JULIA: You can be hungry.

JAMES CRAWLEY: I have not eaten dinner yet, so that’s why I’m talking about food. But it is 8 o’clock here on the East Coast. Is it 8 o’clock for you?

JULIA: Yep. Eight here in Mass.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Fantastic. There was a poll started for those that just came in. I know more are joining all the time. Thank you all for coming in. There was a poll just to kind of get a sense of who we’re talking to today. We’ll give a rundown here in just a few minutes. We’ll get started, and we’ll give a rundown of how we’re going to go about tonight’s conversation, going over a little bit of what we’re talking about. Looks like we have predominantly a good handful of twelfth graders or rising twelfth graders who are just about to enter senior year.

JULIA: ‘Tis the season, right?

JAMES CRAWLEY: ‘Tis the season. How are we — good lord — we’re fourteen, fifteen days away from the first. For those that are maybe newer to this space, this wild world of college admissions, everything is gray and amorphous and different per school, but there is sort of a general accepted day that starts the admission season, and that is, of course, August 1. So August 1 is coming up here in just a couple of weeks, which is hard to believe. Two weeks and two days.

JULIA: Exciting stuff.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Oh, exciting, scary, terrifying, exhilarating, and all the things.

JULIA: Hey — hopefully after this webinar, feeling a little bit less scary.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Hopefully, yes. We have a lot of people in here — a good amount of parents, hopefully a good amount of parents and students. If you are students and you’re wondering why your parents dragged you to this, I will try to layer in some jokes here and there. I can’t promise that they’ll be good, but you can at least exhale a little bit harder through your nose, and that might just be all the laugh that you get. If I can leave you with a little bit of positivity, I’ll try. But really excited to dive into specifically tonight’s topic. For those folks who are just coming in, we’ll get started in about a minute or so.

We are also going to have some questions for you all to answer. If you do want to have a little bit more of an interaction, you can post questions throughout in the Q&A. We will have a formal Q&A at the very end, where any questions that maybe couldn’t be answered throughout the presentation will be answered. So if you’re just joining, we’re going to get started in a minute or so, but there will be a Q&A that you can submit your questions to. We will try our best to answer those from some of our fantastic staff here in the chat. And then there will be time at the very end where some of those more common questions that people are asking, we’ll take a crack at live on the Q&A.

And Jerry, with the best question — you literally took the words out of my mouth. I was going to say, at the very end, if you happen to leave early or you have to go, this presentation will be recorded. We will send that to you in a follow-up email. Jerry, please get out of my head. That was so weirdly timed. I think we have probably all the folks. We might have a few more trickle in. But, Julia, do you think we’re good to go? Good to start?

JULIA: Yeah. Absolutely. Sounds great.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Sweet. Alright. So welcome in. My name is James Crawley. I’m the program manager here at Prepory, and I’ll let my colleague introduce herself in just a second. Just a bit about my background as I’ll be your main speaker tonight. Before coming to Prepory, I spent eight years at my lovely alma mater, Purdue University, and was eventually a senior assistant director of admissions, primarily focusing in STEM — the college of engineering and their computer science program. They work very closely together. So I have a lengthy background of counseling and working with students and reading tens of thousands of applications from students applying to some of the most competitive CS and engineering programs on the planet. So that is kind of where my perspective is coming from as I go through tonight’s topic. Julia?

JULIA: Yeah. Wonderful. Thanks, James. Hi, everyone. I’m Julia. I’m an enrollment manager here at Prepory. I previously worked in admissions at Dartmouth, where I went to undergrad, and I’ve also served as a coach here at Prepory. But now on the enrollment side, myself and my team host what are called initial consultations, or ICs — and you might hear that acronym throughout tonight. These are the first conversations in your journey with Prepory, and this is where we dive much more deeply into your specific profile and your unique goals. And we’ll talk you through exactly how Prepory is going to support you in your intended pathway. In this case, I’m assuming many of you are working toward building a competitive computer science profile. But of course, we support a wide range of academic goals, from BS/MD all the way to pre-law.

So with that: who is Prepory, in case you’re all unfamiliar? James, you can go ahead to the next slide. We are a college admissions counseling firm with nearly fifteen years of experience helping students and families navigate every grade level from eighth grade all the way up through graduate admissions. And in that time, we’ve supported more than 14,000 students toward their unique goals. So we’re incredibly proud to consistently rank number one in this industry. We have excellent admissions outcomes to show for it, which you can see here. During the last admission cycle alone, our students were accepted into every Ivy League school, every UC school, and every institution ranked one through 50 on the U.S. News & World Report list.

We’ve spent years helping students stand out in the admission cycle, and one area where we are proud to make a really significant impact is developing highly compelling and admit-worthy profiles for CS programs. So we’ve gotten students into the strongest CS programs in the country, as you can see here. If you’re curious, there will be multiple opportunities tonight to book an initial consultation with myself or a teammate, and there we’re definitely going to dive more deeply into your unique profile and your educational goals. Those ICs are also a great opportunity to just get more niche questions answered that we might not be able to get to tonight. So with that, James, you can go ahead and talk about tonight’s agenda.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Cool. Thank you. As we’ve said multiple times, we will try our best to answer any questions that you all have. If there’s one that’s asked in the chat and the Q&A multiple times, what Julia will probably do is save that for the end and ask it live just so many people can get their question answered at once. So there will be a live Q&A at the end, but please send your questions in anytime.

We’re going to talk about some high-level computer science admissions trends, and before going into really what helps you as a future — for some of you that are soon-to-be seniors, very quickly future — CS applicant, what helps you to stand out in the process, especially having been on the other side and reading thousands and thousands of these in a single season for years and years. It can blend together. And just being able to really make yourself memorable and make yourself stand out, especially in the competitive world of computer science, is just a necessity now to try to get into these top programs. We’ll have a little Q&A. We’ll talk about the essay as well alongside the other factors in the actual admissions process.

So just high-level here for those that are maybe not as familiar with the admissions process here in the United States: there is no one single way that the admission process works from university to university. One of the most solid trends, however, or solid factors, across schools over the last two decades or so has been the singular competitiveness of computer science as a major. Now, some schools will allow you to come in just undecided. Maybe you can put some interests down on the form. Many schools, especially many of the top CS programs, will typically ask that you select CS as your top major. It really just depends on the school that you’re applying to.

But generally speaking, when you think of computer science and where it fits in the overall framework of majors and programs that are competitive at these schools, one thing you’ll really want to keep in mind as you’re looking at your college list is — okay, here’s maybe the overall admit rate for UIUC (for those that are not familiar, that’s the University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, a Big Ten school, very close to and very similar to my alma mater Purdue University, very well-known for computer science and engineering). They may have an overall admit rate of about 37%. Their computer science program is under 10%. Even for already competitive programs like Carnegie Mellon — overall around 11% for the admit rate as a university — less than 5% for computer science.

So what we’re trying to set the table with here is this idea that even if you are applying to an already competitive university, if you’re choosing computer science as a major, it is just even that much more competitive. And I’m not saying that to scare you away. I’m not saying that to say don’t apply to CS at all costs. Because what that’s just going to mean is you really have to go beyond just your technical knowledge. We sometimes use this phrase of critical thinkers, not just coders — not just somebody who is going to be sitting in a room all day and probably all night writing code, or using Claude Code or Codex or something else to write their code for them. That’s not what universities are looking for, especially in this advent of AI. They’re not looking for people who are just going to be brute-forcing all of these different programs and projects with their CS knowledge. They want critical thinkers that go beyond the technical expertise.

So acceptance rates are getting lower and lower, especially for the top universities, each year. These are some of them. This kind of goes with the last slide that I had. These are many that are also very well known for their CS programs. The Prepory advantage on the right, just as an example of our work, is how much more likely than that rate our students are to get accepted. So we’ve had some incredible success, some incredible narratives that have been created and applications that have been put together with students and coaches over the last few years — particularly for CS students — to help them really stand out from this extremely intelligent, intellectual, technical crowd by adding in some of those more humanities, liberal-arts lenses onto their applications.

And what is a compelling applicant? That is really the question, and it’s one that I don’t think will have a definite answer. I have some guidelines here that I’d like to go through. These are trends that I have seen, that we as Prepory have seen in our own work from all of our own backgrounds, and just trends across the industry. But when you think about a compelling applicant for computer science — yes, almost as a baseline, you have to have that sort of technical inclination. And with that, the academic acumen to be able to handle the rigorous course load of any computer science program in the country. So technical skill, yes, that is a big piece of it. Grades and test scores, absolutely — we’ll get into all of those.

Beyond that, though, increasingly these other three topics — the real-world impact, the ability to show leadership, and maybe most mysteriously, the intellectual curiosity for those of you that have not heard that phrase — those are giving admissions officers a sense of the person underneath the resume. Your resume and your activity section — that is very important in the college admissions process. However, it cannot be the whole story. And one of the biggest mistakes (we’ll talk about this later) that students can make in this process, particularly STEM students, is in all of their writing, they relate everything back to an activity, everything back to something on their resume, trying to reiterate how smart they are or how accomplished they are, and it almost wastes an opportunity to go deeper. So we really are looking under the hood here and trying to see beyond just the technical, beyond the grades — who is the human underneath that I’m considering admitting to my campus?

So let’s dive in with a few of these. And again, I will say, if you guys have any questions throughout this, feel free to put them in the Q&A button at the bottom of the screen, and we will do our best to get those answered as quick as we can.

When it comes to grades and scores, we have a policy here at Prepory where we try — we always say, clear is kind. That is a Brené Brownism. That is not a thing from me. But it means that we try to be as upfront with what we know to be true as often as possible because that is kind — by being clear. If you are looking at some of those top schools, particularly the MIT, the Caltech, the Stanford range, their averages are what they are. They are incredibly high, nearly perfect. And schools at that caliber and even below, top 30 schools especially for CS or engineering, they’re going to kind of accept all of this as the baseline. Maybe not a 790 math — MIT is quite high, obviously.

But the coursework — when they look at your academic profile, they’re not just looking at a test score and then moving on. They’re looking at the actual grades you received, the relevant coursework to CS, math and science obviously being primary among them. Within science, physics being the most relevant type of course. And also the trends from year to year: were you taking advantage of every opportunity that your school offered? Whether they offered four AP courses or 40, were you really trying to take advantage of as many advanced courses across the board as you could?

For math in particular, AP Calc BC is going to be what we recommend you shoot for at the very least. Now, I know we have a good number of students in here who are about to be seniors, and maybe you can’t change your coursework right now. We understand that. If you’re able to get up to AP Calculus at all, that’s really going to be kind of that barrier for entry to show schools that you can handle the incredibly difficult and complex curriculum that they have for computer science once you get there, because they don’t want you to be drowning. They don’t want to admit anyone who they think is going to be just underwater the whole time they’re on campus.

So as far as your coursework — if you’re a junior, if you’re a rising junior, rising sophomore, and if there are any rising eighth graders or freshmen in here — working with someone, like maybe one of our coaches, to help you plan out this curriculum over time will often give you the best chance at admittance. Because this is one of the three main parts of the application, the three-legged stool of admissions — your academics, your extracurriculars, and your writing — it’s definitely the most important. They’re going to look and see, first and foremost, that you have that academic foundation solidified.

So take the most advanced math and science courses possible if you can. Really work on those test scores over time. If you are especially targeting top 30 schools for engineering and CS, that is going to be imperative. Now, I did mention APs, but IB is an incredible curriculum as well. If you’re able to get up to something like multivariable calculus, linear algebra — maybe through dual enrollment at a community college — those are also phenomenal options if you can. There’s nothing particularly special about AP versus those other two. It’s just usually the most common that most schools have.

When it comes to technical skill and individual personality, we want to make sure that you are showing that you have the proficiency on these applications. When you’re showing the kind of languages that you’re fluent in for coding, if you show how many bots you’ve created or all of these other technical accomplishments that maybe you have gotten into, those are great. We don’t want to downplay that. You do need to show that technical skill. You can do that within the realm of research if you’re able to start researching with a professor or start submitting to a publication in high school — that absolutely will help you stand out. The same goes for some kind of technical internship if you’re able to get something in high school using your network. Those will show technical skill, and that is necessary.

But you also want it to feel as if it’s something specific to you. So when you’re doing things — and there are a couple of examples here — are you creating things from your own lived experiences? If you lost to somebody that cheated in an online game, can you create an anti-cheating detection system somehow? That is going to be very specific to your life experience because then you can go talk about how that experience made you grow in other ways on top of helping you grow your technical abilities. So they’re looking for technical skill, yes, but with some personality.

Things like certificates online — Coursera, edX, boot camp badges alone — and when we say alone, we truly mean, like, they are an additive piece to your personal development. But on an application, they’re not on their own going to necessarily help you stand out above the crowd. It’s very similar in ways, I think, to something that many of us are familiar with — National Honor Society, which many high schools do offer. NHS can be a great opportunity for you to volunteer more and get a little bit more involved. However, because so many students get invited to it because of the sort of GPA requirements, something like NHS is not going to help you stand out on an application. And the same goes here with some of these certificates, boot camps, and competitions on their own. They aren’t necessarily going to help you stand apart.

So the suggestion here from this balance of technical skill and individual personality is: get out there and learn all you can. Grow your skills, but make sure you have a why underneath it. Make sure you have an actual reason driving you, or an interest or a passion driving you, to do so. Julia, are there any questions? Or anything so far? Are we good to keep moving?

JULIA: Yeah. We’re answering the questions in the chat, so I think we should be all set. But thanks.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Cool. As far as real-world impact, kind of taking that last point about technical skill and personality and balancing the two: when you start getting up through high school and you start to — especially once you get up to sophomore year, junior year, even into senior year in some cases — you want to start putting that technical expertise to work. You want to start actually making an impact. If I can highlight one word on this slide, it is definitely impact. Because having all of these skills and then just doing nothing but optimizing your own life — that signal being sent to an admissions officer is, okay, this kid does a lot to improve their own life, and that seems pretty cool. But when they get here, are they just going to be that kid who goes to class, who goes to a lab, does their own thing, goes back to their room, and then just studies, studies, studies, applies to jobs, and isn’t adding to our community? You have to show how you are getting out into the community and how you’re using your passion and skill to make it a better place.

One of my students actually last year — she herself struggled with PCOS, polycystic ovary syndrome — and she saw how big of a problem this was around the world, around her community of women who also had PCOS being believed. She decided to use her data science and computer science background to build a calculator that could actually go through and give women this rap sheet of symptoms and connections and cases that would then allow them to be more accurately diagnosed by their physicians. She used one of her own life experiences, combined it with her technical background and passion, and created this public good.

When you are thinking about things like passion projects, or getting an internship, or even doing research, you want to make sure that you’re using a piece of yourself and trying to solve problems that you actually care about, that matter to you. Julia, do you have any — I know you’ve obviously been a coach as well — any examples of ways in which your technical students have tried to make an impact on the world?

JULIA: Yeah. Absolutely. I love that example that you gave from one of your students. And I — the keyword there, too, like you said, is having a personal connection, really feeling personally invested in this project. That sort of authenticity is what can really shine through when an admissions officer is reviewing, you know, whether it’s your activities list entry or a supplemental essay about this project that you did.

A student that I worked with — this is just an example that came to mind — his brother has special needs and was really struggling to find a job. And he himself, the student, was trying to help out and kind of was at a loss and couldn’t really figure out how to move forward. So they ended up finding a job assistance program, and he partnered with them to develop a platform to basically expand access for folks with special needs to have opportunities to get hired, and was able to create an impact broadly. Again, you had mentioned going beyond yourself and actually creating something for the public good. He was able to scale this up to 50-plus companies and over 100-plus individuals that got employed across North Carolina. Really exciting there to see how he was able to take this personal problem and be able to expand on it and create a really helpful tool using his technical skill set.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Fantastic. And that’s really it, guys — when you think about it, I know that sometimes there’s often this thought, especially if you’re lurking in a ton of the corners of admissions TikTok or admissions Instagram, of, ‘you have to get hyperspecific and you have to be so technically knowledgeable on a wide range of things.’ None of that is going to matter if, when the person reading your application feels like you’re just doing this all because you feel like you have to. Well, this is what you have to say. This is what you have to be involved in to be competitive in computer science. This is a very human process. Despite the tidal wave of AI that’s hitting us right now, the people on the other side of the desk here, they are not CS experts, usually. The people in undergrad admissions offices — they’re often 22, 23 years old, just graduated from college. They may likely have a liberal arts background, humanities background, which means they’re very good at critically thinking and discerning who the human is under an application, and understanding, yes, what these technical things mean. But they’re not going to be relying solely on, oh, well, he knows eight programming languages, this person only knows seven. So you really have to keep that in mind — that they’re looking for a human being, not a robot.

Another way that you can show and demonstrate that passion underneath that humanness is taking ownership of your technical passion and whatever problems you might be trying to solve. And obviously, one of the best ways to demonstrate that is leadership. Leadership does not always mean becoming president of your CS club, or of some hackathon that your school puts on. Those can be great if you genuinely care about them. But oftentimes, if you don’t see an opportunity, if you see a gap either in your school or elsewhere of people not being able to explore their technical passions, you can start an organization. You can start a club. This can start early on too. If you can really work with somebody to find that passion that you have, those grand challenges in the world that you want to solve — if you’re able to start early and start building something, whether that’s a community initiative or a school club, or a nonprofit’s another good one — that is a great way to show commitment over time and leadership and initiative.

So don’t feel like you just have to join. I mean, please don’t just join a bunch of clubs for nothing. Because adding up all of those clubs and getting to 10, which is typically the maximum on the Common Application, the AOs can read through that so quickly. They want to see a consistent narrative thread that’s connecting all of these different places where you’ve chosen to spend your time, and showing that you can lead — especially by founding something or starting something. That is a huge piece that makes you competitive if you’re able to really start an initiative on your own because it’s what you love.

It’s also a great way to show collaboration. I think CS students, engineers, sometimes have a rep for being into the solo grind. They’re into optimizing themselves and doing all these different projects and growing their own skills, which is not a bad thing by any means. But with that does come the stigma that they don’t know how to talk to people, they don’t know how to interact with others, they don’t know how to play well with other people or collaborate. If you’re able to show that collaboration, especially across different disciplines with other people, that is going to make you an easier sell in the minds of admissions officers that, oh yeah, they’re really going to be an ingrained part of our community. They’re going to be able to add to it by integrating and interacting with all these different areas. So leadership is huge. It doesn’t mean just becoming president of this club or that club. It means showing your passion, showing your interest, and showing your technical inclinations by possibly starting certain things, either in school or out of school.

All of that is really summed up in this concept we call intellectual curiosity. Because when you’re reading an application — just to give you guys an insight into this, and Julia, feel free to jump in on any of this too — you are going through so many applications so quickly, back to back to back to back. And you get very good at noticing whether there’s an actual thread of consistent curiosity and interest underneath all of it that connects their academic choices with where they’ve chosen to spend their time, and then, of course, with their writing, which we’ll talk about in a minute.

And oftentimes where that comes through is just seeing something that they’re really into that doesn’t necessarily feel like the thing to be into in the moment. It can be some interest that is very niche. It could be some very specific problem. I have a student who was able to get some patents early on in technology, before the big AI boom, into a device that helped his blind grandmother cook, because she couldn’t really cook anymore. He was able to build something that read out loud the cookbook she had opened, kind of navigated her toward different ingredients, how much to add. He loved his grandma, and he wanted to make her have the ability to continue doing something she loved. And that intellectual curiosity is something that just goes beyond what you’re learning in class. It’s showing that you’re actually trying to tinker with and improve these kinds of problems that you see outside of it.

So maybe you’re building your own things, you’re building your own programs, and you’re doing something with them. If you have an interest like being outside in nature and you realize that, wow, there is just so much out here that is destroying the environment — maybe you can build a drone detection pipeline that allows a swarm of drones to cover an area and see, okay, there are these big areas of trash that are piling up. Showing those inner interests can really make you very human in this process and help you stand out amidst a crowd of very technically accomplished people who may only be leaving it on the surface.

Another way that intellectual curiosity manifests — we always recommend, we work with our students here at Prepory to get into summer plans of their choice. Oftentimes, that can mean getting into some kind of very selective summer program, but it doesn’t have to just be a summer program. One single summer program is likely not going to make your entire application. It can help, but it’s also showing, okay, you’re into research — great. Let’s reach out to professors. Let’s get out there and see if you can actually get your hands dirty with something that you love learning about — not because anyone’s telling you to, but because you just genuinely have that curiosity bursting through. So there are many ways to show intellectual curiosity. It goes beyond just the technical skills you have, and it needs to come through from the jump.

Julia, I think this is back to you talking a little bit about our students.

JULIA: Yeah. Absolutely. And thanks for all that. Even being in this space, I’m learning so much from what you’re describing. That piece in terms of intellectual curiosity and really substantiation — I love that word, because it’s the evidence, right, that an admissions office is really looking for in the application, to have those through-lines that are coming really clearly on your application, to have evidence that you’ve been building toward this interest and that it is truly genuine, rather than just something you’re kind of piecing together last minute. I think that’s where Prepory coaches are so helpful in guiding that narrative and really ensuring that from the get-go, you’re coming across in the most genuine way possible, because they’re truly genuinely supporting that process of discovery for you.

In terms of the students we support, around 12% roughly are in computer science as their intended major. And a really exciting stat here is that our students are three-and-a-half times more likely to be accepted into highly competitive computer science programs. So highly competitive, we qualify as an acceptance rate of less than 15%.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. And often that’s because of that story-building that happens. When we start that from even eighth grade onward, we don’t leave that for senior year. We really try from the get-go to help students really understand their story and get feedback on it as early as possible.

JULIA: Yeah. Absolutely. And Rory here is a really exciting tool. Of course, it is going to be a starting point rather than giving you that in-depth tailored guidance that a coach would be able to provide. But Rory is the only AI college admissions tool built entirely from the inside. So the tool is trained on over a decade of anonymized student data, our real internal coaching expertise, and all of these proprietary insights that ChatGPT and Claude just simply don’t have. The more generic tools are designed to answer everything and anything, which is the problem. They’ll give a student a really confident-sounding answer about maybe their chances at Stanford or something, but that answer is based on whatever happens to be floating around on the internet.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. Exactly. Internet vibes.

JULIA: Exactly. So, yeah, basically Rory really runs on that accumulated knowledge of curriculum and inside frameworks and patterns from real applications. So you can go ahead and scan this to get started with Rory. But again, for that really in-depth and tailored guidance, booking an initial consultation and getting paired with a coach is going to be a much deeper experience.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. And one thing just while we’re here — because I think it’s definitely the elephant in the room, talking about AI right now in college admissions, and we probably will do a whole webinar just on AI — but very briefly, I just want to say our kind of approach to using AI in coaching: it should absolutely be more of a beginning, starting-point sort of tool. And we would never recommend anybody use it near the end for gathering a bunch of research, giving leads, giving some general headwinds of this or that or directions of where to go. It can gather a bunch of data on the internet and elsewhere very quickly.

So when we are helping our students to try to understand how to use AI — I know that there are some questions about this in the chat — we’re really trying to help students develop beyond just, here’s what they are, here’s what you can use them for. It’s like helping a young person learn how to eat healthily. I’ve got a five-year-old, and, as of yesterday, a two-year-old, so I’m thinking about this a lot. Building healthy eating habits starts very early, and it has to be consistent. You have to know not just what you should eat, but how often. And that’s often how we describe our approach to using AI in this process. We’re not going to be writing any essays for you with AI, nor would we ever recommend that you do that. Because — oh my gosh, we will get to that.

But just so you know — this is an incredible tool that we’ve built internally just to help you get started. So try it out if you’d like.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Speaking of essays. Oh, man. Essays are — I wish we had a live poll for this. I know we can’t with the format, but I would love to ask the students watching this — because you’re all likely interested in CS — how excited are you about writing the essays? And I can feel half of you at least cringing from here. But it is just a well-known phenomenon that many STEM engineering CS students — writing essays is not their favorite. And I understand why, because it can seem — it’s not as black-and-white as numbers. It’s not as right-or-wrong as code. It is very gray. But it is one of the most differentiating factors, for better or worse, for an applicant, especially a CS applicant.

Some of these pitfalls — you guys can read these. I don’t want to necessarily read these off the screen. But one of the biggest pitfalls just overall is trying to smart your way into getting accepted, trying to impress — as I mentioned before — a likely 22-year-old, non-technical-background admissions officer. I say this as a no-longer-22 but non-technical-background admissions officer myself, with all of these acronyms and very technical terms and examples that they don’t exist in, that students just are removed from. They’re trying to focus solely on this technical, impressive-sounding problem or experience. But what isn’t realized is that if you take yourself out of that essay, it sounds like anybody could have written it.

And a couple of years ago, that was just bad on its own because it just made it very nonspecific. It was very hard to imagine you as a human. But now it has a double-edged sword because it also could be considered written by AI, potentially. There are buttons on the review forms — I still review for universities even though I’ve left Purdue. There are buttons on the review forms that show, like, do you have an issue with the writing, or do you think there’s some suspicion about the writing? And if that gets clicked on your form — again, they’re not going to necessarily put it through a detector, because those are also not perfect. You really have to get specific — not on a specific technical problem, but on who you are and why whatever it is you’re talking about matters.

The personal statement is probably the place where this manifests itself the most. For those that do not know — I know we have some folks who are very early in the process, some eighth and 9th graders — the Common App personal statement is the 650-word-maximum statement of you: why you want to go, what it is about you that you want an admissions officer to know. There are a few different prompts. This is a heavy task. This is a big lift for students of any background. But some of the things that students will often forget here is that when it’s read on the application — when an admissions officer is going through the application — they will often have just finished going over your extracurricular activity section, and they immediately will then read the personal statement. So if all you do is spend your personal statement talking about some extracurricular activity, talking about exactly what you did in the order that you did it for as long as you did it, giving the exact play-by-play, they can almost just skip over the personal statement because they just read about it in your activity section.

So this really needs to be the place where you jump off the page and become human to them. It needs to be about you, about why something matters to you, how it made you feel, and what kind of impact it had on you to grow over time. And that can include some elements of techiness. That can include some elements of CS or computing or some kind of coding background. But here’s a good example for this. When I used to do workshops for Purdue on the personal statement, I would often show two side-by-side of the same topic, same prompt, essays side by side. One of them was 650 words exactly. The other was about 450, 500 words — so not quite to the bottom, but still pretty chunky. They were both talking about the students’ interest in going to Mars.

The first one, that was 650 words exactly, extremely technical. Talked about every technical problem. I felt like I was reading an omitted scene from The Martian or something. It was every technical problem of how hard it would be to get to Mars and what exactly we’d need to do. But, of course, the prompt is asking, like, what’s a topic that they’re interested in and why? And here, I’m getting just basically a book report on how difficult it is getting to Mars. Whereas the other student, 150 fewer words, starts off saying, ever since I was a kid, I’ve always been obsessed with rocks and digging. I would dig holes in my mom’s garden. I would dig holes in the sandbox in the backyard, on the beach for hours. And as I grew, eventually, I realized that digging into the sand and reading rocks and reading geology was like storytelling. You got to read the story of an area — all the glaciers and volcanoes and all of this history. And what cooler history is there than the history of another planet and being able to read its story through its rocks? Both talking about going to Mars, but one just gives you a sense of a person, much more of why they want to do that.

So that is really the big thing here. If you’re going to talk about your love of CS, it’s better to try to leave that for the ‘why major’ question that many schools will ask, and get deeper into what drives you as a person and what you value.

Speaking of the ‘why major’ — you’ve got to be specific, y’all. You cannot just say, oh man, I really just love coding. I love building. I love creativity. I love problem-solving. Those are all great, but also, again, anybody could write those things. You can talk a little bit about why you want to make an impact in a certain area, what it is about a certain topic that has you just diving into the world of computer science.

And the other thing here too, for all of you, especially seniors if you’re listening to this — the other thing to keep in mind is that when you’re applying to computer science, it is just one major. If a school is asking you to apply directly to a major, the number-one tip I would recommend for you guys is: look at their entire list of majors. Look at what we call tangential majors, because you may have a very specific niche interest in the world of computer science or data science that may have its very own major. I know at Purdue and many other places, cybersecurity was one of them. A lot of students loved this idea of being a white-hat hacker and trying to get deeper into cybersecurity. That was its own major that could be applied to. Or maybe you love the design aspect of coding. Maybe you like the back end, yes, but you also have a really big passion for the front end of how sites work and how humans interact with these different technologies. UX/UI design or human-computer interaction — those are full-fledged programs.

So the other thing about the ‘why major’ is you have to first ask yourself, wait, why am I picking CS as a major and not some other major that this university might have? That right there can save you so much headache, because it’s much easier to get specific when you’re applying to an actual major, whether it’s CS itself or something tangential to it, that you have a genuine passion for. So be sure to be passionate, be specific when you are writing that ‘why major’ supplemental essay that many universities will ask on the application.

And then finally — I want to wrap us up here. We’re going to get to the Q&A, of course, but we’re getting close to the end. One of the last things I want to mention too, just as a CS student or a DS (data science) student, one thing that may be often overlooked is letters of recommendation. Most universities will ask that you submit a couple of letters of recommendation — maybe two, probably no more than three. We do not recommend ever submitting more than three, as former AOs. We don’t often have the time to go through all of those, and we can get a pretty good sense of, are the things we’re reading already tracking with what’s in the letter of rec, by just having two.

But if you are going to be doing two letters of recommendation, what we recommend, no pun intended, is: yes, maybe getting that STEM-background letter of rec from someone who knows you. Maybe that is a math or a CS teacher of some kind, or a physics teacher — somebody who can really speak to your academic acumen in those subjects. You also have to keep in mind that letters of recommendation are never read from the jump. They’re never read first in a review. The very first thing that’s often looked at, if not always but most of the time, is the grades — the academic snapshot of what the student has done academically. And if they see that you have A-pluses in every math class you’ve ever taken, A-pluses in every physics class you’ve ever taken, and they go to the first letter of rec, and it’s from your math teacher who doesn’t maybe know you very well, it’s probably just going to be saying, yeah, the student is incredible at math. They’re amazing. They never struggled. They always had an A. That doesn’t really add anything to your application, because they already saw that on the transcript. They already saw that in the academic section.

So even if you are choosing a math or CS teacher as that first recommendation, it has to be somebody who knows you, who has seen you grow, who knows your values beyond just, can they do the work well. And another way to really help bolster that side of it, to really try to give an admissions officer this clear picture of who you are, is going outside of the realm of CS or math or physics. Get a humanities teacher. Sometimes it is required at some universities to have a STEM and a non-STEM teacher recommend you, or maybe an outside mentor, research supervisor, somebody like that who knows you on a personal level.

One of the things that I always loved reading about when I was going through letters of recommendation — didn’t matter who was writing it — was somebody who saw you struggle. For CS students, maybe it wasn’t an English teacher or a foreign language — I know sometimes a world language can be really tough. Somebody who saw you struggle but not give up. That is such a great value read. I’m like, okay, I understand the student. I can see they struggled in that. Maybe they did get an A-minus or a B-plus or something like that. But, man, okay, they didn’t give up. They didn’t just say it was the teacher’s fault or say it was too hard. They kept going. I’ve read so many letters of recommendation from teachers who talk about that, and that gives me such a good sense of who that person is and who they will likely be when they encounter inevitably harder coursework and more difficult situations in college. So don’t be afraid to go and reach out to somebody who knows you well and who has maybe seen you struggle and overcome a little bit. Those can be extremely compelling letters of recommendation to read.

And then finally, just to wrap up here before we get to a final few things and the Q&A: just some things to remember — you really should be showing your passion and yourself in this process as much as possible. Do not let your passion for coding or using AI or building systems, whatever it might be, just stay contained within your own little bubble. Look to see where you can help other people. Look to see what kind of grand problems or challenges in the world that you feel yourself gravitating towards solving, and then go after that. Whether that’s through doing deeper research with a professor, or founding a nonprofit, or getting something started at your school — get out there and make an impact with CS. Don’t just get good at it. Do good with it.

So that’s a little bit of the takeaways here. I hope that this gave some semblance of clarity to those of you applying to these CS programs. Of course, though, I know I did not cover everything, so I’m sure there are some questions that we’ll take at the end. But I want to give it back to Julia for just a little bit, to kind of show how we as a company, Prepory, approach this incredibly complicated process of college admissions specifically for CS and others.

JULIA: Great. Yeah. Thanks so much, James. So how can Prepory help you get admitted, given everything that we just covered? In terms of our core services, you’d have a dedicated coach who will be with you every step through this journey — from essay brainstorming, outlining, and drafting; developing a really strategic and balanced college list, and not just thinking about what colleges are on that list, but also the timeline that you’re applying under; major selection; etc. — and really just ensuring that every component of your narrative is working cohesively and coming across clearly to admissions committees.

So everything in our program — you can see it here in terms of what it includes. But James, specifically, I’m curious if you want to share a little bit more about committee review, because that might be a term that people are slightly less familiar with. And having been on the other side of the desk working in an admissions office, I think this is definitely a unique selling point for why Prepory is unique.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. One thing that we just understand about this process is not only how different it is per school, per major, but also how you get very invested — even as coaches, we obviously get very invested in our students. We love our students. But sometimes when you go to send off this little baby that you’ve made of an application to these universities, the person on the other side, they don’t know you. They’ve not met you before. They don’t know all of the peaks and valleys of your life like maybe your coach might. But we want to make sure that we’re giving as much of a test run as we can to students a couple of times a year.

The biggest way we do that is something we call committee review, which is where a small committee of AO professionals will look at every single one of our seniors in the fall. We spend about a month going through all of these different submissions of all of these different pieces of a student’s application, and we really give them a 30,000-foot view of how they’re doing — what kind of themes and narratives are coming through, whether they meant them to or not, as we read them somewhat unbiasedly, because we haven’t been working with them for months or years on end. And it’s a really great way, just before students hit submit on those applications, for them to get kind of a final barometer read and make some of those final tweaks that they need. But we also do this for underclassmen too. Juniors, sophomores, freshmen — we do an annual profile review every spring to see how things are coming along, give you suggestions on directions to go in or other things to look at. This is a huge team here. So yes, we have that one-on-one coaching model, but we have a whole team of people and experts helping every student along the way.

JULIA: Wonderful. Thanks for that. So thank you all so much for joining. If you do have to drop off early, you can go ahead and scan this QR code if you didn’t get your question answered yet, and be able to book a free consultation where we’ll be able to dive much more deeply into your unique goals and your unique profile. And as has been said in the chat as well, you’ll also be receiving a recording of this call to your email.

So with that, we can move into the Q&A. Hopefully you can stick around — there are a lot of great questions in the chat. So we’ll start with this one actually, James, just because it’s very specific to Purdue. Someone asked: how much weight does Purdue place on the personal statement versus the supplementary essays?

JAMES CRAWLEY: Oh, that’s a great question. I actually think this isn’t just specific to Purdue. I would say other schools of Purdue’s caliber — the personal statement, again, is just our way of talking to you. Something that I know my colleagues are annoyed by hearing me say, especially in committee review, which I run for Prepory, is I have this little internal test I call the coffee shop test. That’s essentially: if I’m reading your personal statement out loud, word for word, does it sound like a story you could be telling to somebody over a cup of coffee or tea at a cafe? Or does it sound like a book report or a TED Talk that you’re suddenly giving somebody in an intimate one-on-one conversation, that would make them want to slowly leave the table?

That is what the personal statement is for. It is meant to be a conversation between students and whichever admissions officer is reading their application. The supplemental essays, which typically Purdue has a few — typically the ‘why major,’ why do you want to go into this major that you’re selecting; the other common one that Purdue and many others have is the ‘why us’ question, where universities will basically say, what is it about us? Why are we so special? Why are we the belle of the ball? Why are we the people that you want to apply to? What matters there is: while the personal statement might be more of a value fit, the supplemental essays are often a sort of academic or campus-community fit. You’re showing that you’ve looked with intentionality at and thought about why this university would actually be a good fit for your academic, student-life, and campus-community goals, with specificity. It shows that you’ve actually researched the school itself and also researched the kind of major you’re selecting, and thinking about why you want to go into it. So I wouldn’t say that schools really place emphasis on one over the other, but the personal statement really is your chance to have that conversation, in addition to those other supplementary essays.

JULIA: Great. Thank you so much. Some more questions that I’m seeing here have to do with recommendation letters. They’re asking, you know, recommendation letters from earlier on in their high school career — if it may be specifically from a CS teacher. Maybe you can just talk us through a little bit more about what makes a strong recommendation letter and what students should be looking for in those.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Sure. Well, first of all, the strongest one is the one that’s not written by you. So do not write your own letters of recommendation. Parents — again, I’m a dad, I would love to write my kids a letter of recommendation one day — do not write your kids a letter of recommendation. It has to come from somebody who can add some color and kind of add a different puzzle piece to this image that AOs are trying to create in their mind.

Now, typically, just like an essay, you want to be able to show recency in your growth. You don’t want to necessarily spend your whole essay talking about something that happened when you were five. Similarly, it can sometimes be hard for a 9th- or 10th-grade teacher who you may have only had once, even though it might have been for CS or math, to really help AOs imagine the person they’re getting now — unless you went back and became a teacher’s assistant for that teacher, or you maybe joined them in a club. Maybe they became an adviser for an organization you started, or you kept up the relationship somehow. That could work if they know who you are now. Just because they were your CS teacher in 9th grade, and you’re thinking about CS — that on the surface does not make a strong letter of recommendation make.

Does that answer the question, you think, Julia?

JULIA: Yeah. Yeah. I think so. If it didn’t, whoever asked that, feel free to ask.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. Please chime in. I hope that answers the question.

JULIA: Yes. Wonderful. We did have a question too about the rigor of research experiences for high school students. They were asking, “does it need to be an STS or an ISEF” or just a national conference in a different field, such as psychology or an education conference to present research — would that also be okay?” So maybe just research in general, and what sort of counts as a rigorous or particularly impressive research experience.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Sure. That is a really good question, because it doesn’t necessarily have to be ISEF-caliber. It doesn’t have to necessarily be published in the most prestigious journal — although obviously that is a huge feather in your cap if it can be. Really, it needs to show that intellectual curiosity. So a lot of students think, when they hear about research, it’s got to be more than something that’s for an IB class. You know, IB research or AP research often involves a research component. It cannot be a research project for a class. It needs to be something that shows you are so into this topic, or you have such a passion for it, that you could not help but to seek out ways to learn more and grow your skill within it.

So even one thing that’s often overlooked — people think they have to get a research partnership with a really prestigious university or a really prestigious professor at a very big, well-known university. If you’re able to get research with a professor even at a local college, it does not have to be the most prestigious university or, like I said before, the most prestigious journal that you’re submitting to. It just has to be something that shows you went out of your way to get involved more with this topic that you are interested in. So it can be the local university in your city or town. As long as it’s showing that you have a commitment to work with that person and grow whatever this topic is that lights your intellectual curiosity, that will help come through.

There are other programs — there are other companies that will do, like, a pay-for-play on research, where they’ll pair you with a mentor. Universities have a pretty good idea of what those companies are, and they won’t necessarily look kindly on it, because it feels very regimented. It feels like, okay, well, if anybody had enough money to do this, they could. So it does need to have an authentic origin, if possible, to help it stand out on an application.

JULIA: Wonderful. Great. Thank you. In terms of demonstrating that intellectual curiosity beyond research too, there’s a question from Rishan about being kind of more self-taught — being able to develop your own computer programming skills and developing that through courses, and how that might add value. So maybe we can talk to, beyond research opportunities, just thinking about additional ways to demonstrate that intellectual curiosity. And maybe especially — I think there was another question about, where someone’s curriculum and their school themselves might be more limited, how they can pursue that learning beyond what their school offers.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. That’s a great question. I do have two screens, by the way, here next to my camera, so I’m reading the question that you were referring to. And as I mentioned earlier on, learning computer languages, learning how to use these different tools, and starting to kind of home-grow your skills in them is phenomenal. It is a fantastic way to show that this is something you want to do. I don’t want anybody leaving here thinking, like, oh, I shouldn’t go and learn all these languages, it doesn’t matter. It’s just that it can’t stop there. If you’re learning those languages, if you’re learning all those different programming languages — what are you doing with them? Are you building anything? Are you finding ways in which you could maybe apply them to problems you see around you, or even issues that you think aren’t necessarily world-changing but they matter to you? Are you actually going out and doing and building something with them?

I think that’s the step that’s often forgotten. CS students in particular will collect all of these different skills and technical abilities and then just kind of hoard them for their own use. But can you use those skills and those languages to then show — and, because I learned this language, I was then able to build this or solve this problem for other people? Not one that’s part of a class, not one that anybody told you to, but one that you thought about with intentionality. So that would be my suggestion to you: take those languages that you learn online or the courses that you take online or programs you do, and find ways that you can actually build something or make a positive impact with them.

The same goes for — I think you had said that there was another question about, what if you have limited opportunities at your school? If you do have limited opportunities — excuse me — if you do have limited opportunities, just keep in mind that many, many universities will have something called an environmental context dashboard that gives them an idea of what kind of opportunities your school might have had as far as clubs, as far as average test scores, as far as AP or IB or advanced coursework. So you really should just be looking to take advantage of any opportunity you can, both within your school and maybe outside of it — at a local community college over the summer, or for a dual enrollment program. They want to see that you are just intentionally trying to go beyond what is normal to really make yourself the most competitive person and applicant possible.

JULIA: Well said. Great. One question just about the sort of admit rates that you shared earlier — there was a question from Natasha. She asked, how do you know that your increased acceptance rates aren’t a function of selection bias? The students who are hiring a consultant are likely more qualified to begin with. So maybe you can speak to just kind of the diversity of students and their backgrounds and the goals that we work with — and, I guess, alleviate some of those concerns.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. That is a fantastic question. Thank you, Natasha, for asking that. So, short — we actually have two different big models here at Prepory of how we work with students. There’s this individual model, where families will get referred, or they might come here and book an initial consultation and decide to work with us. But because our founders came from South Florida, they grew up in South Florida and know what it’s like to be at schools that don’t really have a ton of resources. We also have something called the institutional model, where we essentially partner with a dozen different schools and become their college counseling core. So we’ll partner with their students as admissions coaches and help them to achieve whatever postsecondary goals that they might have.

So we work with a wide range of students that are shooting for all different levels as well. I don’t want to give the impression that we’re only admitting to the top 10 universities and that’s it. Our whole goal here — the whole ballgame — is trying to help students find the best fit for themselves at whatever kind of university that might be. Often, that is going to be the more competitive universities, but not everybody coming into Prepory is a 1600, 4.0 student. It’s really a very wide range of students that we are getting that data and those multipliers from. Does that answer the question, Julia?

JULIA: Yeah. Hopefully — Natasha, let us know.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Let us know.

JULIA: Wonderful. Just looking through here a little bit more — there were multiple questions about sort of specific awards that might have happened earlier on in a college career — sorry, earlier than high school — but if it’s eligible to be included for a college application. So I had answered one of those questions just in the chat, but it came up multiple times, so I don’t know if you want to speak to that a little bit more.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Sure. Yeah. I see them up there about the national robotics competition but in middle school, or the USA Computing Olympiad. What you have to remember, though — getting those awards is great. Full stop. Getting those accomplishments, getting those accolades early — that is fantastic. I worked with a student last year who won the international spelling bee — or international geography bee for, I believe, the 6, 7, 8 division — which helps, because he was going into history.

However, it needs to be a starting point for a larger story, not an ending point. You don’t want to give the impression that your greatest accomplishment — you peaked at 12 in middle school — or that an earlier award was sort of the crowning achievement that should somehow make you stand out. You need it to be a journey of, okay, and I took that success, and I kept growing with it. Because they want to see that when you get to their campus, you’re going to continue that journey of growing and failing and succeeding and learning all there is to know about the field that you have this huge passion for.

There are spots on the application where you might be able to put some of those things, but anything in middle school before 9th grade — it’s not going to be easy to list it, because they really are mostly concerned with how you have been growing the last four years and spending your time. So something to be put on potentially. Our coaches are very good at working with students and kind of understanding when that’s appropriate and when it’s not, which is another benefit of being able to have that sort of umpire walking alongside you. But it really does depend on the specific situation.

JULIA: Absolutely. Wonderful. Well, we have a couple minutes left. I just want to answer — Nora sent a question about the general theme here, which seems to be really showing interest and commitment, not only learning, but then how we’re able to demonstrate that through tangible outcomes. So she’s wondering: where in the application will this show up? Right? Is this in essays? Is this in activities lists? How can we demonstrate this sense of intellectual curiosity going beyond just your personal learning and toward a broader impact?

JAMES CRAWLEY: That’s a great question — kind of a good summation, too, of our topics tonight. I mentioned this way back at the beginning, but the application itself — the three main areas, it’s almost like a three-legged stool — are your academics (how you’re doing in the schoolwork that you would then be taking to college), how you’re choosing to spend your time in your extracurriculars (your activity section), and then, yes, the various forms of writing. I would also include letters of recommendation kind of in that writing piece, because it’s a written account of you but from somebody else.

So how do you show that intellectual curiosity? The strongest way to show that intellectual curiosity and those interests and those passions is consistency. Show it across the board. It should make sense why you’re involved in these seven or eight different involvements for this amount of time and this amount of hours per week, because of the interests that you’ve explained in the writing. And, oh, of course, if those are your interests, you would then be taking harder classes or more specific classes in those kinds of areas. There needs to be just this story that’s all working together across the board.

And you want to try to do it in a way that doesn’t repeat itself too much. So as I mentioned before, you might talk about an example or an extracurricular in a very small way at the beginning of an essay, but then you need to get deep into the introspection beyond that. Because if you’re just writing about the things you’ve already put in your activity section and just giving a play-by-play of what it is, they’re not really learning anything different about you. So there are a few different ways in which you can show that intellectual curiosity: in how you’ve chosen to spend your time and all the different activities, how you’ve chosen to show your values and talk to the AOs in the writing, and then of course, how you’ve chosen to spend your academic coursework and curriculum on the classes and the rigor that you choose.

JULIA: Wonderful. Well, I think that’s a great point to end on. I’m sorry we weren’t able to get to all the questions in the chat, but you can see here in the chat that a link is there to book an initial consultation. And there, again, you’ll have many more opportunities to dive deeply into your unique profile and your unique concerns, and myself or another teammate will be happy to just discuss further with you. So thank you all so much for joining us tonight. James, thank you for sharing your wonderful expertise here in this area.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Mhmm.

JULIA: And, yeah, with that, we’ll call it a night. But you’ll receive a recording of this webinar. And again, feel free to book an initial consultation to get more specific questions answered.

JAMES CRAWLEY: Yeah. Thank you all for coming tonight. If you guys have any questions, please come chat with us. Scan this QR code, and we hope to be talking with you all soon.