SAM LUBY: Appreciate it, Alison. Thank you. Appreciate the introduction, and thank you for the time tonight. I’m really excited to talk about this topic. As Alison mentioned, my name is Sam Luby, and I’ve been doing college admissions work for a little over a decade. This is my thirteenth undergraduate cycle. So I’ve worked as a head of university counseling at an IB school.

I’ve worked as an independent college counselor like I do with Prepory, and then I’ve worked in admission offices, mainly UC San Diego and UC Berkeley where I’ve read a little over 12,000 applications. So I’ve kinda seen from both sides, which is really important, especially as we evaluate applications and kinda determine what’s a good, good steps for us and good things we should be doing as we prepare for the admissions process. One of the key things is summer, and so that is the title of today’s conversation, what we’re gonna go through.

So what high school students should do this summer to strengthen college application, that’s what I’m gonna be talking about. And so let me talk a little bit about the agenda of how we get into this. So first, I’ll start off by explaining how admission officers evaluate application components and specifically looking at the summer pieces, experiences that are valuable to admission officers versus sort of, like, resume fillers, how to build a realistic summer plan. We’ll show a couple examples as well.

And then lastly, I’ll talk about how the summers and their summer involvement is gonna shape your application materials and specifically essays and the activity list. So, we’ll go through all of that, and do send your questions into the group chat as we’re going along. We’ll try to find some time at the end for a live Q&A as well too, but let’s dive in.

ALISON KALESHI: Alright. So

SAM LUBY: our first topic, how admission officers actually evaluate summer application components. And before I show the next screen, I am gonna point it out. On each screen, you can see this little QR code in the corner. That is the scan to meet with our team. That is how you can schedule an initial consultation. And so then you can come in with your specific questions and scenarios and be able to kinda learn about how to get support in this application process. So, yeah, so how admission officers evaluate summer application components?

So first, we have to actually define, like, what is a summer activity. Right? So very obviously, it happens during the summer. So that is… That’s gonna be what we wanna do and talk about as far as the summer activities happening during summertime, but it can have a lot of different things. It can meet one of these or multiple pieces criteria in order to count as a summer activity.

So it has some sort of major and career alignment, clear community impact, incorporating joy and dynamism to it, hard and soft skill acquisition or refinement is happening during these summer application or summer activities. And it usually comes from some sort of institution. So something is hosting the summer activity, right, the summer involvement that you’re doing. It could be, like, a university or something a student created. And then lastly, it could be sort of like a family responsibility or a clear independent initiative.

And so what I’m trying to do with you all to understand this is that, like, a summer activity can be anything. There’s a lot of different ways to look at what a summer activity is, and so it’s about building a good plan to include valuable stuff for your particular summer plan and then figuring out how to communicate that. The impact on admissions as far as what summer activities you’re doing is just paramount.

For the most part, admission officers understand that during the school year, you’re quite busy focused on your main job, which is your grades, your GPA, and your performance in the classroom. And so, you know, you get… You are expected to be involved. You have to do extracurriculars. We know that these things are all important. But when we get to summertime, it sort of turns up a notch.

We definitely wanna see, you know, a clear involvement that you can point to certain things that show and demonstrate your development as a student. So it’s an early opportunity for you to demonstrate alignment with your major. It can prepare you for additional coursework. I really like this piece where if you’re using your summers, you take, prereq classes or maybe gain an additional skill, that’s awesome. It can show a really good just sort of intensity and, appetite to improve yourself that can look really great.

It’s the best chance to explore and identify your college majors overall. So you have an early opportunity to align with it, but also to actually, like, explore and figure out if that makes sense for you. And what I try to make that clear is that sometimes your summer activity that is major related ends up being not in the major you end up applying for, right, which is perfectly normal. That happens as part of the exploration process in determining, you know, what you should be doing this summer.

So that can still be useful in your summer activity list. And, really, it allows students to discover specific goals and research questions or issues of concern that they can incorporate in their essays. And that’s the piece that, like, goes a little… Level deeper with your summer activities is that it’s very much an opportunity to demonstrate, like, you know, what you’re interested in, your abilities, your, academic pursuits or intellectual pursuits or professional pursuits. But more than that, it gives you a chance to sort of answer the why.

Like, why is this important to you? Why is this valuable to you? Why is it the direction you wanna be going into? And so, yes, sure, you have a business related summer activity you’re doing, but what’s the angle that you’re doing it? Right? Well, maybe you can do something in summer activity to really discover and demonstrate that you’re really interested in fintech, and that’s what you wanna do for business. Or you wanna do social entrepreneurship and community development, and that’s what you wanna do with business.

So, yes, it’s to understand more about your major, but really to start demonstrating and creating that angularity, that narrative of what you’re interested in doing in the future with that major. So let’s look then. We kinda have an idea of, like, how admission officers are looking at it. It’s very broad of what it can be, but we’re looking for some themes and some values that are coming from the activities themselves. So we can look at then some options.

We’re trying to give you some low, medium, and high understandings of what is, like, a good summer activity. We’re doing this to give you a sense of the expectation that’s coming from the universities and the admission officers and then what your availability or opportunity is to fulfill that. Low ones do not mean that, like, they’re bad or wrong or you should not be doing. They’re just not gonna have as much value as the high related ones.

And the reality is a lot of the high values that we’re gonna talk about, you first have to do some low and medium ones to be prepared to have the prereqs to have the competitiveness for those high value activities. And so this is not sort of like, okay. Well, you know, this is what I’m gonna do. This… Only this one summer and try to shoot for these things. The ideal scenario is you’re building out your summers in high school with these various, low, medium, and high opportunities.

And so let’s dig into each one. So low impact activities, vacations, service trips, job shadowing, and pay to play. I wanna start first with vacations. We… Summer vacations, we very much want you to be with your family. Take those annual vacations. They are helpful. They can have decent essay material. You could go visit a school or a tour while you’re doing it. And so, absolutely, like, that can definitely be worthy of your summer and make its way in your application in some way. Right?

But that shouldn’t be the only thing in the summer. And vacation is… You know, summertime is meant to put in effort and work and demonstrate that you’re, you know, trying to improve yourself. And if you’re taking vacations for the entire eight weeks, that’s hard to do, which I think is hard to do for anybody. Right? So it’s good. Don’t delete them. You need to have vacations that is valuable, but it can’t be the bulk of it. Job shadowing is something I wanna stick out here.

It’s a low impact activity because a lot of the times, you can’t actually evaluate what the job shadow experience was like. Right? We all know that job shadowing could be, you know, very intensive. You’re following a doctor around as he does rounds. Maybe you get to sit in on the surgery. You’re doing admin and paperwork for him, and helping to make sure, you know, that week or two, you’re really adding value to what they’re doing and literally shadowing them as they go about their day. Right?

And then there’s other job shadowing where you are with your cousin Rick who has a finance job. He’s three years out of university. You’re there for, you know, two hours a day for four days a week, and you find out which coffee everybody likes. Right? There’s various degrees of job shadowing, and that’s why it is… It’s a low impact in a lot of ways. We want to see more out of it.

Again, you can sort of work with your coach to determine how to make it better and how to communicate in the right way and find ways to make it increasing, but relying specifically on job shadowing is challenging. The last one I wanna point out here is this pay to play summer programs piece. It is… It’s low value but can be important for your application. And when we talk about, especially with low value, you have 10 activities on the…

Your activity list for Common App, and these activities should not be in your top four or top five. And so they’re lower value ones. Right? Still very useful. Pay to play summer programs can be useful in a lot of instances, especially for those who don’t plan their summer well. They can be a backup. But, again, those have their own deadlines in February and March, so you can’t just specifically rely on them. And…

But most of the time, because academic performance isn’t a requirement for admissions or it can be a little shallow or not eligible for credit, we see this as not being a super important value added activity. I like to think, and I think this is true, is that a lot of these programs can provide great stepping stones, great progression points for more higher value things in summers to come. But it’s certainly…

We wouldn’t want to say, oh, I did this pay to play summer program, and this is my, like, main thing on my application. You wanna be building off of that. And as I get to the medium ones, this is exactly why, like, working with a coach is really important so you can sort of determine… Or a professional. So you can do…

Determine, like, what you should and should not be doing, what’s a good time to be doing this, when’s it not a good time to do this, and how to invest your money properly, right, especially for these pay to play programs and know, like, what’s the ROI on what you’re actually doing. So let’s go into these medium impact activities. Hopefully, pop up. There they are. Okay. So now we get into a little bit more value things.

Unpaid internships is absolutely gonna be a good one here because usually if it’s unpaid, it means that there’s some sort of, selectivity process associated with it, that there’s multiple people trying to get it, and it’s going to be a thorough learning experience. It does have similar issues with job shadowing. You know, we could just call a job shadow an internship and slap that title on there, and it, you know, it’s going to still be that low value experience if you can’t really talk about the depth of your learning.

But if proper, you know, meaningful responsibilities are assigned, it can be super strong. It can teach you a lot. It can be really useful. And so we do like the idea of unpaid internships. For summer programs, like, the precollege programs, sometimes even pay to play programs, if it’s subject matter specific, especially STEM camps we see a lot or, like, leadership camps. These can be impactful because it aligns much better with your coursework or project experience.

The previous lower value ones of pay to play programs when they’re just more introductory or just very surface level experiences, you’re just not gonna have the evidence of learning, but the subject matter specific summer programs can be very useful. Again, it depends on your context and your individual situation and what makes sense from an ROI perspective, but they can provide a lot of value. And so, this is, you know, why it can… I can’t stress this enough.

Working with a coach to help determine your summers is really important because then you know what’s gonna fit for your context, what you and your family are comfortable with doing and what makes sense for you. Volunteering. This one is probably the biggest swing, right, as far from low value to high value. We put it in medium because of that variety it can really have. Schools like volunteering. Universities like volunteering. It shows community impact. It shows a lot of values.

It shows where you wanna put your efforts to a particular cause or association. Right? As you can kinda see in the description, it’s low impact if it’s just like a school requirement. So, like, the state of Massachusetts, you need community hours in order to graduate. That’s not gonna really move the ball. Or if you’re like… You have fifty hours of community service, but it’s broken up into, like, seven different volunteering activities. It just loses its oomph, right, because you can’t you can’t have a story behind that.

But it can be super high impact if you, like, exceed the requirements, if you got… Went from, like, volunteer to now you’re, like, training the volunteers, and so that can absolutely change. And I’ll tell a story here. I had a student who was really into political science, got into Princeton. He’s a fantastic student. Really, really great guy. And his number one activity was volunteering at, like, the local soup kitchen, the little… Local food pantry at his house.

And he had been doing it for, like, four or five years, and he got to a point in tenth grade where then he started volunteer… Like, training the new volunteers, and then he was part of, like, the recruiting process for volunteers. And then he was doing inventory management, and it grew into this strong responsibility that was very organic. It’s awesome. Universities eat that up because it is impacting your community. It’s showing progressive responsibilities. It’s showing care and value for a particular interest, and then you have a clear story line.

Right? And that’s… And these local volunteering spaces, they need students to want to do that, to volunteer and grab responsibility and, like, learn from that experience. So, again, volunteering, you can swing low to high, and so it really is just gonna depend on your experience. There we go. Last two, leadership programs and sports. I talked a little bit about this with the summer programs already. Leadership programs are great. NCL, NSLC, don’t ask me the acronym, National Student Leadership Conference, Congress. I don’t know. Look it up. You guys can Google.

And it’s a great program. They do a lot of different academic, variations in different parts of the country. It is a great baseline, a good starting point to kind of get into leadership and especially learning about particular topics. I would say it’s most effective for grade nines and tens or rising grade tens, rising grade elevens, but very useful option as well too. And then sports. So a lot of us play sports in the summers. I absolutely still want you to be playing sports.

I think it’s great for a lot of different reasons, and there’s a lot of research out there that talks about the benefits of sports. For my students that are super into sports and they’re, like, two or three sport athletes, summer becomes about sports, and so we have to be really creative then with what else you can do with that sports. I don’t wanna take away, you know, summer league or the tournaments or showcases, right, especially if you’re getting recruitment.

So we don’t want to, you know, erase your sports from your summer by any means, but we then have to be mindful and strategic of like, okay. Well, what are the things? Could you do a week long NSLC program, right, instead of that or do volunteering in your free time? Alright. The high impact activities, paid employment. It’s kind of sad to me in a lot of ways that this is not celebrated as much anymore. Paid employment is fantastic.

High school summer jobs, you know, working at Hollister or working as a lifeguard or working at your local landscape company. I did all three. That’s why I brought up those examples. And… But having some sort of work experience is super valuable. So there are clear responsibilities that are quantifiable. You relate to the admission officer in the university because you better believe those millennials did summer jobs growing up as well too. And so you very much, kinda resonate with them of doing a summer job, showing progressive responsibility.

One of my kids who got into UVA this year, his number one thing was working at the boba shop. And so the boba tea shop and, like, he… His personal statement was about that. He did an activity statement about it, and it was just a great… Because he talked about, like, having to work with other people and customer service and actually, like, accounting and, you know, counting the till at night and stuff like that. And so very much paid employment is celebrated. Selective summer programs. They can be fully funded.

Even the ones that are paid can still be incredibly useful if they’re selective. A lot of times, they have some sort of scholarships, or financial aid available, and the courses are usually credit based. They’re very rigorous. They’re really a great opportunity to get meaningful relationships with professors. You can usually get letters of recommendation. Selective summer programs are huge. It’s just a great signal in the admissions world of, like, your ability because it’s sort of like you’ve already been assessed. Right? It’s like, okay.

Well, this admissions program accepted the student, so they must be a pretty strong student. So we can believe in that variable or that communication that they’re giving off. So absolutely love the idea of selective summer programs. I swear I didn’t put it three times. There it is. Okay. New stuff. Advanced or supplemental coursework. And, frankly, if your summer… This is a lot for my sports kids. Right? If your summer is doing some supplemental or advanced coursework in some area of interest, fantastic. That’s a lot of high value. That looks great.

It develops some sort of subject area of proficiency. You also are showing a lot of initiative to pursue certain majors. Maybe your school doesn’t have a certain track for a certain interest you have, and so you’re able to take some sort of supplemental or advanced coursework. I mean, just with online learning today and especially the embracing of, like, ex… Extended education or community college education from universities in the higher education space, there’s a lot of ways to do advanced and supplemental coursework, and we, celebrate that.

That’s a great thing to have. It’s a great thing you can talk about, in your application. It’s very high value for a summer. And then passion projects or self started community impact. This is a great way to fill one of our three buckets of intellectual curiosity, community impact, and joy. These are the extracurricular themes that we really wanna see in students. Passion projects absolutely can do that. They develop… They demonstrate leadership. It’s potential to con… Be a future contributor.

It gives you a lot of, time to put value into something, and so starting early gives students to kinda build these portfolios and projects, and it showcases a lot of your individuality. If you come through Prepory, you might hear this story. I tell it a lot for my students, especially we’re starting with. I had a student who, one of his hobbies is he really liked making salsas, and so he would make salsas for his, like, close family members and do it for, like, Christmas and stuff like that.

I was like, that’s awesome. Have you ever done, like, salsa competitions? And so he looked into it. I mean, he… This guy, like, grows, like, the tomatoes and the onions in his garden and, like, researches salsa varieties and different peppers and gets seeds, like, mailed to him. Really into it. Right? And so he did salsa competitions, and then it was like, okay. Well, what about, like, selling your salsa?

And you could, like, see the business side of it and, like, go to the farmers market and, like, have a little Instagram going on. And so he did it, and it was awesome. And I was helping him scaffold, like, a business plan for it, and he got really into, like, making the salsas, and he started, like, distilling it to make hot sauces. And it absolutely is a passion project. And you are demonstrating your hobby. You are showing your values and your interests. You’re develop…

You’re progressively demonstrating, you know, your impact, right, in different ways and showing, you know, the growth that comes from that. And that was a great… I mean, he was doing it throughout the year, but the summers would be when he would do, like, the farmers markets and the competitions and, like… So that’s an awesome high impact activity we love to see. So there’s a lot of different ways to look at summer. We have these low, medium, and high different examples. I can’t stress this enough.

It is gonna be so different depending on your context of how old you are, which part of the country you’re in, where you’re living within that part of the country, your socioeconomic status and situation, the resources at your disposal. And there’s a lot of ways to build really strong summers regardless of where you fall on those varieties that I just mentioned, but you gotta put together a plan. So let’s talk about that, how to build a realistic summer plan.

So this is just a timeline of one of our actual students, which is really great. And you can kind of see, like, that they use their summer to gain more interest in a particular direction. Right? So the summer before tenth grade, so rising grade 10, they started doing, advanced coursework. So, you know, not like a formal program, but started taking advanced coursework. I was able to get some college credit, which looked really good. They did some standardized test prep as well too.

It’s a… It’s not gonna show up on your activity list, but it’s a very useful way to spend your summer. And so when we’re, you know, working with students, we want them to holistically think about their summer. Right? Not just the activities, but what are you doing with test prep or what are you doing with your upcoming academic year? What are you doing with college research or the like? And so that was a great kind of introduction to, like, a really strong summer.

And then had some different things for tenth grade, was applying to a bunch of summer programs and trying to figure out what they were gonna do for the summer. And so then the summer before eleventh grade, they did an NSLC program. They used that program to find inspiration for a community impact project, and then they started creating their own community impact project, which was awesome.

So they used the summer experiences to sort of motivate them to create this project, rolls into grade 11, and grade 11 is when it starts to get a lot more real. Right? So they, made sure that the project kept growing, that they had some additional things to actually get it off the ground going into the end of grade 11 and then the summer and rising grade 12. Standardized testing is still a piece of this especially because that’s just gonna really come up as you get ready for the application season.

Still, I should have added this the summer before twelve. Still working on application pieces. Right? Those are still important, but then was able to get an internship and research opportunity. And so adding these things together and seeing this progression of summer planning is just so useful for the students to be able to then… When they’re talking about their narrative, when they’re talking in their essays that they’re writing about their experiences, can point out different places in their summer that allow them to build to where they are today.

So underclassmen summers are the best ways to plan ahead and get ahead. Underclassmen summers mean that we’re, like, rising grade nine, rising grade 10, and rising grade 11 summers. That’s just gonna be your key time to get a lot of the prereqs out of the way and start building an interest in the direction you might have. It allows you to seek opportunities that allow for, like, deep learning that really make you understand, like, are these your interests? Right? You know, there’s many times where we have a student.

He feels or the family feels that they have a very specific direction. Medicine is usually the culprit. Big surprise. Everybody’s like, yeah. We’ll do medicine. That makes a lot of sense. So you do some sort of medicine related activity, and you find out you don’t like blood. Okay. Well, that’s a that’s a key component of medicine. So you use the summer to do, you know, a two week Stanford pay to play premed program, which is cool.

And, like, it’s a low value, maybe low to medium value, but it was super valuable in that it allowed you to understand the direction that you wanna go in. Maybe it’s not being a doctor, but, like, about the health care field in general. Maybe the business side of it was really interesting, or maybe you got to learn about all the computational mutations that are happening within medicine in the medical space, and you’ve got… You wanna see, like, bioinformatics or, you know, biomedical engineering, whatever it might be. Right?

You’re using those underclassmen summers to really discover then what you’re interested in and making sure you’re on a good path. The self initiated projects are always going to be more distinctive. And, again, if you have a great paid opportunity or you have a… You get into a wonderful selective summer program, I… That has a lot of value, like, that stands on its own.

But the idea of you creating, like, a project or you have a clear community impact initiative like the political science kid that I mentioned, that’s just gonna be the highest value because they’re gonna stand out. They’re gonna be more distinctive and also more flexible. I think that’s something that’s kinda undersold here. If you do a selective summer program, like, that’s your summer. It’s four to six weeks or, you know, three to six weeks of minimum wage program.

You get into, paid opportunity as well too if you’re doing forty hours a week or whatever it might be. And so, you know, we really want to encourage, like, the projects and planning that out early and understanding what kind of community impacts you can have early is gonna be really useful. So using ninth and tenth grade to really explore and seek and get more focused over time. For my grade 11 students out there in the audience, you absolutely can do some cool stuff this summer.

A tick-tock, right, where, like, you gotta figure this out soon. Right? But you do have the space to still make this summer, worthwhile, and you can you can find some good stuff out of it. Alright. So getting into then, like, how is a summer gonna actually shape our application, the personal statement, the activity list specifically. So what the main thing is first, like, seeing those activities themselves, right, to understand where they might be because that’s gonna shape your activity list. Right?

In order to demonstrate, you know, I have a clear activity list and a clear, you know, involvement in the summers and extracurriculars that you might have, you have to find these opportunities and place them in here. So, you know, there… You can take notes here, screenshot, or whatever you might need to do. A lot of hosted programs or precollege program activities, and there’s a lot of resources on the Internet to find this. I think, it’s almost too much information in a lot of ways. Right?

Because it’ll tell you there’s all these different programs going on that are doing all these different things. Pretty much at this point, every top 100 university has some sort of precollege initiative that they’re running, and then there’s a lot of, like, private companies that do stuff as well too. And that’s where, you know, it really helps to have someone give advice on, like, is this a good program or not a good program? Is this a competitive or more of a pre… Like, a pay to play program? And it…

It’s not always very clear. And I… I’m not gonna name drop universities, but there are very selective universities that have pay to play programs as their summer options that they’re just not gonna be very in-depth. And then there’s programs at less heralded schools or not, you know, maybe not even top 50 or top 100 universities that have amazing precollege programs that are very competitive. So, yeah, it’s… There’s a lot of opportunities out there where you kinda have to sift through all the noise.

And opportunities through your high school, you absolutely, in your high school, can use your high school to help develop a summer plan. So if it’s from a class or from your teachers or part of a club or activity on campus, just because school is out doesn’t mean you can’t do stuff for biology club if you want to, right, especially if your teammates are interested in doing stuff together. So very much wanna, you know, make it clear that, like, your high school is a great place to figure this out.

Local community options or even, like, local, universities, community colleges, especially nonprofits, local businesses, connecting with all of those groups, especially regarding your interest and how that might work, is a great way to, find opportunities for the summer, even with graduate students or professors. So it does take a lot of research to kind of figure that out and plan it out and determine if you have all the resources for it, but, it’s absolutely a great thing to do. Now how do we show it?

So essays, activity list, recommendation letters, interviews, and then all the supplemental material. I’m putting a lot out there because there is a lot of ways to show summer involvement. Essay is probably the easiest. If it’s your personal statement or a ton of supplemental essays, you get a lot of chances to write about your summer story. The activity list for the Common App, we have 10 of them. For the UC, University of California, we have 20 of them. Very, very clear ways to talk about your summer. Recommendation letters. So you… Hey.

You’ll have a college counselor, your in school counselor letter. They could definitely talk about it. You need to talk with them to make sure they know what you did in the summer and why it was valuable. Right? You can even have one of your teacher recommenders talk about it. I don’t really recommend it. It could… Again, it kinda depends on context, but they absolutely could talk about it in the recommendation letter if it made sense. And then you can have outside recommenders.

So I was talking about with, like, professors writing recommendation letters or your boss from the lifeguard, pool that you lifeguarded at, the manager of the food pantry that you volunteered at. Those are great recommendation letters, and, absolutely, that can show your summer involvement. Interviews. A lot of schools do the interviews, either pre application or post application interviews. And those would be great ways to demonstrate depth and direction. And then supplemental materials in general. Resumes, abstracts, if you get to do published work.

Some schools let you share a website, the additional material… Additional information section. There’s a lot of ways to kinda show additional things that you’re doing in the summertime or expanding on those things, and so you need to take advantage of really showing what that summer involvement looks like. I wanna show one example, on their community or, their activity list so you can kind of see, like, their development over the summer and kinda understand then what that looks like for them. So, I just did a screenshot of their activity list.

We build these activity lists with our students. You… We have pretty clear templates and making sure we have a good way to communicate everything. But this is detailing the rising grade nine, rising grade 10, and rising grade 11 summer. So they use, rising grade nine and rising grade 10 summer to be a camp counselor. So you can see that at the bottom. They did the Special in New Jersey. That was awesome. That’s a great way to demonstrate, you know, things that you’re doing in the summer.

You’re young, so you’re not expected to have a ton of hours or a ton of responsibility. But being a camp counselor is great. It’s a great thing. It’s a paid opportunity. We really, really like that. And as we can see then in the rising grade 11 summer up above, they did two additional things, which was really cool. So they had, a volunteering program that they are working with. So they volunteered to work there.

They were doing, basically, they’re creating, like, profiles of students in need and trying to help them get into formal education and help with fundraising for them. And so that was a great experience where they, you know, got to learn about a cause and participate with it, but also get some technical learning from it. But then the NASA program was really great for them. So they did NASA’s bioinformatics program. They were really able to dive into this area of bioinformatics science and what that means and especially in aerospace context.

So it’s just gonna be a great, major related implication. And then the rising grade 12 summer, which is definitely gonna be the most important one. You can kinda see the stuff they were doing during the school year, but it’s also happening in the summer. So, you know, you don’t just stop playing basketball or, you know, being part of a community involvement. You gotta incorporate those things. But they had some really cool stuff where they specifically worked at Princeton for the summer. They had a research opportunity.

It was pretty much all summer long, rising grade 12 summer, very specific, chemical engineering, research experience. And then they actually kept working on that during grade 12. That’s what you’re seeing as the second one. So, you know, they kind of key lead up. Right? They had they had a pretty good, like, summer before. You know? They’re doing camp counseling, then they started working with a volunteering project. Now they have, like, a clear major related activity, so they have some community impact.

They have some leadership, and now they have clear intellectual curiosity. And then the last summer really go all in, get into a really selective program, that allowed them to really demonstrate that, like, major interest. They’re not getting into this Princeton program without the things they previously did in other summers. They have to demonstrate that sort of, preparedness and prereq, opportunities that you’d have to see in earlier years. Okay. Last thing that I… I think last thing. There’s… I’m looking at the clock here. Oh, yeah.

I’m gonna talk about common early planning mistakes, but I do wanna talk about research specifically. And mainly because summer is a great time to be doing research. You have… You don’t have a class schedule. Right? So you have a lot more flexibility with research. We like to point this out as well too because research can look very different in different contexts. So, it can be an academic or class related project. Your…

For IB kids, your EE or AP Capstone or an assigned project, especially if you did it during class and maybe you kept working on it over the summer or you, like, modified it in order to get ready for a journal publication, whatever that might be, that’s awesome. That absolutely can count as, a summer research activity. If it started as schoolwork and then you’re continuing in the summer, super cool. You present it at a high school conference or, like, a science fair. Dope. That’s super cool. That absolutely counts as research.

Independent projects, and there’s a lot of, I shouldn’t say a lot. There’s a handful of companies that do research related programs where you get paired with a mentor or you’re part of a group of students with a mentor doing independent research. There’s some really good ones out there. I like Pioneer and Lumiere. That’s why I put them on there. But there’s Polygence. There’s other good ones as well too. Again, it would really…

I would really recommend, like, working with a professional to determine which program you should be doing because there’s pros and cons and the ROI and everything related to that, but they are valuable. They are useful to be sharing in the application just because you have to pay to be part of this program. It can be a very worthwhile and intellectually stimulating experience. Precollege programs. There’s a lot of precollege programs related to, research specifically.

BU’s RISE program is really famous, and then the RSI program at MIT is maybe the most selective summer program in the world to get into. Very great option. There’s other ones as well too, others that are not as selective, but research den… Tends to be part of selective summer programs. Research assistant roles where you’re working with a professor or graduate as… Students, and purely independent projects. So maybe you’re doing literature reviews. Maybe you did a data analysis with publicly accessible data. There’s a lot of different ways to be doing that.

And then community based or virtual research projects. Like, you can very much do… Yeah. And the example that I have below is an actual student where the farmers market in her community, they were hiring, like, social media interns and basically, like, high school students to do their social media and Instagram stuff.

And they made their whole thing into, like, poll questions that were asking and actually collecting data from the vendors and then the participants who came to the farmers markets and did data analysis and had these, like, great data visuals for the farmers market board at the end of the summer of, like, here’s what went well and didn’t go well and what your audience is saying. That absolutely is research.

She completely, like, I mean, I’ve helped her, like, determine what kind of research she should do and how she should set that up. But she… You know, they didn’t ask her to do that kind of thing, and that very much can count as research. So a lot of things in the summer you can do related to research. It’s just a great way to demonstrate intellectual curiosity, and research is pretty fun. So good things. Okay.

Last slide, from me is the common early planning mistakes, and this is what we hopefully can end with. There it is. Okay. I want to end sort of our present, my part of the presentation of, like, the of the contents of the summer programming with this slide simply so you can help make sure you don’t fall into these issues. So overprioritizing low impact activities. I gave all those low ones. If you think just you’re gonna job shadow all summer with, like, your uncle that’s a dentist, think again.

We gotta have more than that. Right? Over specializing, and, you know, I get it. You love biology, and, like, that’s what you wanna do. Spending every single summer related to biology related things, it can be a little too specialized. Right? You wanna show variety with what you’re doing. You wanna make sure you have other interests or things to be sharing. And so, I very… I applaud the intellectual curiosity in going for that, but you gotta have more than that. You really need to coordinate with your…

Either, like, your college counselor or your independent counselor or your teachers to understand your coursework opportunities. Those fill up real quickly. So if you were like, oh, yeah. You know, my school requires me to take precalculus in order to go to AP calc as an eleventh grader. I don’t have to wait till grade 12. I’ll do that. And then you find out all the precalculus programs already filled up. Right? That’s what we mean by, like, that’s an early planning mistake is coordinating with your teachers and counselors.

I have a student in New Jersey, and we’re talking about it right now with her school of, like, which one she should be taking this summer so she doesn’t have to take Spanish for the next year and understanding which ones wanna be available and how quickly they fill up, which is January. So, it is very important to consult as very early… As early as you can. Not following up with teachers and mentors post experience. So what do we mean by that?

Like, you have this great summer program, this summer experience, and then you just never see them again or talk to them again. And we would not encourage that. We would want you to be, like, reaching back out to them, you know, strategically so maybe you can get a letter of recommendation. But more importantly, so you can make a connection with that person, you can lean on their expertise in the future, and it’s just a great sort of skill you wanna build as you’re learning how to network with people.

And then can’t stress this enough. The easiest early planning mistake to make is not using grade nine and grade 10 summer as well. If you are just like, okay. Well, I’m gonna just do something really awesome this summer before grade 12, and that’s what I’m gonna do. You’re gonna limit yourself because a lot of the times those programs or those opportunities to do things, they need you to have done stuff earlier than that, and showing sort of a history and, like, positive progression of summers just really stands out.

It’s such a great way to see, like, oh, they really dove in and use their summers effectively in, like, a clear thread line, and it was a really interesting narrative and build. So do get on that. You do wanna be really thinking about your summers, really as early as going in rising grade 10 for sure.

But even rising grade nine, like, is a great way to get ready for high school and to figure out, you know, what you are sort of interested in and get you thinking about clubs and high school involvement. So I do like that when my rising grade nines can do that as well too. Okay. So we’re gonna talk about now how Prepory can help. So I will let Alison take over and kind of wrap us up here, and then I can get a glass of water, which will be really nice.

But, yeah, we’ll be here, and, yeah, I’ll let you take it from here, Alison.

ALISON KALESHI: Alright, Sam. Very well said. To all of our visitors and the questions we have in the chat. I do want you to know you’re asking wonderful questions, and we are going to answer many of them during our Q&A. But let’s first talk about how Prepory can best help. We’ll go ahead and move to the next slide.

SAM LUBY: Oh, I have to do it.

ALISON KALESHI: I was reading

SAM LUBY: the question. Sorry. Sorry.

ALISON KALESHI: No problem. Thank you. So who is Prepory? We are a premier college admissions counseling firm, and we have nearly fifteen years of success in guiding students and families in navigating every grade level from eighth grade all the way through senior year of high school. And since 2012, we have supported more than 14,000 students towards their highly competitive admissions goals. And cycle over cycle, Prepory reflects excellent admissions outcomes to show for it.

And one stat that we’re incredibly proud of is ninety-four percent of our students cycle over cycle are admitted into at least one or more of their top five choice schools. And when we say top five at Prepory, it is specific to your student. So it’s going to be about aligning with each individual student’s goals and aspirations rather than just a number. Our work is ultimately about turning your competitive dreams into results during the most competitive time in admissions history.

And we’ve spent years really developing and helping students stand out in the admission cycle. And one area where we absolutely provide immense impact is ensuring that our students really have a highly differentiated summer. You’re going to receive a significant amount of support as we are developing your profile altogether throughout the year at every stage. And I’ll go ahead and talk a little bit about last admission cycle.

Our students were accepted into every Ivy League, every Ivy Plus, every UC, and every school from number one to number 50 on the US News and World Report list. And we can go ahead to the next slide. I see, a couple more questions that are coming in, and I do wanna share with you all. We are excited to answer them tonight, but we are also very excited to meet with you and talk about how enrollment at Prepory is going to best support you.

Across the board, we have various, programs from grade level to grade level. All of our programs specifically include hour-long one-on-one advising sessions with your admissions expert, and you are going to be paired with a highly dedicated individual with a deep level of expertise in this space.

Every member of our team is a member of the National Association for College Admission Counseling, and at Prepory, you are going to also have the admissions committee review team providing annual profile review and deeply evaluating your profile as well as unlimited essay and resume revisions. This applies to our upperclassmen that are applying to university as seniors, but also to students across all grade levels because these summer program applications require significant support for the application developments, and you have a full team here at Prepory.

And at every step, our parents receive thorough notes after every session, and there will be parent check-ins throughout the year. In the corner of the screen, you’re going to see the QR code. You will be able to meet with a member of our enrollment team, whether it is me or a very close colleague on our team. We are excited to meet you and answer your more niche, questions and discuss how enrolling in our programs is going to best support you.

And with that, we can go ahead to the next slide. That is our final slide. You’re going to see the QR code, and I encourage you to go ahead and scan it so we can talk more about your specific students and the program that’ll best support them. And for those of you who have to drop off early before our Q&A, thank you for joining.

And right now, we are going to go ahead and transition into answering a couple of questions, and, we are going to do our best to answer the questions in the chat. But, if your question is more detailed or requires more attention than what can be provided this evening, we really encourage you to scan that QR code, and we will discuss more deeply this week. But with that in mind, Sam, I see a couple of questions. I can go ahead and kick us off.

At Prepory, we really do an excellent job of differentiating between pay to play and selective programs. Your admissions expert is really there to do that research specifically. You’re never alone in doing this work and having to find the programs. You’re ultimately enrolling within a program that is there at every step to guide you, and then we support you at every stage of those applications. I am seeing some course questions specifically. I received, one that is talking about whether to take, accelerated math during the summer.

And I do encourage that math progression, but I also encourage the student to show a sense of mastery within that class because it’s going to affect them down the line when they’re receiving those SAT math questions. So you wanna make sure that the courses that you are taking in the summer are best for your student, and we guide you through understanding what are the right supplemental courses to advance that math and science progression. And with that in mind, see a couple of questions about shadowing.

When it comes to shadowing a professional, this can really vary from field of interest to field of interest. So for a BS/MD applicant, for example, they are going to have two hundred and fifty plus potential hours of shadowing, to be a competitor within that applicant pool. So this is going to be, again, very specific to your area of interest, and we would love to dive more deeply into this question during your initial consultation. I am seeing another question about being a counselor at a summer camp.

For many students, this is, a strong way of showing your leadership within your community and gaining work experience, but I would argue that it’s also a very common experience for students to be a camp counselor. So if your goal is those hyperselective university programs, we do encourage you to have other opportunities in the mix that are merit based and also aligned with your area of academic interest. That would be my strongest recommendation.

And then for students that are competing, I’m seeing many more coming in, so we’re trying to make sure we get to you all. For students that are competing in, different and various athletic and, music engagements. We believe that this shows that sense of dynamism and creativity, especially when you are participating in highly competitive piano opportunities. But if your student is focusing on an area outside of music, it is important to really kind of, manage that time well so that your entire profile is not solely, enveloped by the music engagement. Alright.

Let’s see. I’m going to

SAM LUBY: Good one.

ALISON KALESHI: Yes. Go ahead. Yeah. A couple. Yeah. I was like, I’m gonna take a quick breath. Just trying

SAM LUBY: to type this, Matt. There’s a lot of questions in

ALISON KALESHI: here. I see you. You’re doing a great job.

SAM LUBY: To this one specifically is the idea of, like, the paid research stuff

ALISON KALESHI: and, like,

SAM LUBY: paid research programs and, like, the value of research and everything like this. I had put this guy… Written this comment out, and I do believe in it. And admission officers, college, school based counselors, independent counselors, we’re all gonna have a variety of opinions on where… If this is valuable or not, right, and how good or not good it might be. Ultimately, we do summer activities. We do extracurriculars to prepare for college, to demonstrate college readiness, to get ready for what’s to come after high school.

And, of course, we do it for fun and make the world a better place and all those things. But, like, from the individual perspective, it is to improve ourselves and be ready for college. Doing paid research opportunities can absolutely… And I… When I say paid research opportunities, you are paying to do the research opportunity. That can absolutely demonstrate college readiness and build that college readiness.

The relationships that I’ve seen my students make with some of these mentors or really understand more about what the research process is like or get really nerdy about a topic that they never had the chance to in their regular coursework, but get to do it in the research, is fantastic. And the reality is we’d be like, okay. Well, why don’t you save, you know, $2,500 and use, you know, generative AI and your own independence to do your own research project.

And I… You know, that can work, and, you know, there’s guidance there and support there that makes sense. But the reality is not every student can be that managed to do it on their own and wouldn’t really know where to start and wouldn’t get the same value as opposed to working with a mentor on it, right, and having that assistance and support in that different places.

So, there is value in doing these types of research programs because you get that mentorship, you get the direction and support for a particular academic area of interest that you have, and you really get some good stories and evidence of where you wanna go next. The last thing that I’ll say on it, though, is that context absolutely matters. If that is going to break the bank for your family to pay for something like that, then you absolutely should not pay for something like that. It is not worth it.

You need to determine the ROI that makes sense for your family. And the reality is this is not available for everyone. A lot of those programs do have financial aid and scholarships you can apply for, so it’s important to look at that. But, you know, it’s not something you have to be doing. Right? There are other ways to do research if it’s on your own or if you’re doing cold outreach to professors or if you are applying to a fully funded research program.

But I do have to say they’re not evil or, like, negative programs or by sharing that, that’s a, you know, like, a black mark on your application. That is not the case. You can tell I’m a little passionate about this topic.

ALISON KALESHI: Absolutely. And I… I’m listening in. I’m absolutely excited. And, honestly, if I was in high school, I would have loved to have you, Sam, as my coach, and that is just not how the universe works. But with that in mind, I see a really great question, from Shayana. What do you think about National Merit for the SAT, and how do we approach that? From my perspective, I think it is, something that is a wonderful achievement opportunity.

It is something that when we take the, PSAT in October of junior year, that is the, ultimately, the qualifying test, and then, those scores are ultimately going to be converted into a selection index. So your preparation for that exam is very, very important. As an enrolled Prepory student, you do receive prenegotiated discounted rates with our long term test prep partner. I do wanna note that there are cutoffs. So it’s state by state. Those requirements can vary.

But, roughly, we want to see that you’re in the top 1% of each state as a student in that semifinalist status. And I believe it’s around 15 to 16,000 annually that gets selected. And then semifinalists, they must submit a qualifying score to advance to that finalist status. It provides massive opportunities for college aid. So if that is something that is important for you, I would definitely recommend it. And with that in mind, I see some questions about students asking about course progression.

And I know we always say this, Sam, but it really depends on your specific major in terms of which courses should I be taking. If I’m targeting Ivy League schools, a general rule of thumb is that you are performing, very well within the context of your environment. You’re taking highly rigorous, honors and AP courses. Many students are, in AB and BC calculus, as a senior.

So it’s very context dependent on your specific profile, but I wouldn’t just decide that because I’m not pursuing a math major that I shouldn’t have rigorous math courses because that oftentimes is not the case. These admissions offices, they want to see that you are challenging yourself and you’re performing well in those courses because they indicate how you’re going to perform on campus.

SAM LUBY: Yeah. Math is a great signal for that. I don’t know, Alison, if we wanna use this as the last question. You had Mark here gonna answer it about the merit based summer programs for students interested in the humanities. It’s a great question because it’s really hard. There is not a ton, especially for younger students. Yes. Of what I would call a merit based summer program.

And so, you know, for a student that’s interested in, like, law or philosophy or, you know, social science even or something like this, and there may be precollege or summer programs that may make sense for you, but it might make more sense to instead, like, volunteer on a political campaign for the summer, right, or, you know, find a paid job opportunity instead or look into doing independent research or online coursework. The reality is that there’s just not gonna be a ton of younger student humanities based summer…

Merit based summer programs other than the two that you mentioned, but I’m certainly working with your coach to kinda determine, okay. Then what else is there available? What should I be creating and kinda setting up for myself?

ALISON KALESHI: Absolutely. And that, is very well said. And what I would say too is for our families that are tuning in tonight that have specific answers or questions that they want answered and want to learn how enrollment at Prepory is going to best support their students, I highly recommend you scan the QR code. It is a complimentary consultation with myself or another member of our expert enrollment team, and we want to thank you all this evening. Thank you, Sam, for doing such a wonderful job this, evening on really getting into summer programs. We’re excited to support you all. We encourage you to scan that QR as there are deadlines approaching for these exceptional programs, and we look forward to supporting you, and we will see you all very soon. Alright. Have a good evening, everyone.

SAM LUBY: Thank you. Have a good night.

ALISON KALESHI: Goodbye. Bye.