Q&A with Former Admissions Officers

Again, thank you for everybody that’s coming in. We’re going to get started here at about five after the hour. If you have any questions, please put them down at the bottom. You’ll see on your screen a little place to put in questions. If you have a really specific question, there may be, depending on the length of it, depending on the specificity tonight, we might maybe touch upon it in generalities, just for the sake of time. If you have specific questions, though, that we can’t get to today, one of my lovely co-hosts will probably be able to post the link right now in the chat for everyone, just for scheduling an initial consultation with us. We have free consultations, just free convos, really, to come with a cup of coffee and just talk about what it is you or your student might be going through as far as how to navigate this very strange process of college admissions. So, that will also be available to you if we don’t necessarily, thank you Prepory for posting that, if we don’t necessarily get to it.

Alright. So hopefully, if I can get just a confirmation from anyone, Derrick, Sam, Guerdiana, is everything looking good as far as screen share? Thumbs up, nice. People at home, can you guys give me a thumbs up? I can’t see you, so I appreciate it if you did, but if not, that’s all good. I will say as well, you may notice my voice does sound a little raspy. This is the joy of having a couple of young kids. I’ve got a 4-year-old and a 1-year-old, so if my voice does crack tonight at all, thankfully I’m so glad to be on a panel because they’re going to help answer a lot of these questions. But if my voice does crack, you do have permission to laugh because it’ll sound like I’m going through puberty again, which is great. Oh, cool. Already some questions coming through. So again, feel free to put those down in the Q&A box at the bottom. For anybody that just joined, we will get started here in about a minute or so. So, feel free to grab your emergency tea with honey or water, whatever you might have.

Already some good questions coming through. Excited to answer these. And again, you might not have the questions right here at the beginning, that’s fine. As we go through this, we’ll have an agenda here and things at the beginning just kind of to show you what we’re going to talk about, but sometimes the best questions come up in the moment, so don’t feel pressured to think of a question that doesn’t actually apply to you right now. Anytime throughout this we’ll be having an open Q&A, so you’ll be able to ask us anything. And with that, I think we’re about 10 seconds away, so I’m going to go ahead and get started a little bit early. And by early, I mean right on time. So welcome. This is our conversation with former admissions officers here at Prepory. We’re going to tonight talk about a few different things.

Before we do any of that, I think it is very important that we might give ourselves a little bit of an intro to you all just so you know where we’re coming from. So, I’ll go first. My name is James Crawley. I am the Program Manager here at Prepory. And before joining three years ago, I was a Senior Assistant Director at Purdue University, which is in West Lafayette, Indiana. It’s a big public school, well known specifically for its STEM, engineering, and computer science majors. I just realized I’m actually wearing a Purdue Polo, so “Boiler Up!” if there are any Boilermakers out there. But I was able to wear all kinds of hats as an AO, and really over the eight years I was there, I’ve probably reviewed about 30,000 applications and set all the review standards for the College of Engineering. We’re now reviewing still for a Top 30 university. Any of my lovely co-hosts, would any of you guys like to go next?

GUERDI: I’ll jump in. Thanks, James. So, hi everyone, my name is Guerdiana Thelomar. I served as an Assistant Director previously at the University of Miami’s office of undergraduate admissions. Like James, I also wore many hats there and really spent a lot of time in the application review team and I reviewed over 40,000 applications during my last cycle, really helping students find their program of interest. And I also just have experience working with students, in general, to help them get into their top colleges across the country.

JAMES: Fantastic. Thank you, Guerdi. Derrick, you want to go next? You’re next on my screen.

DERRICK: Yeah, sure. I’ll jump in. Hey folks. Welcome. My name is Derrick Rogan. I have about a decade of experience in the admission space. I often tell folks that I’ve done everything from being a Recruitment Coordinator all the way up to being a director of my own admissions office at various colleges here in the state of Indiana. I’ve been coaching now for about three years, helping students get into some of the top schools, Princeton, Harvard, Yale, UC Berkeley, Vanderbilt, et cetera. And so, I’m just really excited to be here today, answer some of your questions, and help you all out.

JAMES: Nice. Thank you, Derrick. Sam, last but not least.

SAM: Well, hi everybody. My name is Sam Luby. I’m a college admissions coach here at Prepory. I’ve worked a little over a decade in admissions, specifically. I spent four years working in admissions at UC San Diego and UC Berkeley, where I reviewed over 15,000 applications focusing on a lot of areas of international applications, specifically. So excited to chat through tonight for all of your questions and yeah, ready to get into it.

JAMES: Alright, well with that, hopefully that gives you guys a sense of just where we’re coming from. We’ve worn many hats between us, reviewed tens of thousands of applications and obviously we’ll reveal a little bit more about our backgrounds as we start to answer your questions. Just to give you a sense though, of who Prepory is, we all have various roles here at Prepory and we are a college admissions counseling firm that really believes in a student-centric approach to the college admissions process. We have worked with, I mean nearly, 15,000 almost now, 15,000 students over our last 13 years of existence. And we really are focused on helping your students not just get into top colleges, but really help them understand the process of course, and really be intentional about the life that comes after college because we are much more interested in helping students graduate successfully from these top colleges than just merely getting them admitted to schools.

And we are obviously shooting for and do target quite a few competitive universities. Some of them you can see just here from the last cycle. We did have students attend or get admitted to all 50, Top 50 universities in the United States last year. And that was, of course, because we had amazing students, but we also have an incredible staff here that is just dedicated to helping these students get into the schools of their dreams and to do it with intentionality, with enthusiasm, and with knowledge; just to really understand why they’re doing what they’re doing. So really, tonight what we want to do, is we want to be able to give you guys a little bit of, like I said before, a peek behind the curtain, an understanding of who are these individuals, these sorts of veiled, opaque individuals that are making these decisions on the applications that you’ll work so hard on, either on your own or with somebody like us.

And so, we want to give you a peek at who those individuals are, what world they occupy, maybe tell a few success stories from our students and talk about, again, how we really address all of these different pieces, these very multifaceted, stressful pieces of the process before, of course, getting to our live Q&A. So, we’ll be pulling out some answers from the Q&A to be answered live and when we do that, we’ll also have some other questions that have been sent beforehand to try to answer those, as well. So, keep them coming as we go along. But here to begin with, I do want to give you guys a sense of who an admissions officer is, and we often will call them an AO if you haven’t heard that term before. But essentially what their main role and goal is in this whole process—when you think about an admissions officer, sometimes a lot of people will think about these maybe grizzled professionals who have been in the field for a long time, their professors or their researchers at the height of their craft. Really, admissions officers are often in their early twenties, late twenties; they’re quite young for the most part. You might move up into thirties and forties when you get up to the director level, but it is typically a younger group of individuals and their main roles as listed here are to be reviewing applications, but also to be managing territories. So, every school does this differently, but in the fall season, starting in August all the way up through sometimes October, your admissions officer for whichever university you’re applying to, they may be traveling on the road for 6, 7, 8 weeks at a time visiting high schools, doing college fairs.

I mean many of you, wherever you might live, you may have some school-designated college fairs coming up or maybe like a regional college fair. Those people often are going to be people making decisions. And the way that many universities will do this is they’ll actually have the territory manager review the applications from their territory. So when I was at Purdue, I oversaw quite a few different ones, but Missouri, St. Louis, specifically Nashville, I did some South Florida and also New England. I would often read those students because I knew those high schools. I understood the resources available to them, the areas they came from. That’s a really integral part for many universities of the application review process. The actual application itself, it sits on what I like to refer to as a three-legged stool. There are three main areas that AOs are looking at when they’re making decisions: the academics, the extracurriculars, and the writing.

Now, we’re obviously going to dive into all of these things much more. So, this is all a very high-level overview, but they will get trained, they will do practice reviews, they will have committees that they’re on to ensure that they’re correctly evaluating these different pieces, along with several others, to make sure they’re admitting a class that reflects who they want their universities to be comprised of. And then as far as these people, I mentioned this before, they are kind of wide-ranging as far as who these individuals are. They’re not going to necessarily be professionals or experts in the field. They’re often quite young, usually right out of college. I know maybe by a show of hands here, who else went right into admissions after undergrad? Maybe just me? Derrick? It’s a very common thing in the field to go in right after college to the world of admissions.

So, they don’t necessarily want to see that you are talking in the most technical, sophisticated way possible. They want a human being to come off the page. They might often have a variety of seasonal readers or regional readers that live in a big city or a big area. And there typically are going to be several rounds of review, maybe getting looked at in a first round pretty quickly, then going through a second round if they are able to move forward. And then there might actually be a real committee of people that you sometimes will imagine in movies or TV shows that are kind of going back and forth and deliberating on each individual application. The only consistent thing in the world of admissions sometimes is that there’s not really a lot of consistency between schools. There are consistencies in terms of programs they use or maybe general holistic outlines they have, but every school will do it a little bit differently.

But generally speaking, these are some of the more common trends of an admissions office makeup. Very quickly, again, I’m not going to go through all of these really heavily, but the season itself, if you want to think of it that way, we often call it the season or the admissions cycle. If you are not aware, this does go from August 1st, kind of the unofficial official opening of the college admission season all the way through a couple of key dates, you can see them here, November 1st being the first big one, in the fall where you’ll apply. So, if there’s any younger people, juniors, sophomores, you might think you have two years, but really, I mean, this gets started at the beginning a little bit before senior year actually begins. So, getting started really early can actually behoove you in quite a few ways to ensure you’re telling the best version of yourself on the page.

As the seniors, if you know a senior right now, give them a hug. They’re probably pretty stressed if they are going through this process at the moment. Their relief will come typically by the end of April or by the end of March, beginning of April. That’s typically when all the decisions are going to be returned to students based on whatever round they might have gone through. That’s when you’ll have kind of the table set to know what you have as options for the following year. And typically, you’ll have until about May 1st to make that decision. So that’s just a little bit of a preview, a little bit of an overview, like I said, of the admissions officers’ roles. We’re going to go more into this, if you see anything here that I didn’t go deeper into like “What are these different rounds?” “What do they mean, ED versus EA versus restrictive EA?” Feel free to ask those questions in the chat. And if enough people are asking about them, we’ll definitely answer them live. But the last thing I will say, too, is just this process takes a long time to build up to. So, we really do encourage you to be thinking early about, “Alright, well how do I want to approach this? What kind of programs might I want to consider? What kind of schools might I want to consider?” And then from there you can really start to craft the best narrative that aligns you with the values of those schools. So, I am going to stop here just as kind of a way point and have us jump into our Q&A. We’ve had a couple of, thankfully, Derrick, Sam, Guerdi, thank you guys for all jumping into the chat, answering some of these questions.

JAMES: I think if there are any questions that have come up that maybe you think would be good to answer first, live, we will get into those in just a second. For the folks at home, if you guys have phones, you’re more than welcome to pull them out. If you want a really specific look at your situation, your student, what you guys are going through, feel free to set up a free initial consultation. This is just a really good chat to better understand what are your specific worries about the process. So Derrick, Sam, Guerdi, just based on presenting here, it’s been a little hard following the open questions, are there any questions you think we should start with? I’ve got a few that we had sent beforehand. Derrick?

DERRICK: Yeah, so I’ll start with one that I picked out. I think mine will transition really very well into Guerdi’s. So, someone asked, “What are some factors besides GPA, honors, APs, SAT scores, that can actually make someone’s application unique?” And I think this also feeds into what you were talking about, James, those other buckets. So, there is the bucket of academics, but we also want to work with students to really build that extracurricular profile that really tells a complete robust story of who the student is. And we also want to make sure that those writing samples—be it their personal statement, be it those supplementals—are also really good components for, I often use the phrasing, for the student “to jump off the page.” The goal of those writing samples is to turn the student from applicant number 532 into Derrick. And so, those are some of those other pieces that we also work with students on to really develop a unique application.

JAMES: And you’re right, it is holistic. If you’ve not heard that word, you will hear it quite a bit. The deeper you get into the world of admissions, that does actually lead really well into Guerdi’s question about “What makes an application stand out?” And maybe more specifically, “What might make an essay stand out on the college application?” Guerdi, take it away.

GUERDI: Yes, so this is a great question. It’s actually probably one of my favorite areas to help students with, is the personal statement and how they’re able to stand out. I tell students to look at it this way. The personal statement is really probably the only place on your application where you get to tell your story. Free range. Everything else is kind of out of your control. Your grades, you’ve been through 9th and 11th grade, I mean, you can’t go back and change those grades. Your letters of recommendation, I guess you can tell folks what you want them to write about, but there’s not much control there. Your extracurricular activities, by the time you get to senior year, what you have is what you have. However, your essay is really where you get to tell your story. This is where you get to shine. And so, working with a coach to really help you bring out what that story will be is super important.

And for every student it looks different. You may have a different story compared to your peers, and that’s completely fine. I’ve seen a lot of essays around sports and experiences being able to travel, lots of different topics, so it’s really helpful to have someone guide you through that process to really understand, “Okay, what’s the story I want to tell the admission officer because I’m not going to be in the room to be able to tell them, but I could definitely write about it?” So that’s probably my advice for how to make your application, at least the personal statement piece, stand out.

JAMES: Yeah, fantastic question. I feel like, I mean, we could probably have a full hour-long session just on the writing and I’ll add something to that and Derrick, Sam, if you guys also want to impart some wisdom based on what you’ve seen in your experience. The way that I often will counsel students here at Prepory is to think of it as a conversation, and I actually have developed a silly little test that I call the “coffee shop test” to see if a student’s essay passes, specifically their personal statement. This is the big 650-word. You write it once and then you typically send it to all of your schools.

The coffee shop test is this: imagine you’re sitting across from a relatively friendly stranger—which is typically, I mean we’re all pretty friendly, but we don’t really know you as AOs. Imagine you’re sitting across from them, and they ask you whatever the prompt is or some version of whatever the prompt is. When you actually read your essay out loud—you write your essay, you draft it, whatever—you look at all the sites, you’re deep in the corner of admissions TikTok, and it’s telling you everything to write, and we’ll talk about AI in a minute, or you have AI write it—does it sound like a human being when you read it out loud? Does it sound like something you would tell somebody who’s sitting three feet in front of you or are you using this sort of verbose vernacular, this crazy language that is just all from a thesaurus, that they would slowly walk away from the table if you started talking about? That is really the test: are you sounding like a human being who they could have a conversation with? That kind of tone, that kind of voice, is not easily obtained, especially for a lot of young people. Getting their thoughts and getting their voice onto the page can be very tough. Which again, I think is one of the biggest adds of working with somebody like us who’s been in those rooms, who just gets to be a brick wall and kind of show back to you what you’re throwing at it. Derrick, Sam, any thoughts on the writing?

DERRICK: No, I think that, excuse me. I think that covers it, so I won’t take up too much time because I do think that you’re right, James. We can talk about writing a personal statement.

JAMES: We could.

DERRICK: Forever in a day. This is something that I think all of us, as coaches, can agree that we spend a lot of time developing with students. And so, could I say more? Sure, but then we’d never move on.

JAMES: That’s very prudent. That’s very prudent. Sam, I also want to, because I actually have a question for you, if you want to give some thoughts about writing.

SAM: Sure. The last point to it is there’s no such thing as a perfect essay. And frankly, going through the process is really important, but some of my favorite essays were kind of spur of the moment ideas, random ideas that students came up with after working on writing in this process for 3, 4, 5 months. And then all of a sudden, it’s like, “Hey, Mr. Luby, it’s October 10th and they have some new essay for me.” And it’s brilliant, and it’s because of that process of understanding the coffee shop scenario that James talked about and being casual about it, telling the personal story to really shine through. That’s where it comes. So, we will work with you to get to that point where you feel comfortable enough in that essay, but it’s hard, it’s challenging, and it’s something you have to get used to because we’re going to do it for cover letters when you apply to jobs or graduate school. So, it’s a great sort of tool to build here as we get ready for the undergrad application.

JAMES: Yeah, it’s a good muscle to build and any muscle building process, it takes time. You can’t just go once at the gym and then be completely ripped. So, you do have to take your time with it. Sam, since you were the last to talk there, there’s a great question that actually Amy asked a few minutes ago or back near the beginning about how she’s heard “It’s advisable to reach out to the admissions office when applying. If so, what is the recommended approach?”

SAM: Yeah, that’s a great question. And there’s also another question kind of similar, “How important is it to contact the admissions officer?” So, I’ll talk about it in general on this, and the idea is, is it advisable to reach out to the admission office or contact the admission officer? My justification or explanation to students is we should always try to maximize this process as much as possible. So, reaching out to the admission office, asking them questions, trying to discover if they’re going to come to your school or setting up a meeting with them or telling them that you’re going to do a campus visit and maybe you have some questions, things like this, never hurts. And I would also say in addition to this, that one of the questions was “How is it important to open emails, do site visits, all these kinds of things?”

That stuff is tracked, and it is good to show that you are serious about this process, that you really like this process, that you like the school that you’re going to and showing that you’re excited and enthusiastic about it. So, making those connections and reaching out is never a bad thing. And again, kind of the same idea of applying for jobs or graduate school in the future is kind of in a similar vein. Now, how to do it properly. We don’t want to just reach out and send your whole life story to them or an own personal statement email, in the email itself. And so, the recommended approach really is to, if you have an actual question, that’s a great reason. If you’re curious if they’re going to visit your high school soon, that’s a great question to ask. If you are going to go visit campus and you want to try to see if you can meet with an admission officer or maybe somebody that works in the admissions department, that’s a fair question to ask, too.

We’ll definitely help you, especially starting in grade 10 and grade 11 about how to contact admission officers and if it makes sense for you in certain contexts. But in general, I would say, yeah, you should be maximizing this process as much as you can just in a very thoughtful way and in an active way that you have real reasons and a real justification for why you’re doing that reach out. And I’ll let my panelists chime in and what they would say, but all of us kind of remember stories of certain students that made impressions, and that can be bad impressions too, like the very long email.

JAMES: Yeah.

SAM: So, it does go both ways. Exactly. So, it is a thoughtful reach-out, but impressions matter.

GUERDI: And Sam, actually there was a follow-up question to that, “How do students find their admission officer?” And I would just add, you can just go on the website of the school that you’re interested in contacting, and usually they’ll have a list of the admission officers on there as well as the contact email. And if not the individual officer for that area, you can just always contact just the admission office and they’ll connect you, too.

JAMES: It’s a great question to ask them if you don’t have a question like, “Hey, I’m really interested in learning more about your school. I can’t seem to find who my admissions officer is. Do you have a territory manager for my area?” So, nice. And the other thing to remember too, maybe I’m really bad at metaphors and you can call me out on it, but this whole prospect of the admissions process is like a game of Plinko. If you know what that is, if you’ve ever been to a carnival, you put a little hockey puck up at the top and there’s all these pegs before there are some buckets at the bottom. Every single peg is a factor in this admissions process. And you typically start to see the trend line of where that hockey puck is moving either to an admit bin, maybe a deferral or a denial, something like demonstrated interest, opening emails, visiting schools. They’re not going to be the most important factors. Your academics are definitely going to be up there. We’ll answer this in a little bit, but they could be one of those bottom factors, those bottom pegs. So, every little peg, every little factor does count towards something. So even if it is small, it still can make a tiny difference. And actually, Guerdi, there was another question asked, maybe specifically, for you. With your background, “Is there a specific score that someone would need to get to guarantee some sort of Miami, University of Miami Merit scholarship?”

GUERDI: Yeah, great question. So, there isn’t a specific score to guarantee merit scholarships. However, all students who apply are automatically considered for merit scholarships. If you apply early though, you can also be considered for their premier scholarships. And so, students are usually encouraged to apply, whether that’s Early Action or Early Decision, so that they can be in consideration for those premier scholarships, but there isn’t a set score or number to guarantee that merit-based scholarship.

JAMES: Got you. Similarly, in the vein of test scores, somebody did ask not too long ago, “What is your advice regarding test-optional schools?” This is obviously something that’s changed quite a bit from school to school since COVID, even before that, but if their child is looking to apply to portfolio-based majors, “Would it make sense to focus more on the portfolio and grades class rigor than the SAT or ACT?” Derrick, do you have any thoughts on that?

DERRICK: Yeah, so to your point, James, test optional is becoming more and more of a thing. I often tell students that a lot of this also depends on the student’s profile. To take it broad first, for anybody who’s wondering about test optional and how to approach test optional, I usually tell students that we first want to start with a baseline to figure out where the students test scores fall, and then students often work with our coaches to figure out what then makes the most sense from there based on the totality of their school list. And then to the more specific point of the question, what their majors of interest and fields of study are going to be. When we’re talking about portfolio-based programs, that depends on the major that students have in mind. And so, students work with our coaches to figure out what’s going to make the most sense once we have that baseline. If a student has a really great test score, then maybe we do submit them to demonstrate some academic rigor on behalf of the student. If the student isn’t the best test-taker, then maybe we decide to buff or increase other areas of the student’s profile. And so those are also the conversations that our coaches help students with to talk through next steps and help them understand how to navigate that process because it is different from school to school as test optional becomes more popular.

JAMES: Nice. And one area, the test scores definitely do fall into that category of academics. We talked earlier at the beginning about that three-legged stool, so to speak. The test scores, for better or worse, are part of that entire leg of the stool, the academics. One that we haven’t really talked too much about though, aside from the writing and the academics, is the extracurricular profile building. And we’re going to get into a second. I know there’s been a couple questions about this is all information that’s out there, how does Prepory really come into this? And we’ll definitely segue into that in a few minutes. But Sam, or sorry, Guerdi, I would love to know just from your point of view and your review experience, what helps an extracurricular profile stand out? And this really could be for any of you, but Guerdi, I know that this is somewhere that you really specialize in your coaching. So, what helps an extracurricular profile stand out in the process?

GUERDI: Yeah, that’s a great question. It’s something that students are always wondering as they’re preparing their materials. And I guess I would start off by saying universities are looking at quality over quantity, and so they’re looking at students within the context of their environment, within the context of what’s available to them in high school and in their communities. And so, I usually tell my students, let’s first look at that. Let’s not stress too much about wanting to get involved in everything under the sun to be able to stand out. But through the coaching, we definitely do a lot of work in trying to figure out, “Okay, how can we highlight the things that you do that showcase the skills that you are learning while in high school, perhaps the different activities that relate to your potential major that you want to pursue, or that just highlight the impact that you’re having in the community?” Universities are really interested in knowing how you are spending your time outside of the classroom just as much as what you’re doing inside the classroom. And so, through the coaching, we do a lot of work with students on just being strategic with how we write these descriptions for their activities to highlight this impact. And I guess I’ll stop there. I know my colleagues have some other input that they could provide as well, but that’s kind of the basis right there.

JAMES: Sam, Derrick, anything to add for the extracurricular side of things, maybe in your own coaching that you focus on?

SAM: Yeah, I can definitely add something. What’s really valuable I find in the extracurriculars is the local context piece or local community activism or engagement. So what does that mean, right? It can be just simply leading the biology club at your high school. That’s a great context. It could be doing volunteer work and expanding volunteer work at your local food pantry where you help organize middle school volunteers to come to the food pantry and start doing middle school students to get involved in volunteering and what that looks like. It could be connecting with local businesses in your community or maybe local issues. For example, maybe you have a really polluted lake in your community, and so you start to help with cleanup efforts and things like this. That kind of local community impact or engagement is very attractive in the application. Pretty much every university is going to really value that because they want you to do that stuff at their university.

Remember, the university is trying to choose people who will uplift the university, and it’s this idea that you want to be the face on their website as a powerful alumnus or somebody that was really successful at the university, and usually those people are the ones who make impact at the university. So, how do they find those people? The ones who are already doing it in high school. So, being able to demonstrate and communicate that in your extracurricular profile and your activities is super valuable to shout out Prepory here, we have so many examples of this. I mean, that can rattle off different examples of kids that I’ve worked with that have done these different things. And so, while maybe the answer is not apparent to you right away, or maybe you’re passionate about beach cleanup, but you’re like, “I have no idea how to do organizational efforts to actually make it a reality.” We can definitely help you. But if you had to focus on one, that would be one that I would always highlight is the idea of local impact, local community engagement.

JAMES: Derrick, any thoughts on the extracurriculars?

DERRICK: One quick thing that I’ll add specifically for my 9th and 10th graders, I always talk about the importance of also having fun. Extracurriculars are incredibly important, and I agree with all the things that the rest of my panel has said, but I know sometimes my 9th and 10th graders get really bogged down with, “I want to go into this field. Everything that I do has to be related to this.” And admissions officers also want to know that you have personality. They want to know that you have been a kid. And so, the best example that I always give is one of my students who I’ll never forget. A few years ago, we got her into Yale, and we wrote her personal statement about knitting. And so, completely unrelated to anything academic whatsoever, it’s just something that she enjoyed, and we were able to write this really dynamic essay that talked about her level of self-awareness and a bunch of other things because she invested some time in an activity that she enjoyed. And so, when we talk with our 9th and 10th graders, all of us as coaches, one of the things that we talk about is how do we balance that extracurricular profile for students and how do we make sure that you’re getting the local things, you’re getting the things in line with your major, you’re also getting some things that you enjoy, you’re also having fun. And so that’s always a tidbit that I like to throw into the conversation.

JAMES: Yeah, it’s all great information, and I think that the through-line through all these answers, about extracurriculars and about writing and even about your academics, is this air of authenticity. So many students and parents, and this is going into what someone asked about 10 minutes ago, “What are the services that we offer? What is the difference that Prepory can actually make in this process and that authenticity or finding out what is your authentic interest? What is your authentic passion? How do you like to actually make an impact in your community?” That takes a lot of time and a lot of reflection, and sure, it sounds like something you should just be able to do. “Oh, well, I can sit there and think about it.” But you’ve got practice after school and two clubs that you’re in leadership for and you have to study at some point. Somewhere in there, you might want to sleep or eat.

It takes time. And we often find that our students that come to us, they’re often short on that resource. So, using us gives them a sense of structured time, both in our sessions and with the homework or any of the assignments we assign, to really be working toward a unified clear goal so that they can always feel like they’re on track in building this authentic narrative about who they are becoming and who they might want to be. And so, some ways that Prepory can help you get admitted, just this is the overview of what we offer. We do all of our sessions one-on-one virtually, so it can be from anywhere. We’re all kind of spread out all over the states here, but these are one-on-one relationships that are being built between a coach and their student. And we are very intentional about how we pair our coaches and our students because this is really kind of unique to Prepory in this space.

We want our coaches helping our students with every part of the process. There’s no additional, this person’s your passion project specialist or this person’s your extracurricular specialist, that you have to add on as part of your package. There is a coach who is helping you through every step of this that is being backed by an incredible team of writing specialists. If you wanted to submit some of your essays of a Mock Committee Review, this is actually something that I oversee for Prepory where in the end of September, beginning of October, we run all 200 of our seniors, 200 plus of our seniors, through an intensive 45-minute mock review where we are having former AOs, like ourselves, go through the application and really give actionable feedback on, “Hey, okay, you’re a month out from these deadlines. Here are some things we’re noticing that you’re doing really well.”

“Keep doing these. Here are some things you might want to tweak before you submit.” It’s gold. And honestly, it’s one of the reasons I love this side of the desk is because when you’re an admissions officer, you don’t get to email that student and say, “Hey, I denied you because I didn’t see this coming through in your extracurriculars. Next time, if you want to try that…” You can’t do that as an AO. We get that privilege here, and that is one of the things we’re most excited about is being able to help students get that story right before it’s time to submit. We also, of course, will have check-ins for parents, including also just having assignments week to week that parents will be aware of, as well as students, to ensure that you’re progressing toward these milestones that we’ve set out. I want to actually take a second here to go back to our panel and just talk about some of their favorite students that they have worked with.

Sam, I didn’t realize you actually got called out on this page. Look at you! “The best coach I’ve ever had.” I did not realize it. I just want to take a second and maybe talk about some of these success stories and what they look like, what difference you might’ve been able to make, whether it was an extracurricular that you were able to help a student get off the ground. Again, we’re not just about the results, obviously we’re getting the results. We are having students go to the most competitive institutions on the planet, but we are just as interested, if not more so, in their success as human beings. So, I don’t know if anybody would like to start here on a student that they’ve worked with that really just stands out to them as far as a difference that you were able to make. Sam, I almost feel like you should maybe go first on this, just because you’re being called out here.

SAM: I can talk about Maya actually, specifically. So, she got into Columbia Engineering, which we were ecstatic about. It was a great program, a great fit for her. She really wanted that kind of downtown feel, so it was all really worked out. So, an extracurricular that we specifically worked on. So, we started working together in the spring of her grade 10 year, and what she wanted to do was try to create a personal project that would fit with her interests in finding wearable health technology. So, she was really interested in this idea of accessibility when it comes to smartwatches and tracking of data and especially for health concerns. And so, not being able to just create something out of nothing. She decided to first work on a research paper where she did independent research about the literature of this technology at the moment. I gave a kind of brief overview and description about how she can go about that paper, but it was kind of her initial research on all these different areas, and she ended up using it for an AP Capstone class.

So, it really worked out as far as this paper and putting it together. But what’s best about extracurriculars is when you can build on them. So, she had this paper experience and then what came from it was she actually helped coach her through this and did some cold reach outs to some of the professors and the literature, the authors, that she cited in her research paper. One of them was really excited about what she was doing and invited her to join in on his research team that following summer, so this is now the summer before grade 12, where she actually got to do some of the testing of technology that they were working on in the lab. Now, it happened to be a local university that was in her area, so kind of the stars all aligned, but it just goes to show you that working through your passions, finding some way to help grow that passion and see where it goes, and then a little bit of coaching and advice on the way of how to take the right steps to really pursue that interest, it really worked out for her. And so yeah, it was a great experience. The professor wrote her a recommendation letter for her application, and it was a very just authentic learning of passion of just how to learn more about this topic.

JAMES: My goodness, I actually did not know that. I knew you had Maya, but that’s so cool to see that that cascade was able to happen kind of organically of just getting those opportunities. I don’t know, Guerdi or Derrick, if either of you would like to share a specific student that you’ve worked with a success story.

DERRICK: So, I have, funny enough, I’m working with a student with a similar situation, currently. I was working with a student who was the type of student who had too many things going on, and I think that’s also kind of somewhat of a common profile for students where they say, “Hey, I have all the things. I’ve done robotics here. I’ve shadowed at a hospital there. I’ve cleaned up. I’ve volunteered. I’ve started this nonprofit.” And so, he was a student who had all these things going on and was a little paralyzed with how to approach his application because he was like, “Hey, I can only put 10 activities on my Common App. I have more than 10. What do I do there? I don’t know what to write about for my personal statement. I don’t know what to include for my supplementals.” And so, with him, what we were able to do is we were able to take a look at the story that he wanted to tell everybody and craft that really good personal statement. And we took a lot of time and intentionality behind how we were going to stack his extracurriculars to build that well-rounded profile. And then we sat down with each of the 13 schools at the time, on his list to figure out what story do we want to tell each of these schools? And so, as we completed those supplementals, we sat down before we gave it that final step of approval, and we said, “Okay, here’s the full story that you’re telling this school. You’re telling this school that you’re really dedicated to medicine. You’re telling this school that you’re really involved with your family. You’re telling this school that community and inclusion is really important to you. Is that the story that you want to tell?” And so, we literally sat down after he wrote every supplemental to determine what that story looked like. We were able to successfully get him into his top three, which at the time were UPenn, Duke and Johns Hopkins, I believe, and I’m fairly positive he ended up going to UPenn. We were able to get him into all three. We weren’t able to get him into Yale, so that was a bummer, but Yale was a little lower on the list for him anyway. So, I don’t think he was that bothered about it, but UPenn and Duke were at the top of the list, and we were able to get him into both of those with the stories that we told, with kind of that holistic approach to his application. Those are sometimes some of my favorite situations to work with when students say, “Hey, Derrick, I have too many things. Can you help me figure out which thing I’m supposed to pick up and do something with?” It allows for a lot of creativity.

JAMES: And you get to be really tailored with the story you’re telling.

DERRICK: Absolutely.

JAMES: And you have more things like that, depending on the school, which I’m sure is a huge lift by you, the coach, but also by the student, as well. Guerdi, anything to add before we move on a little—Before we go back into the Q&A—about a student you worked with or a piece of the puzzle that you’ve really helped have an impact on?

GUERDI: Yeah, I mean, I have truly enjoyed working with all of my students. The one student I can actually talk about—and this relates to one of the questions that popped up just now in the Q&A about timeline and whether it’s to start working on writing—I had a student last year who came to me a little bit later in the cycle, and she was a senior, also an international student, and she was involved in everything you could imagine. Amazing student in her hometown. She was doing a lot of work in the community, also academically, just excellent. But she was really stuck on, she didn’t know what to write about for her personal statement. And so, we ended up talking about a passion project that she had been working on since 9th grade. And so, that became part of her essay, just the reasonings behind why she picked that as her project, and she ended up getting into her top choice school.

It was really rewarding, I guess, just to see her come in late in the process thinking like, “Oh, I’m behind. I probably won’t be able to get into where I want because I’m starting so late.” I think that was a rewarding experience, just kind of helping her manage those anxieties, but also just staying focused on, “Okay, this is what you have done so far, and then we’ll just use, we’ll capitalize on that so that you can still come up with some really strong application materials.” And so for students who are thinking right now, maybe they’re seniors like, “Oh, it’s too late for me to work on my personal statement,” I really encourage you to sign up for a consultation if you can, because we can, depending on your context, really give you some information about what your timeline truly looks like and what’s realistic for you, depending on your goals.

JAMES: Definitely, not too late at all. We actually have quite a few people right now that are enrolling, that are seniors, and the next best time or sure the best time might’ve been a month ago or a year ago, but the next best time is now to start really getting a hold of this process for yourself. And I’ll just quickly say for my student, I actually just talked to him from his dorm room last Thursday, but it was actually a transfer student who was at a small community college out west. He had to take a year off because he had pretty severe cancer and had to go through a full year’s worth of treatment. And not only is he just, he’s an incredible person, but we spent most of our time on the writing because he really wanted to talk about something that he had gone through.

But so often, and we can all kind of attest to this, so often these tougher stories, you don’t need to have had cancer to really get admitted to a top university. You don’t need to have gone through this grand tragedy that you just put on the page and expect the sort of shockingness of the sadness of your story. We read a lot of sad stories as admissions officers, but what we often don’t see in that is the student themselves. And so, it was really gratifying being able to not only hear about his journey, but to help him reframe this idea that instead of just talking about how hard cancer was, talk about how it actually changed your relationship to something. And for him, he realized it completely changed his relationship to time because right after having it, he had to sit out a year of college.

He was thinking, “Oh gosh, I’ve lost a year. I’ve got a carpe diem and really seize the day, get super involved, never get behind, try to make up for the time I’ve lost.” And he just burned himself out. And that helped the pendulum swing back this other way to a place of gratitude and just being happy that he could go on a walk at night with his dog. And it was just so great seeing his personal growth along with the success. He’s now at MIT, he just called me from his dorm room for electrical engineering on Thursday. It was so good seeing him, but it really can be the difference between telling a story that is just, it sounds impressive, but it’s stale or hollow versus an authentic story that really allows an AO to get to know you. So, we really do try in a myriad of ways to help you find that best version of yourself.

And just from a numbers point of view, when you think about the number of schools you’re applying to, y’all—yes, you have your personal statement, that’s the big one—but you likely are going to have, if you have say 10 to 15 schools (which is about average for a Prepory student), anywhere from 10 to 15, on average you might have anywhere from two to seven supplemental essays. Some of those might be short, some of those might be long, but one draft of that essay for 10 schools, maybe on average four per school, you’re looking at quite a few different rounds of essays. It takes a while, which is why we start our juniors writing these essays. We start them a year early because we know how much time it takes. So that is another reason why we’re such big believers in trying to get intentional with this process early on and see if a coach like Prepory can really help you find that best narrative, that best version of your story.

And just some stats too, as far as the Top 20. These are kind of what the average Top 20 admit profile looks like for admitted Prepory students. This is a lot of work. This is a lot of time that goes into this. And each of these pieces, whether they’re academic, extracurricular, or writing-wise, they do take that relationship to build. They don’t just happen overnight. And then just a little bit of based on our data that we’ve been able to compile now since we started, we really are making a difference and trying to make these seemingly unobtainable schools more obtainable for our students because we’re encouraging them to lead with that authentic version of themselves. I’ll say this comes to our last slide. We’re about five to seven minutes out from 8:00 Eastern Time, but from the top of the hour here. So, we’ve got a little bit more time for a few last questions.

I know most of our questions are being answered. Thank you so much to the panel here of Sam, Derrick, and Guerdi for hopefully giving you guys a really good context. Again, scan this code if you would like, or look in the chat and see the link that’s being posted there to set up an initial consultation. This is free. This is just a conversation to even see if this would make sense for you and for your student and help you get ahead of the game and really help you kind of take the reins of this extremely stressful process.

JAMES: I have a couple of last second questions here for the three of you. Just one piece to kind of leave our folks with maybe a final takeaway. And Sam, I actually want to start with you because I think that having all of us been AOs, we often know what we like in the process. We know what somebody should do, but we are also as painfully aware of what a student shouldn’t do in the process. In this case, Sam, I’m curious, are there any common red flags that admissions officers will notice right away?

SAM: I mean, the really easy one to talk about is generated AI essays pretty much ever. Yeah, I mean, pretty much every admission office right now is getting well-versed in common flags and how to find them. And if you want to figure out what those are, ask ChatGPT, it will tell you what it is. But, truthfully, kind of avoiding those copy and paste answers. Now, does that mean you never use generated AI? Probably not, right? I’m sure it comes in different ways. It’s a tool like everything else, but simply just doing copy and paste and allowing a machine to speak for you or you lose your voice in the process, it’s a huge red flag. The other big red flag, I would say, and this one is a little more nuanced, but something during the Committee Review we can help work you out with or as coaches is just in your activities list, especially, if it’s very outlandish claims that you’re making or if the hours and the weeks spent on activities really aren’t adding up in a lot of ways, and it’s hard for us to really take them seriously, and it’s not the idea that we think you’re lying about anything or something like this, but you lose the value of it. It doesn’t allow you to bring that into context in your application review. So, now instead of all 10 activities that I’m viewing, or for the UC application, 20 activities, now we’re looking at like 12 because you have kind of misreported certain things or saying outlandish claims or things like that. So, it’s definitely something like with your coach to work through as far as how to report activities properly and being authentic in that process.

JAMES: And I think the generative AI, again, that’s a whole other conversation. We could have a full hour-long webinar.

SAM: A whole seminar, seriously.

JAMES: And we do not take a zero-tolerance policy to—I mean, there are some great applications of using things like Claude or ChatGPT in the process, maybe not necessarily the writing process, but in the college admissions process and the brainstorming process, that kind of tool should be that, it should be a tool, a thought-partner, not a thought-replacement. And we’re seeing so many students who have maybe not known how to approach this process or are overwhelmed with everything else in their life. Seeing it as an easy, fairly good-sounding essay. That sounds impressive. I’m realizing that these AI programs are pulling from the amalgamation of every average, or slightly above average, essay that’s ever been written.

It’s going to sound like every other essay that’s ever been written. And we’re reading these sometimes a hundred back to back. And just for sake, I’m not trying to get on an AI pedestal here, but on the review form for the Top 30 school I still review for, they will have a button that says, “Do you think there are problems with the writing?” And quite simply, and it flags it if you check that box, if the AO is feeling like this is way too general, it’s clearly not jiving with all the other kinds of writing that’s being done, that is a big red flag. So yeah, thank you Sam for that. Just quickly, Derrick, if you could, what happens if two students from the same high school apply, and one is well-rounded while another is very specialized in a single passion area? How might an admissions officer view those differently?

DERRICK: And that’s often a very loaded question. Of course, each school is naturally going to be different, and it’s also going to depend on the student’s profile. Students ask this question quite frequently and for that matter, so do parents, and I often refer back to the fact that it’s a very holistic review process. What I often tell students, for example, if we have a well-rounded business student who’s done all the clubs and done all the things, and we have a student who is very specialized and is looking for a BD/MD or a medical school program, being specialized for a med school program or a BS/MD program makes a lot of sense for that student profile based on where they want to go compared to a student who is interested in business and looking more well-rounded, might be the key there. To some of the points that we’ve made earlier about students who are kind of in 9th and 10th grade, that’s usually a really big start to the conversation to say, “Hey, the kids at your schools are doing other things. What do you want to do?” Because that’s going to dictate if we want to build a very specific, very niche type of profile, or if we want to build something that is a little bit more well-rounded, that leaves room for some other pieces as you go into applications.

And so, often I tell students we have to make sure that we’re comparing apples to apples. And in my experience, 9 times out of 10 we’re not. But you have to have that full picture first to be able to do so.

JAMES: Yeah, and it’s again very specific to each individual situation. If you’re a student that’s a nationally recognized athlete for a niche sport, they’re going to consider you in the context of that experience—that you probably were dedicating most of your time to that sport and maybe you didn’t have the opportunity for as many well-rounded or out-there involvements—that other students would typically have. So that’s again, another reason why a coach can be so helpful is because they can get creative with how to build that narrative and show that context to AOs. So, it really is because of the totality of the things that have to go into this. Letters of rec is another big one. And if you have any questions about letters of recommendation, again, please feel free to set up an initial consultation here, but we are at the top of the hour, so I do just want to really be respectful of everybody’s time.

We will stick around for any last-minute questions you might have, but really, thank you. Thank you to the panel here who took time out of their evening to join us and to answer these questions. We’ll stick around here for another five minutes or so for any last second questions. But thank you all for spending some time with us. We hope to hear from you soon. We really love talking about this and helping dive into everybody’s individual situations just to see what kind of program here at Prepory would be a good fit for you to achieve your educational goals. So, thank you to everybody. If you have to leave right now, please feel free to do so and then we’ll stick around just for a few minutes to see if there’s any other last second questions submitted. So, thank you all. Give folks a second to catch a breath, maybe type a last-second question.

JAMES: I really do feel like all of these, oh, can I answer? Oh, I want to answer that question that just came in. How do colleges see “Project Lead the Way” classes? I feel like I have to answer this. Being a former engineering lead at an engineering school, they are supplementary, they are peripheral to the overall picture. It’s not something that’s going to hurt you in the process, but if it’s the choice between choosing a Project Lead The Way, which is kind of like an engineering class, or a core math or science class, choose the core math or science class every time. The same thing will often go for medical, any sort of medical or nursing or health experience that takes you away from core science classes, you really want to make sure you have the most rigorous core classes possible. And then Project Lead The Way, if your schedule allows, it can be an add-on to that, but it’s never going to be the thing that is determining your academic success in the review process. So, I just saw PLTW and I saw that all the time. Any other questions in here, Derrick? You have one about honors college.

DERRICK: So yeah, someone was asking “Could answering an honors college essay hurt you and is it worth the risk?” That is a bit of a loaded question and depends on the candidate and the student’s profile for sure. And I know that y’all have been hearing us say it depends on the student’s profile, but it truly does because it depends on how you measure against the university. Is it a reach school? Is it a school that is kind of targeting a fit? Is the honors college something that we should be aiming for? Is it not? Those are kind of the questions that go into this. Strictly, if you have to kind of put this in a box, could answering an honors college question poorly hurt you? Yes, it can. Because a bit about James’s point earlier, if you have a great rest of your application, your personal statement is great writing, your supplement is great writing, and then your honors college essay is terrible writing, as an admissions officer reviewing your application, I’m going to think that somebody else wrote something somewhere. And so, we don’t want to do any poor writing at all, which is why for our coaches, we treat those honors college questions as supplemental questions, and we help students with those honors college questions just as much as we do everything else to make sure that that application is good all around.

JAMES: Yeah, great clarification, too. Yeah, we are open to all summer program essays, scholarship essays, obviously supplemental essays, personal statement essays, honors, college essays. I think I’ve done one of each of those in the last couple of months. So, we really do tackle each and every one of those. We have a couple more. Lori’s asked a couple of really good ones here back-to-back. Sam, I’ll let you answer the first one about “Can you explain why it matters if a lot of people from your high school apply to the same college?”

SAM: Yeah, that’s a fantastic question. So, I was also the head of university counseling at a high school. So, this is a really important thing. The idea being that a college or a university can’t accept everyone from the same high school and it’s just a matter that they want to have diversity of applicants. They want students from different high school contexts. And so yeah, if it’s a really popular school, if you’re in a Boston area school, Boston College is going to be really common. And so, a lot of kids are going to apply there. And so, does it matter if a lot of people from your high school apply to the same college? In your individual context, it certainly might, especially when it comes to decisions about Early Decision if you want to make that choice. And the fact of the matter is, colleges and admission officers, when we review applications, or at least I did this at UC Berkeley, I would review by high school a lot of the time. So, I would see all 14 kids from the same high school that submitted. And then I can sort it by GPA by test, well at Berkeley you don’t do the standardized scores, but AP scores or a lot of different ways. And so, it is important to consider if they’re applying to the same college or not. Does that mean you shouldn’t apply? Not necessarily, right? But it’s part of that strategy of creating your school list and what that looks like.

JAMES: To tack onto that too, and then I’ll answer Lori, the other question you put in there, when I was overseeing the college of engineering at Purdue, at the very end of the EA cycle, the Early Action cycle, we would have these big validation reports that allow the leads to each go through their individual college and go high school by high school to make sure that those decisions are consistent. And Sam did mention GPA, test scores, AP scores, but we also will have columns in those validation reports about: how is their personality fit? What are their values? How is the quality of the writing, the quality of the activities, do they show leadership? Are they bridge builders? These sorts of values that are important to these universities, that also comes out on that report. So, it’s not as if I just got to get a higher GPA or a higher score than everybody else in my class applying, you want to be up in that competitive range, of course. But those other factors, that’s where they can make the difference because somebody who might have a slightly lower GPA or applied to a different major, they might have some of those more qualitative factors that are more competitive or more desired by the university.

JAMES: And I think to Lori’s other question here, “Is there a benefit to applying undecided for a spot at a college?” I feel like I could also have a whole session on just that question, but I want to really focus on the word “benefit” that you put into that question because undecided should not be a backdoor and universities are very, very cognizant of this, that applying undecided is a backdoor into the university, especially for universities that do have direct admit. They don’t have you come in undecided as a class and then decide later when you are applying to a school and the option is there for you to select undecided, you have to be decidedly undecided.

You have to be kind of deciding between a few different routes, not just, “Yeah, I can’t pick any of them, so I’m just going to have this kind of all-over-the-place application that doesn’t really have any narrative threads going through it.” You have to have a bit of a competing vision between, “Hey, I’m down to these three. It’s business, biomedical, engineering, or communications.” And I should be able, when I see that in your writing, I should be able to see in your extracurriculars in the classes you’ve chosen some threads that point to that. “Oh, I can see why you’re interested in communications and also engineering and maybe a little bit of business because you started your own thing.” You have to have that intentionality behind the decision to go undecided, even if, yeah, you really don’t know. There are probably a couple of sectors or majors or groupings of majors that you could show as interests based on the alignment of your application.

I’m a huge advocate for applying undecided. I wish more students went in undecided, but it typically means they should have somebody like us helping them to become intentional about why they’re going undecided. It’s not something we just recommend as a method of ‘backdooring’ into a competitive university because they’ll see. They will see that, and they will know. So, good question. I think that is all of the questions for now. I’m going to go ahead and call it there. Thank you all so much for coming in again. Actually, I’ll hopefully get that back up really quick. If you, if anybody else is here, and you would like to schedule any sort of consultation with us, it’s a free consultation just to give you a sense of how we might be able to help you and your very specific situation. So, please scan this QR code. We’ll put the link in the chat again but thank you all. Have a great night or a great morning, wherever you might be, and we hope to talk to you soon through a consultation. So, take care everyone and have a great night.