GLEN WATER: Hey, Katie. And I think those conversations that you have with Katie are some of the most important — it’s where we start. It’s that entry point that can inform a lot of the sort of work that we will do. And this is work that I deeply care about. I’ve been doing it for over 15 years, really on both sides of the desk. I started work at the Notre Dame Law School admissions office, worked as a faculty member at the University of Wisconsin–Madison, but I’ve also been doing this as a teacher and counselor for many, many years.

One thing I do want to emphasize: it is doctor Glen Water. I’m not a medical doctor — this is important. If you have medical issues, I can’t help you with that. I got my PhD in education policy from the University of Wisconsin–Madison, which I’m naming for two particular reasons. The first is that it is the number one ranked school in education. And I say that not to be like ‘gotcha Harvard’ — which we did — but because I think it’s illustrative of this idea of rankings and what really informs them. It’s more than just the names. A lot of you put in all these most selective names, and a lot of those are in that T20. Once we get into both what those look like at a major level — Penn State, for instance, tends to actually punch above its weight on a lot of things, and that’s important to name — but all these other factors will influence what a school is and why it gets the rankings that it does, because that will ultimately inform how you get into those schools. If you know what they’re cueing in on, you will be able to align your profile to match that.

And the other piece is that part of the work that I did for my PhD was looking at the goals, culture, and missions of these institutions. So that research I did will inform what we’re talking about here, but I promise I won’t get too nerdy. It won’t get too theoretical. But before I get into all of that and the dive into the rankings, you’re probably wondering a little bit more about — okay, I know who you are, Katie, I know who you are, Glen, but what’s this Prepory organization?

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Yeah. Happy to give you all a little bit of introduction about Prepory. And while I do that, I do see we have a hand raised. If you do have a question, you can put it in the Q&A for us. We will answer some of those live throughout, and also have a Q&A at the end of the presentation, so definitely stick around. We love answering your questions, and there are going to be a lot of touch points to support that. I think the person with their hand raised also put their school in the chat for us, so maybe it was just that. Our first person to list MIT, so we got an MIT in there as well. But definitely throughout the presentation, please jump in. We do have someone backstage answering questions, and like I said, we will be answering questions live. We are here for you to get the most value out of this webinar as possible and, of course, continue that conversation with us in an initial consultation as well.

A little bit of background for you about Prepory: Prepory has been in this industry for over a decade. We’ve helped over 14,000 students through this process, and 94% of our students are admitted to one or more of their top five choice schools. This is the most important thing to me at Prepory — this reflects your real goals, the things that you really care about in this process. We are making them happen. We have 70-plus admissions experts on the team. So from coaches to our program team like Glen, there’s so much expertise that you can benefit from throughout our program, and this leads to the incredible results that we have.

Our students have received acceptances to — at this point, I’m looking around trying to see if we’ve mentioned all of these. I don’t know that someone listed Caltech in the chat yet, but if they haven’t, I’m sure that it’s coming. I think we’ve got a lot of coverage here. I did my graduate studies at the University of Michigan — go blue — and taught writing there as well. So really, across the board, these top programs — we have results with them year over year. So 94% year over year acceptance of one or more of your top five choice schools. And we’ll dive in here.

GLEN WATER: Cool. So this is our agenda for today. First, we’re going to be talking about what we mean by T20 admissions. Then we’re going to get into the sort of minimum academic profile that you need to be competitive at these schools — which is the operative word. How do you be competitive? It’s not like the UK or a lot of other international applications where it’s just a set character. It’s more of, how do I fit? And that creates a lot of stress for parents, but this is something that we can help you to navigate.

And then beyond that academic profile, we’re going to talk about the other factors that universities really focus on. We’re going to get into school-specific advice — I named a lot of those schools you named, we actually did think that you might be interested in them, so we tailored that. But if you do have questions about others that we don’t mention, feel free. Katie and I love talking about this stuff and can share our insights, especially if there’s time. And then we’ll talk about really how we’re going to help you get into these top schools and the sort of learning that you will do along the way. Because one of the reasons why I like this process is that the admissions departments of schools and ours really align. We have that same mission of trying to make sure that you are able to find the right school that helps you meet your goals. And that process starts with us — it starts now. It probably started with you as parents, but we’d like to add to it as well.

We’ll have time for Q&A at the end as well, but as Katie said, also we’ll save some time. Please don’t hesitate if you’ve had a question now and you’re like, ‘oh man, I might forget about it’ — drop it in the Q&A so that our backstage team, or Katie and I, can talk about it now. We can sort of bring it in live. Don’t wait. Don’t just sit on it and let it stop you from hearing the other parts that I will get into.

GLEN WATER: So with that, if we’re going to be talking about T20 admissions, it behooves us — that’s the last SAT word I hope to use — to really understand what it means. How do they consider what is a T20 university? What defines it? What makes it? So this is thinking about the rankings. It means understanding what sort of factors U.S. News & World Report considers when they are actually calculating these rankings.

And I will name — there are a lot of different ranking systems out there. When we say T20, we are referring to U.S. News & World Report. This is our preferred ranking because of the factors that it does include. It is not necessarily highly weighted, but I think more evenly distributed towards these other things, including student achievement — which really, what they mean is your grades, and also your job prospects. By this, they mean a count of who is actually employed gainfully right after graduation, and then a five-year measure on that. But they’re also including grad school applications in that as well. If you are going from one school to T20 as an undergraduate, what is your pipeline to these top graduate schools? But then this other factor that they really consider is peer reputation, and that’s something that we’re going to unpack in another bullet.

One thing I want to emphasize is what these other international rankings include. You might have seen this — this is the Times Higher Education. These are the Shanghai rankings. There’s a lot of them out there. The reason why we don’t include those as much is because we think they over-emphasize that research publication output. So it’s really measuring how much professors are making publications within high-impact journals. If that’s something that really appeals to you — like, ‘man, that’s what I want to do long term, is produce those sort of publications in impact journals’ — then absolutely, you should be considering those rankings as well. U.S. News & World Report does measure that, I just think it’s better weighted. But if you’re like, ‘the only thing I want to be is the best academic in my field,’ yeah, weigh those in at the same time. We’ll look at some of the QS — I think they do the best at that. But we believe, and you probably have experienced, that there might be more to it than just whether or not you’re trying to do research.

GLEN WATER: So the thing that I wanted to unpack, which is going to really inform a lot of the other pieces that we’ll be talking about in this session, is peer reputation. What we mean by this is: what do the other university provosts, deans, professors think of another institution? When you think about who those people are, yeah, academic achievements are going to be part of it — which we’ve named, the research achievements. But it’s also all these other missions of what higher education was founded to do.

These are the economic ones that really matter, especially for a public institution, where their goal is to actually produce employable people. What are the things that are going to match out for that? That is going to be something that does matter and will be a factor. But it also includes the civic foundations of institutions. Schools were founded under the guise of — under the mission of — wanting to make a difference in the world. How can you use your talents, your interests, your academic understandings to actually solve problems? You’ll see this right in the mission statements of almost every school, that they’re trying to have you consider what sort of problems you can solve.

But even beyond the civic, even beyond the economic, there’s also these humanistic sides. These are educators at heart. They want to see you have a flourishing life. They want to see that you are actually fulfilled — you have a sense of the world, you have a sense of how you interact with the world. That’s why there’s all these general education requirements, because they know that leads to a more rich and, honestly they would say, better life.

The reason why I’m emphasizing all of these things is because I think often in this industry, we describe universities just as a business. We’ll see people saying, ‘we’ve got to just calculate them as a business, and the product is the students, the graduates.’ And yes, that is true — they are trying to index on how do they be the most competitive. But there’s so many other factors at play here that we need to be making sure that, as applicants, we are displaying those factors as well. So this is probably the most theoretical and PhD that this presentation gets. If you have questions on that, again, drop them in the Q&A. The key thing that I want you to walk away from this slide with is that, as applicants, if we’re trying to stand out, we need to be making sure that we align to all parts of what is considered a great university — not just the research output, but specifically the humanistic. We’ll come back to this.

GLEN WATER: The other thing I do want to emphasize is what these rankings don’t include. Even though I think U.S. News & World Report is the most extensive of these, it still lacks some things that I think it’s really important for you as students — or for you as parents who are helping your kids navigate decisions — to consider when choosing a school. They are not going to be including student happiness, student wellness in those rankings. If the student gets a job but they’re depressed the entire time, that is not considered in those rankings. The sort of student friendships and community is also not something that is considered, which actually is kind of interesting because one of the things that we know as educators and professionals in this job is that the quality of job can actually matter tremendously.

Yes — this thing is a binary, like, they have employment, but what that job is is less measured in those rankings. What we know is that when students are in these close belongings, these networks, those can actually inform the type of jobs that they get. They’re also going to be way happier in those roles because they’ll have this sense of, ‘oh, this is the goal that I want to have, this is why I am doing this job.’ Those networks can help you, and they will also lead to long-term measures of fulfillment. There aren’t longitudinal studies when they’re making these rankings — they are just point-in-time studies.

So one of the things that I think Prepory does really well is making sure that these schools do align to that. If you have a good sense of what you’re trying to do and why you’re trying to do it — which the college admissions officers are also looking for — this will lend itself to better success in both getting accepted, but also long term. So that’s something we really want to cue up: why are you trying to do this? What is that ideal role, and how can you actually achieve it? Both us and the universities will be focusing on that. And because both of us are focusing and we have that alignment in mission, this is why I think our results are as good as they are — because we are aligning to what universities are wanting. We are helping you to stand out to these AOs because, through our years of experience, years of study, years of doing this, we know what they’re looking for. So yeah — you look at all these crazy amounts of applicants who are coming into these schools, and those are the rates they’re accepting at, but we are three to four times that output. So that’s the sort of baseline of what schools are actively looking for.

It’s more than just that number of four times, which you see in the center — four times more likely. We also really care about the results: that other piece that I named, about being able to see that they’ve found their goal, they’ve found their focus, they’re able to be really happy in this process and fulfilled. Katie, is there anything else you really want to emphasize about this, or anything else for our reviews here?

KATIE WILLINGHAM: You can see these on Trustpilot. So if you’re curious to see more student experiences at Prepory, we just pulled a few for you here, who are specifically referencing their dreams come true with the Ivy League. But I think something you’re also seeing in these reviews is that consistent dedication from coaches. Right? Deep gratitude, always available, the encouragement, being present with students, listening to the struggle in what is an incredibly intense and stressful process, and actually helping you navigate that strategically and get over all of those hurdles to make this dream a reality.

And that is such a huge impact, not just through the admissions process, but those are tools that our coaches are helping you with that will help you succeed in college and beyond. I think that that is really important to talk about, because we also want you to be successful on the other side of this process. Your life does not end when you arrive at the gates of your Ivy League institution. We really want you to be set up to thrive there and produce those outcomes that those colleges are looking for that keep them in those rankings. We want you in their alumni magazine — that thrills us to our core. So just seeing these results come through in our testimonials directly from students — I absolutely love seeing this. It really motivates me and excites me for the work that we do.

GLEN WATER: So let’s get into some of that — that element of those rankings, but how do we make sure that they are staying in those rankings? How can you help them with their goals of staying in those rankings? And we will get into the question about how do we actually do this with the extracurricular profile. This is what we are going to be focusing on — well, not this part, but a few slides after that.

The minimum academic profile that they’re looking for: this baseline academic ability really aligns to those first few numbers that I said U.S. News & World Report really emphasizes — the graduation rate and the student achievement. They know their rankings matter because these things are good. Those things matter for students, they matter for schools. How do they actually determine, or what are the best ways that they know, will correlate to these outcomes on the rankings? The most important thing that they use to assess that is your high school GPA. (Your undergraduate GPA will determine your grad school, but you’re focusing here on undergraduate.) So this is going to be your most important thing.

The biggest indicator is if you can have a 3.95 unweighted GPA. The closer you have to that 4.0, the more likely you will be to succeed in college. The caveat on this is that freshman year, you can sometimes get a caveat — it depends on the school. They know you’re fresh into it; they want to see that upward trajectory. If you didn’t do as great freshman year, I wouldn’t stress it as much. A number of schools will recalculate it, but they’re recalculating around B’s. Okay, you got a C freshman year — but how does that actually move forward?

The other thing about this is that the coursework should exceed the grade level. This is your best courseload. They want you to be not just getting this 3.95 unweighted GPA in the easy classes — they want to see that you’re actually challenging yourself. So taking the most rigorous courses that are available to you, especially as they align to the major, is something we’ll unpack later. But not just available — finding ways to get past what the average competitive student does. If you’re applying to any of these T20 schools, I highly recommend that you make it to Calc 3, multivariable calculus, by senior year. I think Calc BC is a requirement for any student in any major. It’s just that sort of quantitative reasoning that can really help students to stand out. I’m fully on the ‘Calc for all’ movement, and many universities are as well. We’re seeing this even in the University of California system — they just published this, like, ‘our kids aren’t as prepared as much, maybe we should bring back the SAT,’ because they’re so worried about that. Your quantitative reasoning, your math ability, matters across the board.

One of the other ways — this is that debate they’ve had: does the SAT score, that standardized test score, actually predict how well you can do in college and whether or not you graduate? There have been back-and-forth studies on this, which is why we’re seeing the back and forth on the policies of admissions officers. What you should do right now as an applicant is just make sure you have one. If you want to be competitive, the things that we’re looking for are 1560-plus is the way that you’re going to be the most competitive.

Now you’re like, ‘oh, maybe for some of these twelfth graders, I don’t have that.’ The key thing I’m emphasizing again and again is how do you be the most competitive. They’re looking for this baseline. This is the way that you can most likely have this as a starting point. If you don’t have it, well, you’re going to have to compensate in other ways. We’ll start to unpack that.

One of those ways is this alignment to your major. We would want to see four to six activities aligned to your major that show that you have the academic ability to be successful in that major. So through those activities, you should be able to demonstrate that you have this ability — your proof of subject expertise. Often this can come through competition wins. Are you good at robotics? Did your robotics team win? Are you good at business? How’s your DECA team doing? Those are great ways to show it, but it can also come in the test scores you would have in your AP, in your IB courses. Those are other ways that you can demonstrate that baseline academic ability to be successful at these schools.

So that’s one of the first things they’re looking for, but it has to be more than that.

GLEN WATER: This next factor really aligns to that research output, which I said was de-emphasized but still really matters for these universities. So the thing that they’re measuring is your intellectual curiosity. This is your ability to perhaps pursue these questions that the universities are interested in solving, talking about, and applying in the real world. The way to really emphasize this — or to have that narrative build — is to get very specific with your interests and show a deep passion within that, and a sort of niche within it.

Let’s say you’re interested in synthetic biology, which Katie has heard me talk about in the past. This is a hot subject — as popular and as going to be as impactful on the world in terms of its transformation of jobs as AI. The way the two intersect is going to transform the economy and the way we live. Universities are very interested in those questions. What will that look like? You being able to pinpoint, ‘oh, these are my understandings of what’s happening, this is the work that I’ve done to understand this, here’s how I’m set up to do this,’ will help you to stand out. Maybe you’re interested in connecting these things to vertical farming. What does that actually have to do with it? Or lab-grown meat is a big thing that’s going to be happening. What have you actually done that will help you to show that you are ready to do that at the university scale?

So the easiest way to demonstrate that — or the most direct way; it might not be the easiest, it’s the most direct, and I think that’s a very important distinction — is research. Have you done research in your field where you were looking at a particular question within this larger thing of synthetic biology? Here’s how I’m adding to — what do they call it? There’s a term in academics, but it’s like the house. You’re adding that next brick to it. But research isn’t for everyone. Not every kid wants to be sitting in, like, grinding out research, producing papers. That’s not why everyone goes. Remember, that’s what you frequently do in graduate school, more than undergraduate.

But universities are also interested in what you will do with those sort of questions, what you will do within those niches, how they can actually be applied in ways that will impact the world. And that’s where internships can also be a great way to show that you have an interest. The key thing that they’re really looking for is that you have a meaningful impact. It should be an internship that is actually aligned to something that you care about. If you’re in engineering, but you’re doing an internship at a hospital around biology, but you want to be doing robotics — that is hard to make mesh. It just feels like you’re doing an internship for the sake of doing an internship, and that’s a big red flag. They want to see that you have made a meaningful impact that contributes to the application of the questions that you are really curious about.

One of the ways where you will be able to demonstrate this — beyond just the internships, beyond the actual research — is the writing. Now, this is writing that will of course show up in the essays. That’s one of the big things that you do with the application. But it’s actually writing before that as well. These are the writing contests. These are the Substacks that you could produce. These are the op-eds that you could produce. We hire coaches who are very focused on making sure that you have that writing ability, because that is still the way in which they measure intellectual curiosity, your impact. Their main index is your ability to publish things, or do things with things that are published. So you being able to write in depth about these things — being able to speak to nuance and expertise about the subject matters you find interesting — is going to be critical. This is a lot of the work that you will do with your coach: to develop that ability.

I think one of the worst things I can see is a student who’s applying for the sake of applying. It’s like, ‘why do you want to study business?’ ‘Well, I want to make a lot of money,’ or ‘I’m interested in how numbers work,’ or, for engineering, ‘I want to solve problems.’ You’re just not getting in with that sort of narrative. It needs to be much more niche-focused than that.

And one of the other things that I want to emphasize about these schools as well: they are universities and not technical schools. They are literally different schools fitting together so that they inform each other interdisciplinarily. So they want to see that you can do this within your application. Being able to understand these broader concepts in your field and the liberal arts in the world — I just talked about synthetic biology; that’s ripe with all these sort of ethical questions about what we should be doing. In a world where AI makes a lot of those initial knowledge pieces very easy to solve, you have to be able to ask the right questions. Are you thinking about the ethical implications? How are you using this technology? Those are the things that our coaches really love to help your students figure out.

So that’s the intellectual curiosity. That’s the academic piece. We’re going to talk about some other factors that help an applicant stand out. That’s just the pure academic narrative. Are there questions, Katie, that you get on this intellectual piece? Or are there questions in the chat that you think we should really talk about now?

KATIE WILLINGHAM: We’ve been getting a lot of cool questions in the chat. So thank you guys, and please keep putting them in. One question that I think is a really good one to cover is participating in IB curriculum versus AP, and how much the testing process matters versus just taking the coursework.

GLEN WATER: So both will work if you have access to them. They are going to be measured. Was it just the curriculum versus the tests that was the question, or both?

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Is the IB program more valuable than AP courses?

GLEN WATER: So my opinion is that the IB curriculum is the best one to get you to these questions. It’s just so well structured. If you have the opportunity to take IB courses — not just IB courses, but the full diploma with the EE essay, the extended essay — that forces you to ask these questions. The CAS project forces you to do the next thing that we’re talking about. It’s just built into the curriculum. If you have the opportunity to do IB, great. Sign up for IB. Love it for you.

Admissions officers know that not every kid can select into the program that they want. They are like, ‘Oh, you’re doing AP courses. Great. What are you doing within those AP courses? How are you still getting at those same questions?’ They do not require you to do one or the other. They do not have a set preference for one over the other. They’re not going to be like, ‘oh, this is IB plus one point compared to the AP.’ But what actually comes out of those experiences is going to be the key thing. So if you’re in an AP curriculum, you want to make sure that you have that clear arc. You get your extended essay out of it regardless — you have that research focus. And then if you do have an EE, you want to make sure that it’s aligned to what you’re trying to do in college as well. Be very purposeful with that. Any other ones that we should take?

KATIE WILLINGHAM: One more that I think I’m interested to cover around intellectual curiosity — though I think we’re going to dig into it a little bit deeper as well as we look at other components of the extracurricular profile. But I get really similar questions to this one a lot, so I want to do a little thought exercise briefly with you, Glen. This is a question about a specific activity. What about a student who is working as a student consultant for a small business? I have so many questions. So how I start to think about this, when I have these conversations with families, is — I want to dive in and know so much more. So I’m curious what you’re thinking about, what comes up for you when you’re kind of assessing an activity that a student or a parent brings up. Like, ‘we’re doing this thing.’ What are you asking yourself?

GLEN WATER: Right — the student consultant for a business. As you name, it’s a lot of initial questions. What is your goal? What is your long-term academic goal first? Like, what is your dream job? That’s the first thing. Is it in business consulting? Okay, cool. Then business consulting can mean a lot of different things. One of my close friends from when I was a teacher — he went on to McKinsey. He does business consulting for grocery markets, and trying to make sure that they’re actually producing the most — like, how do we get the best food products to people so there’s less food waste? That’s his whole goal: to reduce food waste, because he’s passionate about the impacts of that on the planet. That’s interesting. Right? Like, you have a goal — that’s probably why he got the McKinsey job as well, because he was able to talk to that narrative.

So what is the longer-term — why do you want to do it? But then also the impact. ‘Consultant’ can mean a lot of things. What are you doing? How much impact is there? So it could be a great project.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Exactly. I always think — my thinking is always like, you don’t want to over-index on thinking, ‘we’re just checking this box, and we’re going to be able to move on.’ Ivies are never looking for you to move on. It’s not a move-on type of scenario. So I would be thinking about also: what is this time commitment? How much of your time is going there? Who are you working with? Are you thinking about someone who might potentially give you a letter of recommendation in some capacity later on? Are there other opportunities to grow your involvement at that company later on? What would that look like? Can you have something where you’re bringing on other students as consultants? Are they going to be working with some kind of data that you could do a project around? I just have so many different ways that you could bring this — but I would never ever be stopping there.

GLEN WATER: Okay. I think you bring up a great point too about the individual versus the group. If it’s just you doing something, it’s way less impactful. We know this on a philosophical level — you have less impact if it is just you. There is a synergy about people that you can multiply your impact. It’s why universities bring people together, because they want people working together.

And so this is that sort of next piece that we’re going to be talking about — getting into that peer evaluation element that schools care about. What makes this a good school? What are the graduates of it, the current students, doing? This is community impact, and they are really looking for you, as admissions officers — we are looking for you to have this community contribution and this leadership. Everything that Katie was just talking about. It can’t just be that you’re doing it; it’s got to be the deeper whys behind it, which is the thing at the end that we’ll get to.

The best ways to have this is to have a clearly identified important problem that you are really interested in solving. ‘Oh, I want to make a business better’ — that is not a clearly identified problem. And I think one of the important things is also: what makes something important? Better in itself — there’s no scale on it; there’s no quantifiable measure. To kind of do business without numbers or clear metrics — they’re like, ‘do you even business, bro?’ That’s not going to happen for your application.

So what they are looking for is that layer of measure, but they’re also looking for this piece of importance. What makes something important? For that, I think it’s really helpful to scale it in from the — this is the scale of impact here — to move beyond the interpersonal and individual and into these larger elements of impact. What is the thing that you are doing that is going to have a lasting impact? Great — you’re consulting, but did you create the infrastructure, create the systems, that actually made a lasting change beyond when you were at that school?

Some of the ways that I’ve seen this look really cool in applications: one kid was interested in mechanical engineering, but he was really interested in electrical cars. So one of the things he did was, ‘Okay, well, I’m interested in building these things, but I do know that there’s an infrastructure problem around these things’ — anyone who has an electric car knows this. Unless you’re in Southern California, you’re like, ‘where’s my next charge coming from?’ And so he actually worked with his city to get extra EV chargers in their town hall. Which is, like — oh, cool, this is absolutely a — like, it’s community impact, it’s going to last longer than you. And he had to reach out to all these other organizations in his community that were already doing this work. How can he partner with them? How can he get his school involved? That automatically is going to be leading to some of these conflicts and challenges that they would expect to see on a university campus when they put these kids together — like, how do you navigate those things?

If you are doing things at this level, things actually come through. In some ways, maybe pyramid, but, you know, it’s more important at the top of what we’re trying to go for here.

So beyond that impact that they’re looking for, you should be able to articulate things within those essays that speak to the deeper academic disciplines, but also the nuance and concepts of how change matters. It should look like you know what you’re talking about. You should be able to use the specifics of your field within context. It shouldn’t just be like, ‘oh, here’s all these random theories.’ You have to be able to integrate it into an essay in a way that somebody who isn’t an expert — your AO in that field — is able to understand, but to see that you have expertise. That’s an inherently difficult task. Being able to thread that needle is a challenge that is hard for a lot of 18-year-olds to do. But it’s something that our coaches are much better at. So that’s something that I wish I had as a kid when I was applying. It’s gotten even more competitive since then. To be able to weave that reflectiveness, that academic ability, but also that authentic voice, is what you’re going to have to do in these essays when you’re applying.

GLEN WATER: The other aspect that I want to emphasize — knowing that it is 6:46 on the West Coast and 9:46 on the East Coast — is this dynamism aspect. This is that humanistic side that I said they were focused on in the peer reputation. These schools want to build kids who are long-term flourishing. They want to bring kids who are going to be dynamic on their campus, who are going to bring a texture to the community and make it someplace that other people want to be at.

That second question there — are you somebody that they want to have lunch with? This is the Stanford AO question. They are trained to be like, ‘would I actually have lunch with this kid?’ Yeah, he’s got a 1600. Yeah, he won this national competition. But there’s no ‘there’ there — to continue to quote from, I guess, my Bay Area here. You need to have something that stands out a little bit more about them that makes them want to actually be interacting with you.

So those ideas, those traits that make you stand out beyond the academic — it should be that you are doing activities for the sake of those activities. Because you’re interested in the results and the outcomes, not just because you want to check a list. If you are like — what is this girl’s name? Arisa right here — you’re just doing this for the certificate. You’re doing this wrong. She is not what you want to be doing. The certificate is not the goal here. The goal is being able to have those meaningful experiences where you are interacting with other people.

Part of this is just joy. You should find joy in the things you do, and it doesn’t have to be directly connected to your major. You can contain multitudes. Universities know this. They want to see that — okay, great, you’re a phenomenal engineer, but you’re also a really cool poker player. Or you collect stuffed animals — why? You know, why? What’s the story behind that? As long as there’s a good ‘why,’ that’s the most important thing — because then they’re going to want to see, like, ‘stuffed animals? What? What’s the story there?’ And if you don’t have a good story, you’re not that dynamic. But the stories matter — which, again, is why essays matter.

So if you have all of these factors — this dynamism, this community contribution, this intellectual curiosity — these numbers that you see, these are the kids that get in. But these numbers belie — that’s a T-word here — what’s actually going on underneath. Yeah, you have five leadership roles, but it’s not just that you have five leadership roles. It’s that you had meaningful impact. It’s that the leadership connects to a common problem, a common cause, that you were interested in. You didn’t just create a club that was about anything. You created it because you wanted to solve a particular problem. And because you were so passionate about it, yeah, you might have won an award with it. It’s really hard to do these things if you were disconnected from your larger narrative. So that is what we’re really looking to do within this role. It’s what we do as Prepory, and it’s what we hope you do as a student.

Before I get into the school-specific advice, Katie, questions that you were seeing around both this dynamism, this community contribution piece — do you want to lift up?

KATIE WILLINGHAM: We have been furiously answering questions in the chat, so please keep them coming. But something that I’ll say about this is that I get a lot of questions about where do we find the time. And I think something I want to speak to there is the overlap that you’re talking about. So when you have a very clear niche focus, these things are going to overlap. And something else is that these 10 activities that you’re seeing here — that is all 10 slots on the Common App activity list that you are filling. But this does not mean you are in 10 clubs that are meeting every week. That’s going to be a really shallow experience. So that is not the way you want to check that box. Again, thinking about how to do things that are meaningful in the long term at your school, and then really taking advantage of summers as well, for doing things where you can add a lot more depth to your profile.

GLEN WATER: Yes. Yes. Okay. Getting into some of the school-specific advice — one thing that I want to clue in on is that the schools are able to assess these traits through the type of essays that they’re looking for, and the activities. I think the essays are the most clear way in which you have to read these things, and that’s why, for the school-specific advice about how do you stand out to these schools, we will clue in on what the personal statement or what their supplemental essays look for.

Before I get into that, I do want to give a caveat. I’m going to paint a broad picture of these universities. And what you’re going to need to keep in mind is that just because you clue in on these three traits that I named — that a university indexes on — keep in mind, they are trying to build a full class. They want diversity in it. They don’t want every student to be the exact same, because that doesn’t allow new ideas to happen. So these are called institutional priorities, because they’re emphasizing these things — it’s not institutional requirements. But you should be able to articulate that you’re at least comfortable with this. You don’t have to rewrite or recolor your entire application. It’s more of a different sort of shading, a different sort of emphasis. So don’t change your profile too much, because it won’t feel as authentic, and authenticity is probably the most important word that you should be focused on when building these applications.

To get into a few of these — what are the ways that you can stand out to what these schools are really indexing on, what they are prioritizing within how their goal of education looks? Their mission, their goals, what they’re trying to do.

Princeton: their motto, their emphasis, their vision of education is really rooted in these bottom three things — I’m pointing to it; I can use my clicker here. The first being service and civic duty. This was the former Woodrow Wilson School. They really want you to be making an impact, but they want that impact to come out of this very intense academic seriousness. They know the problems that are facing the world are hard. If climate change was easy, it would have been solved. It’s going to require some deep thinking, some deep knowledge to be able to do this — but they want to make sure that you’re doing it. So you need to have that theoretical rigor, but they are literally asking you. They put this in their supplemental question. How does this intersect? If you are not doing something to make your world a better place, Princeton is not interested in you. They just don’t care — there are too many other very talented students. They want to see that there’s a civic impact. Now, what that looks like is going to be a number of different things. You also don’t need to have necessarily this deep traditional legacy of privilege. They are looking for other things — but they are indexing on making sure you have this commitment to service.

Stanford, on the other hand, still also has this commitment, but it looks different. They are talking about: what is your distinctive contribution that you are going to make at Stanford? With this, they are really emphasizing what they would call the moonshot mentality, or this disruptive innovation. Stanford is the land where big ideas come to change the world. That is how they index on themselves. They want to see that at Stanford — what are you going to do to impact it? There’s a reason that Stanford is at the heart of the AI revolution, because they know that their graduates are going to influence it, and they want to see that you are able to do that as well.

Yale. Yale is a bit more quirky. It’s a bit more of an emphasis on being your genuine, irreverent self — is what they want to emphasize. They’ll really distinguish themselves from Harvard in that way. They’ll distinguish themselves from Princeton in that way, which you see in this question: if you wrote an original piece of art of any kind, what would it be? They don’t want to see you really focusing on your major within that. They want to see that you can do other things beyond just be somebody who’s going to grind out problems — which would be different than an MIT.

An MIT is going to be someone — they want problem solvers. They want people who are going to grind out problems. Maybe even more so at Carnegie Mellon, which we’re going to get to. They are big believers in their problem sets, their p-sets, and you have to be able to work through very complex problems, and you have to be able to work with it in interesting ways. They want you to be makers. They want you to be tinkerers. And then they want you, as you’re tinkering with other people, to figure it out. If you just focus on the interpersonal, you will not do well at MIT. These are the ones where it’s like, bigger problems within larger issues — how am I solving them? MIT is going to like that.

We’re going to cut through some of these. I’m going to do two more. Columbia is a bit different in this way. Columbia is very grounded in its school and in its location. It really sees itself as a conduit of New York City culture, which is a little bit different than NYU, in the role of ‘we are the city.’ Columbia sees it like — New York City is a node of global culture. How New York City shapes the planet, Columbia shapes the planet. They see it more part and parcel of New York’s role within it. And within that, this sort of hustle, this global awareness, they are also deeply rooted in that understanding of the classics and how they inform the larger problems out there. They want you to be able to use Socrates because it’s still relevant today. As we get more and more into the AI, those questions become more and more apparent.

Last one I’m going to do here is Penn. This is one where they are again rooted in their city. If you’ve been to Philly, you know it’s that grit and grind. They want people who are going to be creating things. They want people who are going to be doing new things. That is that entrepreneurial spirit. Even if you’re not applying to Wharton, which this essay comes from, they still want to see that. If you’re applying to the number one nursing program in the nation — and the only one at an Ivy League school — how are you going to be an innovative nurse? What are you going to do within that? They want that innovation, but they want you to apply it — it’s a nursing school, it’s very hands-on, it’s very practical. So they want to see theory doers in that way.

So what we do within Prepory is we help you to crack these, because all of those narratives that we talked about — all of those themes about intellectual curiosity, community contribution, dynamism — they need to show up in these essays. That’s where the universities actually see you. They see that authentic voice. But as you can see from these questions, that’s a complex task. That’s where Prepory kind of comes in to help, because it is so complicated.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Thank you, Glen. I’m going to talk a little bit more about Prepory for you guys, and then we are going to do a little bit of live Q&A. So please keep your questions coming. We’ve been answering a lot of them for you. Take a look if you’d like, Glen, if there’s anything in particular that you want to make sure that we cover.

So a lot of you have been encouraged to schedule an initial consultation with us to dig deeper on your specific goals and exactly how Prepory works — how we can support you, what does that actually look like. We support students from eighth grade all the way through the applying process — so all the way through twelfth grade, and all the way through you deciding exactly where it is you are going to go when you’re comparing offers at the end of this process.

The core of our programs is expert guidance — hour-long one-on-one advising sessions with an expert coach at Prepory. So having that time together to craft your narrative, to build your strategy and your roadmap over time. And then we also have layers of full team support that we can talk you through in more detail, including a committee review process, which reflects what the admissions office is really like — when people are debating your profile, thinking about all of the different aspects, are they coming together as a cohesive whole? Several rounds of essay review on your writing for your final college applications from our expert writing team. So it is really a full team support approach at Prepory, and we’re happy to dig in with you on that in much more detail.

Before we let you go, I did want to mention that Prepory is also hosting some in-person events coming up really soon, towards the end of June. So in Orlando, if you are based in Florida — if this is close to you — we would love to see you at our event hosted by Prepory’s CEO and our program director. You can scan right here to RSVP. You can ask your questions in person, meet members of our team, get a feel for Prepory. It’s going to be a really good time and very informative.

And if you are not local to Orlando, I encourage you to schedule an initial consultation with our team. You can do so by scanning the QR code — I know we’ve been putting this in the chat and in responses to your questions as well. And we’ll just take a couple more minutes here to answer a few more questions for you before we call it a night. Glen, is there anything you want to start with?

GLEN WATER: Sure. And I will emphasize — if you’ve got some place to be, please, like, we understand that. We will make sure that we are done at 5 regardless. So it’s five past the hour. Getting at those questions.

One thing I see — the first question I’m seeing here is about sports. This really depends on what you want to use it for. This is Katie’s and my initial question always. If you want it to be like you’re trying to get recruited, yeah, you’ve got to achieve something big. But if you’re just doing this as part of your dynamism side, you’re doing this because it’s something that gives you joy. It’s something where you have this community. It is your team. It is something that matters to you. You will identify — you know, ‘I’m 16, but I’m also a swimmer.’ Cool. We want to know that. Schools want to know that. You can absolutely do it.

If you’re trying to apply for engineering, we’re going to need four to six activities connected to engineering as well. But swimming can absolutely be part of that profile. And you don’t necessarily have to be great — although if you want to be recruited for it and have that, yes, you do need to have that. It’s just a different sort of calculation.

Then the — thank you for answering that one. The other question that I’m seeing here is about grade inflation. I’ll put my PhD hat on back for this one — and the general loss of higher-ed focus. What was your exact word? General faith in higher education. Just like the K-shaped economy is happening within America, we are seeing the same things happening within higher education. These selective schools like Yale are continuing to be as competitive as ever. They are continuing to get those same levels of applications, despite the demographic drop-off — which is, I think, illustrative of how these continue to be considered of value. If you looked at — this is another ranking, the Times ranking — I thought it was very illustrative in how much these universities can actually transform a student’s life. Because if you have access to a T20 school, you have access to that network. Why do I know people that went to McKinsey? Because of those networks that I came into contact with. Your access to the jobs continues to be there.

So yes, there is a loss of general faith in higher education as a product as a whole, and I think there’s some validity to that. If you were going to these for-pay or for-profit universities where half the kids don’t graduate, I would highly question whether or not you should be doing that. That is not an effective use of your money. The top 100 universities, though, they are going to set you up for life. That is why they are the top 100 universities. So I think it’s something that we have continued to see. And what should students consider about that? It’s doing the things we just named in this profile.

Let me see the next one here. After this, I’ll answer that one live. Okay — ‘how many scores for AP can I send to colleges? Is it unlimited? Do we have to pay for each score that we are allowed to send?’ This is something you’re going to want to figure out specifically with your coach, because it’s going to really depend on what those scores are. That’s something where we get into these nuances of, well, ‘I have fours and I have fives and I have threes’ — it’s tricky within that, and the best way to maximize your competitiveness of it. It will vary by the student. I highly encourage you to sign up to get a more explicit answer, so Katie can see what you’re actually looking at, and then Katie can point you in the direction of a coach who might be able to help you — not just with that question, but the larger process.

We do have coaches all over the United States, all over the world, honestly. So please sign up for the consultation, get your more specific questions answered. As Katie has mentioned, it really depends on that student. If you have other questions, again, scan the QR code, get those answered. I appreciate you all for sticking around. Six minutes past the hour — we’ll let you all go. We hope to see you in a future webinar. Enjoy the rest of your evenings.

KATIE WILLINGHAM: Thank you all so much for joining us tonight.