEM to engineering, etc.But if people have questions about that, I’ll prime you now. We don’t get—I’m not getting super into that in the talk, so feel free to, you know, put any of those questions that you have in our chat, and we’ll either respond to them as we go, or we’ll have a Q&A at the end of this to address people’s questions that we weren’t able to otherwise get to. So with that, first, I’m going to start by talking about what these elite business programs are looking at in the applicants that they are reviewing. So people will, a lot of times, kind of look at the Common Application and consider their activities and their extracurriculars and their profile and think about, like, what specific involvements—like, what specific activities do I have to do to check boxes to look competitive for programs. And so while that’s one way to look at it, I think that the more, kind of, like, organized and comprehensive and thoughtful way to consider it is looking at sort of, like, the values and the skills and the characteristics that the colleges and the programs are interested in evaluating when they’re considering students for admission.

So it’s not, oh, I definitely have to be involved in FBLA. I have to start a business. It’s how do I, for lack of a better phrase, check off showing colleges that I have one or more of these different characteristics that I’m going to be talking to you all about. So quantitative and analytical skills, showing off that you can work with data, that you can analyze data, and that you can use data to make informed and impactful decisions in whatever it is that you’re working towards, whether that is a business, whether that’s a club at school, whether that’s a nonprofit that you’re working for.

Leadership and initiative—showing that you’re a go-getter and you’re someone who gets things done and that you have ideas and that you bring those ideas to fruition. And, again, whatever it is that you’re getting involved in. Sort of leaning into entrepreneurial thinking. How do I solve problems? How do I use the resources at my disposal to get the job done and to do what I need to do?

And this can be, again, specifically in the business context or just solving problems generally in whatever it is that you might be involved in on campus or off campus, in your school or outside of your school in your local community. Communication skills. How are you able to—either in speaking, in debate, in Model UN, or in the written word through, you know, your school’s journals or mock trial competitions through briefs and things like that—how are you able to effectively communicate and get your point across and sell your ideas to others and convince them of your ideas and be persuasive? How are you able to show schools that those are skills that you’ve cultivated and that you’re not, you know, not fully cooked and finished with, but have a strong foundation when you come to their program. And then ethical reasoning, global awareness.

How do all the things that you’re trying to do, the impacts you’re trying to make, affect the people around you, and how are they influenced by the stakeholders and the people that you’re intending to benefit with what it is that you’re doing. So I want to sort of just harp on the fact that I’m not necessarily pointing out, at least for this slide—I will talk about them later—but, like, specific checkbox extracurriculars that you necessarily have to do to get into these programs. It’s showcasing one or ideally more of these attributes and characteristics as being things that you have been interested in cultivating and are currently working to be great at, so schools can see where you will go in the future beyond just the involvements on your list.

KATIE: Would you say that there’s one of these, Peter, that you feel like is non-negotiable, or are you trying to kind of hit all five? Or, how would you think about the importance of different components here?

PETER: Yeah. I mean, I would definitely say that a lot of them bleed into each other, so it’s hard to have—it’s hard to be really, really great at one and not have some proficiency in the others. I will say students that I see year over year doing really well in their college admissions journey generally, but also more specifically in the, you know, piercing the T20, T30 kind of veil are those who are in the leadership and initiative category and are the ones who, like I said, bring not only have the ideas and bring the ideas forward, but help to garner support and seeing those ideas through, helping to come up with the, you know, the process by which that happens, helping to bring people in and get them excited about the problem and the solution for the problem. Those are the people that I see kind of over and over again doing really well in this process. So, you know, I wouldn’t say it’s just one.I wouldn’t say it has to be all of them, but I can speak certainly to the leadership and initiative piece being very important in this process.

PETER: So next, I’m going to talk about the kind of the major and the major decision as you’re going into selecting what you’re going to—how your how your business application is going to look. So I will say this is a fairly nuanced decision that’ll that, you know, should be made in the context of, you know, friends and family and advisers, and it’ll be based a lot on your own interests, but also in terms of the, you know, matter-of-fact application you have in front of you, what your extracurriculars have been thus far, depending on how far along in the process you are. For the juniors on the call, this is going to be something that’s a little bit more solidified, and you’ll kind of be making the decision based on what you have now. If, you know, for the 9th and 10th graders, you have a little bit more control over which one of these paths you may end up going into based on the just the additional time you have still in school to put your extracurriculars together in a thoughtful and intentional way.But, essentially, the three kinds of big buckets for entering the undergraduate business school realm are the direct way, which would be, you know, your business, finance, marketing. That would either be at the actual business school if you’re applying to an institution that has one, or if not, that would be housed in the College of Arts and Sciences but would still be business-oriented programs and applying directly into those. There’s also ways to differentiate yourself and apply into majors that might not be directly related to business, like, you know, STEM, computer science, things like that, but can bleed into business and allow you to still cultivate skills by taking additional coursework and then kind of giving you either a dual major or just a more interdisciplinary approach to the business world if that’s something that you’re more interested in and maybe aren’t hardcore into business by itself. And then there’s the undecided for people who are just really not sure if business is the right choice for them or if it’s a different major or if it’s—or, you know, business versus STEM versus something else, like, particularly for people who are maybe farther along in the process and possibly weren’t as intentional with their extracurricular selection as they could have been.

The undecided option is certainly a good choice for people to give them an opportunity to kind of figure out what they’re doing early on in school and not have to necessarily commit to something right off the bat. Again, it’s a nuanced decision. So, you know, undecided isn’t a weapon for people to use. So if you do have a strong profile that suggests business and suggests something in that area, choosing undecided can potentially backfire on you. So you want to make sure that you’re intentional about your own goals, but also kind of what your application looks like based on what you’ve done so far or what you’re planning on doing.

As far as considering the different, like, programs and types of areas you can apply into, there are schools, of course, that don’t have business programs but still have business-oriented majors. There are schools that have undergraduate business programs. And then of those cohorts of schools, there are some where entry to the business school is gate-capped, and you have to apply specifically to the business school. Or if you apply outside of the business school, you have to transfer in. And there are some schools that are a little bit more lenient in terms of transferring in after you apply to the school under a different major.

So being very intentional about what you’re looking for and how hardcore into business you are is important because schools like the ones on this list—Wharton, Ross, and Haas—have direct admit programs, which usually end up being more competitive and have lower acceptance rates, but have the added bonus of, you know, you’re in the business school and you have unfettered access to all of the resources that are available there. You don’t have to kind of reapply or transfer in or go through any of the processes once you apply to undergrad. You go there and you’re in and you’re doing the program in the major that you knew you wanted to do. And then kind of like what I was saying before about your activities lining up with what you say you want to do. If you—whatever major you select, your extracurricular profile in addition to your essays—your evidence that you’ve explored that and other areas thoughtfully and have come to the conclusion that this is something that you can realistically see yourself doing.

So if you say you want to do finance and you don’t have any advanced math coursework or you don’t have any kind of extracurriculars that evidence any kind of interest in this, it’s going to be a hard sell really to any school, but particularly to the more elite colleges that students might be applying to.

PETER: So to look a little bit more granularly into the extracurriculars, we’ll talk now for a bit about different business-oriented activities that you can think about getting involved in and then some that are maybe less specific to business, at least explicitly, but have an implicit businessness, if you will, that will look good on an application and can be for people who aren’t necessarily just looking to do, like, straight business, like pitch competitions and things like that. So this slide is really just here to provide some context for students, particularly the, you know, 9th and 10th graders who are looking for competitions so they can get involved in while—you know, there’s more time in high school to do that. A lot of schools have clubs for DECA and FBLA that already exist. If not at your school, be the one to start it.Be the leader in initiative driver that I mentioned a couple slides ago. There are different—there’s the Economics Challenge. There’s Blue Ocean, Diamond, and conferences, which are all different kinds of competitions. We’re putting together, like, business pitches and coming up with—I think the Challenge is more specific to STEM, but in the entrepreneurial area. So these are all, like, team-based competitions that are national and international and give students the opportunity to work through and solve problems on a team.

And in some cases, win money, in some cases, awards that can show up both in the extracurricular section of your application and/or in the honors and awards section.

KATIE: Then there’s a question from, you know, parents of a 9th grader here about DECA in particular. So it’s a student who’s really busy, really loves debate, and is trying to decide about the time commitment for DECA. You know, how do you think about helping students who have multiple commitments, but they want to pursue business, you know, balancing their schedule, what to prioritize, and how to kind of also remain authentic and true to themselves in this process?

PETER: Yeah. I mean, every student’s different. So there’s a lot of—there’s a lot of things you have to balance when you’re applying to college and particularly when you have your eyes set to—particularly to very competitive schools. So, certainly, grades come first always, because you need to be doing very well. You need to be getting A’s in your classes, frankly, all throughout high school to show that you can handle the rigor of the schools that you’re trying to go to and, essentially, to make sure that you get read by committee.There’s a certain point where if the grades aren’t there, your essays can be as magical and as lovely as you want, but they are just not going to be read if you’re not meeting what the school’s cutoffs are for what they consider to be competitive, academics-wise. So certainly not foregoing grades for the sake of extracurriculars because they won’t save you if you have a C average. Wharton’s not going to be interested. As far as balancing things, you don’t want to be the well-rounded kid that does a little bit of everything and dips an hour into 17 different things in a week and then never rises to the leadership and initiative standpoint or isn’t a problem solver. Essentially, if you’re—if you’re involved in something pretty much after 9th grade, I would say, where you can remove yourself from the situation and nothing is changing, you need to start cutting down on things and being more intentional about spending more time on fewer things, fewer involvements so you do have those impacts and you do have meaningful things to talk about in your essays and in your activity section to make sure that you are hitting what what colleges are looking for.

So the time commitment piece is definitely a big deal, but kind of a lot of what I tell my students sometimes when they’re targeting these top 10, top 20 programs for business or for other majors, is how worth it is it to you, how much sleep you’re getting. And then we kind of just talk about, like, you know, there’s other times you could do your homework. We put together, you know, plans on how to spend their day—their weekdays, their week-to-week situations to make sure that classwork doesn’t fall behind, etc., etc. There’s a lot of, like, tailored organizational planning that can go into fitting clubs and involvements in where you think they can. But, essentially, it boils down to if you’re targeting these really top programs, they want great grades, and they want deep involvements in things that you’re interested in that hopefully have something to do with the major that you’re looking for.

So sometimes what it comes down to is if there’s things that you really, really like but aren’t going to help your application, we talk about potentially cutting back on those to be able to do things that are more helpful for the application and then, you know, picking them up afterwards or things like that. That’s—it’s a give and take that’s—we always make sure it’s student-driven, but is very tailored to the individual person.

KATIE: It feels related to another question that we have in here about kind of the strongest spike for a finance-focused applicant. Right? You know, it’s going to look different for different students, but I really love the way you spoke to—I’ve never heard it described exactly like that. You know? If you could remove yourself from this, right, would it look exactly the same?Would it go on without you? And when you think about a spike, right, that is the biggest thing that matters there. Right? Is that impact. No way is it going to look like a spike if that were the case, if you can just remove yourself from that activity.

PETER: 100%. And then certifications, I don’t have to go—I won’t go one by one, but, essentially, these are just different areas where you can gain, you know, more credentials and more knowledge and more applicable skills that you can talk about in applications and use in your, you know, other involvements, be it clubs or jobs or etc. I will say this isn’t one of those, like—you know, an activity on your list shouldn’t be Bloomberg Market Concepts course, and then that’s it. Like, some people I’ve had in the past will do maybe multiple of these, and they’ll have an activity be—we’ll name it, like, something fancier than this, but essentially, like, outside-of-school, like, business-oriented learning. And then have, like, four or five of these and talk about not only why these specifically, but also how the skills were used in different clubs.Because some of these take time, and so you want to get credit for your time. But just saying I took a Microsoft Excel course by itself as an activity is not something I would really ever tell a student to do unless that was, like—it was September, and I started working with them in their senior year, that’s all we got. You got to make it work. But, anyway, additionally, research and internships. So other extracurriculars that you can get involved in that are helpful for business.

So there’s tons of summer research programs that students oftentimes apply to. The more competitive ones are usually due pretty early in the winter, but there are still some that you can apply to in the spring as well. Different internships at think tanks, presenting research at different competitions. So, again, presenting research at a competition might not seem very business-y, but, again, hitting at that communication characteristic and skill that I said was very important for a lot of majors, but certainly in business, are things that students can start getting involved in early and kind of have long-standing involvement in. And then different internships with local businesses, financial institutions—these are things that, like, more often end up being job applications that we oftentimes help our students identify and then apply to.

Sometimes these come from family friends. Sometimes they come from, like, looking at the school, and the school will have relationships—like, high school will have relationships. Or sometimes it’s just looking on, like, LinkedIn and different, like, online avenues and just drawing a reasonable radius around, you know, the student’s house and then just cold emailing. So a lot of different extracurriculars that can signal business interest, which we’ll get into some cases later to show that a little bit more actively. But before we get there, I want to talk a little bit about some red flags that admissions officers see that parents and students don’t always think about, but are important to consider when you’re putting together your application and when you’re considering extracurriculars to get involved in.

So I’ve worked with—I’ve seen many students who have, you know, started businesses, and there’s no real impact. There’s no real responsibilities. It’s kind of just an idea that was started with another friend that hasn’t really ended up doing anything. There’s not a lot to talk about. Our students will, lot of times, like, throw the 501(c)(3) designation like it’s a Nobel Prize, and it’s cool, but it’s filing paperwork with the state.

It’s not anything, like, insane. So, you know, creating businesses that are ghost businesses and not really doing anything. So making sure that we’re really intentional about the impact that we’re trying to have and the work that’s being done by the students so they’re not, you know, working for a business that they started that isn’t actually moving their application forward. Pay-to-play programs that are essentially just, you know, very expensive summer programs or, you know, programs for during breaks that don’t have a real educational or at least a very strong educational or experiential impact that is essentially just tied to, you know, bigger name schools that don’t always do much for the student and don’t give them a lot to talk about afterwards. And I’ve had students where we’ve used these programs and have essentially, you know, demoted, if you will, them to honors and awards because there’s nothing we can talk about.

They kind of just did it. They were a member of the program, and then that was all, which is cool, but it’s not going to get them anything in the activity section where we have the opportunity to talk about impact and intention and motivation. Pay-to-win business competitions is essentially the same threat as the pay-to-play. This was kind of the generic business club membership was kind of what I was talking about before. The student who gets involved in 12 different clubs meets with each of them half an hour a week, doesn’t have enough time to kind of rise to the level of being any kind of leadership in the club or contributing anything super meaningfully.

And then, additionally, more, like, pay-to-play type of business engagement areas, like the Who’s Who Among High School Students, pay-to-publish anthologies, things like that. So things that don’t have real impact and real work or anything behind them or skill building that look good—or people think look good as a name, but really carry very little weight for the student. So I’m going to pause for a moment and send it over to Katie who’s going to talk a little bit more about kind of the types of students that we work with, the majors that they apply into, and things like that before I move back to the rest of the business talk.

KATIE: Yeah. And, Peter, take a peek at the Q&A if there is anything that you want to cover, a few questions about specific summer programs. I’ll be diving back in there after talking a little bit to you all here, but please keep the questions coming for us. Really enjoying them. So many thoughtful business applicants in our audience tonight at different stages of the process.And with a lot of questions specifically around summer and making the best use of summer, which we’ll get into as we get into our case studies. But in terms of thinking about our students at Prepory, if you have overlapping interests, which we often see with business, which I know you brought up earlier as well, you’re seeing that we’re covering a lot of different areas with our Prepory students. So if you have business interests that overlap with medicine, definitely can help you build a really strong profile for that or overlapping with computer science or engineering. So many different ways that business can connect to the other interests. And Prepory students are three times more likely to be accepted to competitive business programs. So schools with an acceptance rate or a program with an acceptance rate below 15%, and these are around 16% of our students year over year.

So we’re working with business applicants every year and building these profiles for top schools all throughout. We’ll talk a little bit more later about what that looks like, but in the meantime, please keep your questions coming for us. I’m really enjoying them, and I’ll keep throwing some of them to Peter.

PETER: Perfect. So now we’re going to talk a little bit more about kind of what you guys can be doing at the different stages of your high school careers, as you progress from 9th grade to eventually getting that acceptance letter. So in 9th grade—and you’ll see a lot of these kind of just become 9th grade plus—but I’ll spend a little bit more time on 9th grade. So the academic bucket, you want to start getting involved in the honors and advanced coursework kind of as soon as it’s available at your school and as soon as it’s practical for where you are as a student. You do have to balance.You know, schools want to see you doing well in the highest rigor coursework available to you, but you don’t want to start off doing all honors your first year if you’re not ready and then getting C’s and B’s. That’s not going to look as good as making a concerted effort to get harder and harder each year and then having a commensurate rise in your GPA, or just staying consistent and doing well with your GPA as the rigor increases. Schools are going to have access to essentially, like, a school report, and they’re going to know what coursework is offered at your school and when and all of the different, you know, requirements for prereqs and things like that. So they’re going to see if you’re getting all A’s but not taking any AP coursework, and the majority of students at your school take APs and your school offers 25 APs. They’re going to see that you’re coasting.

So that’s something that you want to be thinking about right off the bat. Certainly, there is coursework that’s going to be more relatable to business, like AP Psychology, Calculus and Stats, Economics, things like that. But advanced elite business programs are going to want to see you excelling in everything. So they don’t want you to be just doing the hard math and the hard, you know, Psych and the hard History/Government and then just, you know, coasting in your sciences or coasting in English. They want to see you doing well in everything.

So starting that foundation strong 9th grade year by picking courses intentionally that you can do well in, that will challenge you, and that will help you work towards what you want to do in 10th, 11th, and so on. Extracurriculars, this is really the only year that—this is the year of exploration. This is the year where I tell students, like, you can do the 17, like, things for one hour a week each this year so you can understand what you’re interested in. It’s not going to be on the differential, or it’s not going to be the diagnosis if it’s not in the differential. So, like, we need you to try everything so you know what’s interesting to you, and then we can start narrowing down from there.

So this is a very fun time for exploration. It’s a little bit more of a laid-back time because I really want my students to just see what’s out there and see what’s interesting for them and see how we can find their angle that’s going to make them a more interesting insert major applicant later. So start doing that, you know, 9th grade. Don’t say no to any opportunity or to any club. And then similarly with that, be just as open to developing any skills, to doing any of the things that, you know, your junior and senior club officer counterparts ask you to do or to be involved in, and just do what you can to start building your skills in the areas that are interesting to you and that are relevant to your future major.

10th grade, 9th grade plus. So, academics, this is when you should start taking more honors coursework and APs. You want to have that strong trajectory to be taking, you know, your bigger, more difficult, rigorous math and science and English and everything when you get to junior and senior year to show schools that you’re able to handle the rigor that they have at their institution. This is when students start to consider taking SAT and ACT for the first time just to kind of, like, suss out and see where they might be and determine how many, if any, additional administrations of the test they’re going to have to sit for. This is where we start trimming the fat for extracurriculars and start dropping the things that you’re not as interested in and the things that you don’t care to go to every week because that’s a great proxy for interest.

And then getting you more involved in the things that you really do like and helping you rise to the leadership roles and to come up with cool ideas that you can bring to the E-board and to bring to whatever your involvement is so you can start being, you know, a lowercase-L leader or capital-L leader. I don’t know. I’ve seen sophomores who really take charge. And then summer planning. Your summers are always important, but they get exceedingly important 10th and 11th grade year because those are your big summers for your college application.

No longer is it just, I don’t know, swimming or, like, hanging out with friends or whatever your climate allows you to do. You really need to start doing kind of real skill-building and/or experiential things in the summer when you have more time to dedicate to that. So starting to get experience in that is important.

KATIE: Think about, Peter, for—we did get a question, which I did answer, and I think you’ve kind of covered a bit already. But just to kind of bring it in for everyone, it was about sort of, you know, if you’re kind of still planning your summer, still thinking about your summer, this was a 10th grade student, but even, you know, if you’re in 9th grade, 11th grade, if you’re still planning your summer and summer program deadlines are over, what are the kinds of questions you might be asking or recommendations you might be making about adding impact at this stage?

PETER: Yeah. So—when is it, March? So there—it’s definitely late for the more competitive programs and the more, like, structured business-oriented ones that I was talking about at the beginning, but it’s definitely not too late to come up with a plan. So one of the things—really, there’s two big buckets that I tell students to get involved in. There’s—you can do research.You can do other things. But some kind of community service in an area that you’re very interested in is a super low barrier-to-entry way to show that you could have something you care about, that you can problem-solve whatever the issue is that’s facing that group of people that you care about and that you can bring a solution into that problem and get people involved in it and have some kind of tangible impact in your community. That can take many forms. I’ve helped students through tons of different, like, initiatives in that kind of bucket. And it—again, it shows leadership.

It shows initiative. It shows that you’re humanistic and care about, you know, insert cause, in your local community, and it’s something that doesn’t require an application. It doesn’t require somebody to say, yes, you’re allowed to do this. I mean—

KATIE: I started to feel like we should have volunteering as a webinar topic too. I feel like I talk to families so much about this, and it’s such a kind of undersold way to find leadership opportunities, to find those growth opportunities, and really be doing something fun and cool that you care about. And you can really jump in at different points and find something that really matters to you. So I love that suggestion.

PETER: Yeah. 100%. And the second bucket, I would say, is get a job. If you can’t find some—I mean, you can do this with—my thing is always “and.” Like, you don’t need to—so you—I volunteering and business or and a job, you can do both. But if you’re having trouble securing research or you’re not, you know, your summer internships aren’t panning out or whatever, get a job. Like, we—in our committee review process where we go through and review our internal, like, Prepory applicants’ full profiles that are coming up with, you know, feedback and where we think they stand, etc., etc. We love seeing students who had jobs in lieu of doing kind of some of the more fake things just to have activities filled because you can tell a lot from a student who had a job. Like, it tells teamwork.It shows work ethic. It shows a lot of different things that some other extracurricular activities maybe don’t. And particularly, if you’re involved in it for a little bit and are able to speak to yourself as a team member, kind of what you were able to learn about working with others, both, like, the people—your coworkers and then also whoever it is you’re serving, whether it’s a public-facing job, that kind of thing—that help inform essays that, I mean, over and over again, we have a lot of, like, AOs here who work at this company. Like, people just look at a job differently than other ECs and just can take a lot out of knowing that a student did that. I’m not saying you need to get a job to go to Stanford or whatever, but it’s definitely something that if some of the things that were part of your plan aren’t working out, it’s a very good—I don’t want to call it a Plan B.

I feel like that’s, like, diminutive, but, like, a good Plan B. So 11th grade, 10th grade plus, this is going to be one of your hardest years academically, not necessarily because it’s going to be harder in rigor than senior year. But senior year, at least most high schools, they, like, get it that you’re a senior and are, like, a little bit nicer to you. This year, you’re still just a lowly junior, so they don’t care, and you still have to work really hard. So this is where you’re taking your APs.

You’re doing IB if your school offers that. You’re taking whatever the advanced curriculum is that your school offers. This is when you should start really solidifying whatever your SAT score is going to be. And so I always want my students to be done with this by their junior summer. I don’t like when we have to get into senior fall working on the SAT.

So this is really the year where you make that work. This is where you’re really solidified in your activities, and you’re not doing anything that’s kind of outside of your own personal passion slash what you need to be doing for school. Like, if it’s not the Venn diagram—the Venn diagram is a circle at this point. There’s nothing that we’re doing that’s not leaning towards one of those avenues. And then this is where you kind of start thinking about really and specifically your college application in its real sense, like, what you need to be doing to actually apply.

And so that’s going to start with beginning to identify schools that you’re interested in and starting to visit them and putting together lists of where you want to be visiting, starting to think about brainstorming topics for your personal statement based on kind of what you’ve been doing and what your interests are, and then really starting to narrow down on, you know, one of those three buckets I was talking about before of your major. Is it going to be a strict business major? Is it going to be maybe the, like, STEM or some kind of additional piece that leads into business, or is it going to be entirely undecided? Then for 10th or for 12th grade, we still need A’s. Still need to be doing the top coursework at your school.

11th to 12th grade is where we get a little bit more questions about, like, one course versus another, which is very, like, a student-specific strategy point. But generally, as long as you’re taking rigorous coursework, we’re kind of splitting hairs on that. But usually, sometimes it’s, oh, should I take, you know, AP Environmental or AP Calc? And I’m like, oh my god, AP Calc. But, like, sometimes it’s not that easy. Then, this is where you’re applying to college. This is where I tell my students that I’m going to be the most overbearing relationship they have their 12th grade year. This is—there’s—you—it’s basically your most rigorous club that you’re involved in, another one of those. You’re doing essays, personal statement revisions, supplemental essay revisions, hopefully not still, but oftentimes tracking down letter writers, and kind of doing all of that on top of the projects that you’re doing for your extracurriculars, and still maintaining, you know, your strong GPA for the early decision and regular decision application cycles.

So that’s kind of up through high school. Giving a little bit of context into some things that you want to avoid. So I’ve tried to tell you about what to do. Here are some things that you shouldn’t do. So don’t start thinking about college in senior year.

Opening Common App for the first time in October of your senior year is—don’t. I don’t even know what to say. Just don’t do that. Starting as early as you can help you to be more intentional about the choices you make and helps your narrative, which I’ll talk about shortly, to seem more cohesive and thoughtful. Don’t just choose prestige over fit.

You want to pick schools that are interesting to you and that fit what you want both as a person and also as a, you know, academic and as a student. We get people all the time who apply to every single Ivy. That is what I would say is prestige over fit. Columbia and Brown are not the same. If you really, really love everything about Columbia, you are probably not going to like Brown.

So being intentional about, yes, that you want to go to a good school, but you want to go to a good school for you. So be specific and mature about the decisions that you make when you’re putting your list together. Neglecting core academics—like I said, you want to do well in Psych and English and math, but you don’t want to shirk History and Science even though you’re going to business school, and they might potentially be less relevant. Lacking the narrative coherence kind of comes from starting too late if you’re just doing things randomly and don’t have anything in sight. And it’s like the Michael Scott, “I started the sentence and don’t know where I’m going, but I hope I find it along the way.”

We don’t want that. Avoiding risk, playing it safe, just doing the courses that you know you’ll do well in and that don’t have strong rigor or any, like, intentionality towards business. We don’t want that. And then not seeking mentorship, just writing everything by yourself, making your decisions in a vacuum, doesn’t always lead to good places.

PETER: So now I’m going to talk a little bit about building that cohesive narrative. I’m going to go through two student profiles relatively quickly just to kind of give you an idea of what these extracurriculars look like in practice and how you can put together a strong business profile. So how do you build a strong narrative? First, you have to have an interest, then you have to demonstrate that interest, and then you have to talk about the growth that came from you demonstrating that interest. That’s all. And now I’ll talk about how you do that.So this first case study is a student who applied finance, econ, and business. There were reasons for choosing those at different schools, but it was essentially—he’s essentially went the business path, the student. 3.89, 36 ACT, 13 APs with basically all fives. And a general idea of the student’s extracurricular profile—cofounded a healthcare marketplace startup that wasn’t a fake business that I talked about before that was just the 501(c)(3). This was a real one with an impact with employees.

Founded a community health initiative in his area surrounding vaccine access and public health, was the president of NHS at their school, participated in one of the summer programs oriented towards business at Wharton, and then also founded—was a president or founder of four different clubs at their school. And then kind of to show you how this wrapped up, I’ll talk a little bit about the student’s personal statement. So this is a quote from the personal statement. “I try no longer to focus on the things I can’t control and choose instead to find solace in knowing there is always something that I can do.” So this student talked about essentially noticing a gap in vaccine rates among people in their local community and then putting together an initiative that shared information in multiple different languages about the safety and efficacy of vaccines to help people feel like they were getting good information at a time where there was a lot of disinformation being shared.

And the student even, as part of their initiative, went door to door and talked to individuals about their initiative and gave, like, specific information to them outside of just the website to make sure that their impact was doing what they wanted it to do because they did the website. They got it up and running and realized that it wasn’t enough and wasn’t doing what they wanted it to do and wanted to actually have specific conversations with the stakeholders, with the people they were intending to serve. And this essay just kind of really gave that—everything the student did for this and other involvements was fueled by this. There’s always something more that I can do, and there’s—I just need to keep going. Like, the goal—I’ve never reached the goal or—I don’t know.

There’s something some kids said to me that’s, like, is fitting here, but I can’t think of it. “Job ain’t job never done,” something like that. Anyway, that—it was very much that vibe. And you can, like, see that this kid will, like, work themselves to the bone doing the things that they care about and that are important. And the essay and the whole narrative, basically, was all of a leadership initiative bubble.

So leadership isn’t—is a pattern, not a list. It showed a totally unified story that made every piece seem inevitable and wasn’t just a bunch of random disparate extracurriculars that eventually came together through forcing a round peg in a square hole. This next one—and that student ended up going to UChicago for economics. This student, 3.92, ACT 36, 16 APs, also did the finance/business/econ track, so not the STEM or the undecided. President of their Quiz Bowl, founder and president of Young Investors Society and a financial literacy nonprofit in their community, research assistant at a local university for AI and market liquidity, teaching assistant for a college-level portfolio management course, treasurer for their school’s FBLA, research in econ and data science. So you can see from this and the other student, there’s a lot of leadership here.

There’s a lot of—I didn’t put them, but all of these—both of these students were involved in pretty much everything on here for at least two or three years, if not all four or three years of high school. So there’s also a lot of long-standing commitment there. This student’s essay, “Personal limitation becomes the engine of purpose. My allergy didn’t hold me back. It propelled me forward.”

It was all about the student’s nonprofit organization that centered around basically making more accessible allergy-safe foods that they noticed were chart-priced way higher than their non-allergy food counterparts. And there was a lot of very specific, quantitative evidence that appeared all throughout the essay that just really showcased the lengths that the student went to do the thing that they wanted to do, make it impactful, and then reflect at the end when one of the children that was benefiting from their program tried pumpkin spice granola for the first time and was over the moon being able to have that. And so similar to the other essay, every piece of this essay came together to do argumentative work to showcase the student as being someone who gets things done, who finds a problem, creates a solution, and doesn’t stop working until the solution works. So that kind of gives a little bit of an overview of extracurriculars, how they work in overall narrative, and then how you can kind of come together and create your personal statement, which is really the argumentative piece that puts all of your extracurriculars and all of your work beforehand into context.

And so with that, I’m going to turn things back over to Katie who can talk to you a little bit about how we here at Prepory have, do, and will continue to help students like you to become the students that I just talked to you about.

KATIE: I really was so inspired by those examples. I haven’t—I mean, I’m familiar with these applicants, but just digging in and understanding a little bit more about, you know, how many outreach efforts went out the door, the kind of tenacity that these students are demonstrating in finding these opportunities. I think there are a lot of questions about how to make these dreams kind of become a reality, and that’s a really important piece of the puzzle and what Prepory can help you do. So what does that look like? Prepory support involves hour-long one-on-one advising sessions with a coach like Peter.Really important to have this consistent connection. Right? You get overwhelmed with taking all of your AP classes. You’re very busy. Sleep is limited, you’re really trying to be strategic with your time, where is that time going to go?

If you’re trying to launch a passion project and you run into, you know, a block or you send out 30 emails and you didn’t get anywhere, who are the next 30 that we’re going to send an email out to to make something happen that you really want to happen? Right? Having those conversations really make sure that you don’t drop the ball, that you don’t forget a really important component that we’re covering here. That’s one piece. There are also parent check-ins built into our program, so we keep parents informed all throughout in this process.

Students are in the driver’s seat, but parents are a really important part of this process as well, especially in terms of planning college visits and thinking about all of the different ways to help students be informed about the opportunities that are out there for them. We also do interview preparation, and we help with the SATs. I can’t stress this enough. Ivy Day is coming up here, and we are about to have a lot of conversations with families, right, who didn’t get the results that they were looking for, right, who are already maybe exploring transfer opportunities. So if you’re an underclassman right now or in 11th grade and you’re facing this essay process, this writing process, you’re facing trying to put together a cohesive narrative, this is really that make-or-break opportunity.

I have conversations with students every year where they’re saying, you know, my peers who had a slightly lower GPA, they got in somewhere that I wanted to go. Right? But what does that full picture look like? What did those essays really talk about? Did they tell a cohesive story?

That is super important. So we’re here to take a few more questions for you about business. So glad you all were able to join us tonight for this conversation. And, please, I would love to talk with you in an initial consultation with either me or someone on my team to talk through your specific profile, how Prepory can help you, what our coaching support looks like, and all of the ways that we can make your dreams for a business degree a reality. Okay.

So—oh, where did the second student profile go? You can speak to that, Peter, I’m sure.

PETER: Oh, sorry. Wharton. The second one went to Wharton.

KATIE: There you go. So you’ve got UChicago and Wharton there. I see someone is raising their hand. If you could put your question in the chat for us, that would be super helpful. Happy to make sure that we get to that.And please use the QR code to book a consultation with us. Happy to answer really specific questions about your profile and how we kind of navigate this whole process throughout. Oh, got it. We’ve got someone—a few people asked that question. Okay.

Great. In the meantime, the person who’s raising your hand, if you do want to drop your question in the chat, happy to get to that. And I’ll put this one to Peter here from Marie. Thanks for your question, Marie. Talking about research, how do high school students go about finding this type of opportunity when it comes to research?

PETER: Absolutely. And I might have mentioned it quite a bit. You don’t have to do research to get into business school. It’s not quite as important as, say, if you were applying as a STEM major. So I don’t want the takeaway to be, I have to do research if I want to go to a good business school undergrad.But with that caveat, there’s a lot of different ways. There are internships that are oftentimes available that are usually, like, more geographically sensical to apply to. So we’ll help students based on kind of where they live, and apply to areas that are usually affiliated with, like, local universities or sometimes private labs in their area. If resources are such that it doesn’t have to be a local thing, then we can help students apply to, you know, more national, like, research programs that you would stay at for weeks at a time over the summer or on breaks. And then, certainly, there’s just cold emailing.

So that’s something that we help students with a lot. It’s important when you’re emailing people just out of the blue to kind of ask for opportunities to, like, help them with their research and contribute to projects that they have to be intentional about what you discuss in terms of, like, your interest in their research, how you talk about your own skills so they can basically see you just seamlessly coming into the team and contributing to something versus having to bring you in and train you, onboard you, do all this stuff. It’s more of a hassle to them. So kind of making it seem like you’re an easy yes because all they have to do is tell you how to get into their lab or get into their office, and you’re ready to get started—that makes it easier for students to get research when they’re just reaching out to people out of the blue.

But those are usually the ways that we help people get set up. It’s either, like, programs that exist, whether it’s local or national, or leveraging your network, or just reaching out cold email to people in your area and nearby that can potentially provide you with the opportunity to contribute to their ongoing projects or have them mentor you through a project of your own that’s related to theirs?

KATIE: I do see a member of our team is answering this question, but, relatedly, surveys done for a business class, can you spin this into a research opportunity or a way to describe research? I wonder if your earlier advice fits here as well. Right? If, you know, if we can take you out of it, does it still go on?

PETER: So something that was done for a business course?

KATIE: Yeah.

PETER: If you expand upon it and, like, go some—like, you can’t really just use something that was in the line of coursework as an extracurricular, not only because it is just part of school, so it doesn’t—it’s not extracurricular in the most real of senses, but also because it’s going to look non-extracurricular when you talk about how limited it was that you did it. Like, if you—you have to say in the Common App how long you were involved in these things. And so when it says that you just did it for a semester and then dropped off, it’ll give the reviewer—the AO—pause either that this was just something that overlapped with schoolwork, which won’t necessarily look good, or in the best case scenario that they do separate it from schoolwork, but you only did it first semester. So the involvement is fairly—not long-standing and not super committed, and then it fell off. So if you found that you were interested in something through schoolwork and then either continued it outside or expanded upon it in some way that extended beyond the class, absolutely.Like, we’ve definitely had students do that in the past, and those can be meaningful extracurriculars. They can end up being essays that you talk about that showcase any number of characteristics that are useful for business schools. But if it was a one-off in the context of class and then nothing happened with it, I wouldn’t necessarily advise putting that in as one of the 10 activities.

KATIE: Yeah. Definitely. I met with a student where something like this, where there was a, you know, survey component for a class, they wanted to expand on that. And then, of course, you know, what do you do with that data? Right?You surveyed something. Did you get valuable information? Are you able to kind of build a passion project or do something else with this? Right? So really thinking beyond that, the solutions-oriented piece that you brought up earlier.

Right? What’s the point of research? And so really also learn something that maybe could be actionable. So we have a question here that’s about coursework and coursework maybe not related to business. So this is a student asking about AP Human Geography.

How do you think about balancing your coursework more generally, and maybe some of those APs that are not directly in the business track but that students might be weighing or considering?

PETER: Yeah. So I guess—so that’s kind of a tailored response based on, like, what the student’s taken so far that they’re planning on continuing to take. Like, just giving a course and saying yay or nay, I can’t.

KATIE: Exactly. So it’s exactly why you would kind of meet and go through, you know, your entire course history, course selection, and what’s available at your school, all of that.

PETER: Yeah. But the rigor is great. I love AP generally. But if there is, you know—like, if I’m seeing that there could be more math than there is currently, then I might say no to geo and do Stats instead. And if you already did Calc because that would be more helpful for business schools.But if you, you know, already maxed out the things that are kind of more business-focused and you have more space and this is something that you’re interested in, then, like, you know, definitely go for it. But, yeah, just saying, like, yay or nay to, like, a specific course without the context of other things that we’re taking is, like, a little bit more difficult.

KATIE: I want to answer one more here before we let everybody go unless there’s something that you also want to address. But I really like this question about a student who has a summer job but is thinking about ways they could expand their role or contribute in meaningful or creative ways beyond their regular duties. I have a lot of ideas about this that might be possible, but I’m curious what you might say.

PETER: Yeah. I mean, it’ll—I guess, a little bit depends on what your role at the job is, what the job is, and then kind of how long the job’s been around. Like, if this is, like, not, like, a full startup, but, like, a fairly new business, then there’s going to be a lot more opportunity for you to get involved and do things and help create processes and structure that might not currently exist versus if you’re working at a place that, I don’t know, is a very, like, long-standing business. But even places like that, you just want—I mean, you work there. So you see what stresses your coworkers out, what might not work well in a customer-facing way if you’re—if this is a business that works directly with the public in a customer service-oriented way.So just seeing things that don’t work and trying to find ways to fix them are really, like, the first step. If you have—if you’re very new or you’re, like, maybe more shy about going in and, like, just starting to make those changes or you’re just having trouble, like, seeing because it seems like things work well, ask people what they hate. Like, talk to your coworkers. Talk to your boss. Like, ask them in ways that come from, like, a genuine place of curiosity.

Like, what gives—what gives you headaches? Like, what do you hate coming into work and having to deal with? Like, what is your chair—the chair, like, that you dump all your laundry and your crap on that, like, nobody can figure out how to fix? Like, what things irk you? And then you go home or go to your desk or whatever your job is.

And then just, like, think of ways to help lift that burden off of your boss’s shoulders, off your coworker’s shoulders, off of the customer’s shoulders, whoever it is that it’s impacting. And then that can result in you coming up with programs for the job with you, like, influencing the policies and procedures of the business in a way that makes things more efficient. And those are absolutely things that you can talk about. I remember a student from quite a few years ago worked at a law firm, and I don’t remember how he came about this, but he was looking into something tax—that the law—that the law firm was—it was a small firm in their area, how they were, like, handling taxing their clients or something.

I don’t know what it was, but essentially found some loophole they weren’t exploiting and saved the company, like, thousands of dollars a year in how they were doing their taxes because the student was very interested in, like, math and accounting and just happened to see a problem and went to their boss, mentioned it, and then was able to meaningfully contribute to, like, saving the firm a lot of money. So it doesn’t have to necessarily be that, but just looking for problems. And if you’re having trouble finding problems, people will complain if you give them the opportunity. So ask them what is irking them, and then they will be more than happy to tell you, and then you can go from there.

KATIE: I really love that, Peter. And what a fun anecdote to conclude on. You never know what you’re going to find when you ask these questions, when you get creative. Right? Don’t just sit at your desk and say, you know, I checked my boxes for the day.Here I am. Right? There’s always ways to think about being more deeply involved, asking those smart questions, and thinking about where it can lead. So I love that. Thank you all so much again for being here tonight. It’s 8:02. I want to make sure that you can get on with the rest of your evening. If you haven’t already scanned the QR code here and you want to have a conversation, book an initial consultation with our team, here’s your last opportunity to do that. Please do.

Looking forward to continuing the conversation with you. And thank you so much again for joining us tonight for our conversation about business. Have a good rest of your night, everyone.