EP 019: Top Things to Do This Summer as a Junior Applying to College [Part 2]
In this episode, As a follow-up to the previous episode, Thomas highlights the best tips to follow during your application.
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In this mini-series, Thomas talks about the top things to do as a junior student applying to college. It is an important time because the students start to feel that their time is coming, and several questions are now coming to mind.
As a follow-up to the previous episode, today, Thomas highlights the best tips to follow during your application. Usually, August 1st is the day when students are allowed to start their applications, but you don't get any extra points for being too early. A lot can happen during summer, so living all the experiences before writing about them is the way to go.
When writing an essay, certain things like punctuation, conciseness, and grammar are fundamental. In parallel, writing more doesn't always mean writing better. Tune in to learn more!
Key Highlights
Learn what you need to do between now and the fall.
How are you presenting yourself to the university?
Recommendations are fundamental during this time.
It's helpful to have a list of desired schools.
Get to know the university if you pay a visit.
Important aspects to consider during this time are your grades and leadership skills.
Take advantage of summertime to organize things.
About Thomas
Thomas is a parent and alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was director of admissions and financial aid at Wharton School. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to create the best possible MBA class.
Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities, he works with diverse and underserved communities to help them become successful college students. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for parents and applicants.
Related Links
Apply to be a guest: www.thomascaleel.com/apply-for-podcast
Follow Admittedly on Social Media
TikTok: @admittedlypodcast
Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
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Hello, and welcome to the admittedly podcast. My name is Thomas Caleel. I'm the former director of MBA admissions and financial aid for my alma mater, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this podcast, I don't promise easy answers or quick fixes. But I will use my decades of experience to help you achieve your education goals. Now, let's get started.
This is part two of our What to do as a Junior with your summer vacation, talking specifically about the summer between your junior and senior years as you're approaching application season, the following fall. It's a very important summer. And in part one, we talked about things that you should and can be doing to maximize your chances for a successful admission season in the fall. What we're going to talk about today is what happens when we hit August 1. And why August 1, why is this an important date?
It's important because that's the day that the common application opens. So you can set up your new account, you should definitely go in the first couple days of August and set up a new account. Get ready, and start to familiarize yourself with the Common Application. What you can do what I recommend that you do first is spend some time just nosing around the application, and go and figure out how to add schools. There's a vast list of schools and you can only pick 20 applications in the Common Application.
But if you have one or two schools or even four or five schools that you know that you want to apply to go ahead and put those in my in your my school's tab, just familiarize yourself with that. Look through the different tabs in the main body of the Common Application. You'll see there's a lot of data entry. And there's quite a bit of data entry in some of the supplements as well. And as you add schools to your school list, one of the nice things you can do is go in and look at those supplements.
But we'll get to that in a minute. I strongly suggest that you take some time and just start doing the data entry. The data entry takes far more time than you think it will. And it's a bit of drudgery. But the nice thing about that drudgery is that it gets your mind kind of geared up and locked in on what we need to be doing for applications. Keep in mind that when you're doing the data entry, this is not something that you necessarily you don't need to know what your EA or ED school is going to be right. This is just the main body of the common application.
So you can go in, and fill out the information about your family, your parents, your address all of those basic data points that are important. They take time. And really this is very important. That sounds like a minor point I know. But spelling, punctuation, capitalization grammar matter. Here, if you are sloppy, and you're not checking your work, you're not taking your time and you're misspelling words, you're not capitalizing street names or courses, things like that, that absolutely will count against you. Maybe not will but can count against you in the admissions process. Is that fair? Not necessarily, but also, you know, college is a time and place we're going to be under time constraints and a lot of pressure. And they don't want you making careless mistakes. It says a lot about how much you care about the process.
One thing you can start working on a little bit earlier, if you'd like is your activities list, you generally get 10 activities. And you're going to rank those in order of importance in order importance in terms of how much time you spend on them, and how important they are to you and the strategy that you're articulating, right?
So if you are positioning yourself as a STEM major, you really want your STEM activities to be up at the top of that list. Now they naturally should be because you've spent one would hope the most time on them and gotten the most involved in them and generally have the most leadership responsibilities in them. But be thoughtful, because the order in which your activities are listed says a lot about you as a candidate says a lot about your interests, and says how a lot about how you spend your time and focus. And that needs to translate over to the strategy of the rest of your application. So take your time doing that data entry.
Some of you will apply to schools that require you to input all of your courses and grades into the Common Application. That is a tedious, time-consuming process. And so you want to get started on that as soon as possible. Do not leave this until the last minute I promise you once school starts you will only get busier and busier. Now is the time to just carve off a couple of hours a day, sit down, put your headphones on, or whatever, however, did you work best and just do this data entry is very important as well. You can have parents or a friend double-check it and go behind you to make sure things are correct. Things are in the right order. Things are spelled right. It's very, very important. All right. And be honest, with these questions. If you're first generation mark, first generation, right, there's, these are not pejorative questions, they're not looking to trip you up, they're really looking to get a sense of who you are.
Now, the next thing you want to do is step back and say, Okay, what is my strategy? And we've talked a lot about this, right? But what is my strategy? By positioning myself as a journalist? Am I positioning myself as a biologist, a chemist, a physicist, right? A creative writer, an artist? What is our, what is our thesis to the school? Why should they care about us? And then what you can start to do is you can start first by looking at the common application essays. And that's generally a 650-word essay. The last two years, they've had questions about how COVID affected you. And are there is there any additional information that you'd like to share with us? We'll talk about those as we get closer to application season.
But again, we're looking at how we break up our story across all of these data points. Interestingly, a lot of the schools now are accepting there's a particular form that the common app has provided that says, tell us about some responsibilities you have outside of school and extracurricular activities, because what universities realize is that many students might work might have to take care of family members might have religious duties or household chores or things that take up a significant amount of time. And there was really no place in the common app to talk about that.
And so students would have to kind of hack around that and put it in the Additional Information section or see if they couldn't weave it into their common app essay. But again, when you only have 650 words, every word that you put in talking about something else detracts from your overall message.
So I think it's it's an amazing opportunity for students to really express different sides of their life, different commitments, different things that they care about, and are invested in involved in, that they otherwise didn't really have a chance to talk about and explore.
The next thing you want to do is you want to go into the supplements, and you want to look at what questions the schools are asking. And it's very important, as you're going through, to start to kind of try and fill in some of the data points and check the majors that you think you might want to apply to. And the reason I say that is that many of the supplements have hidden features.
So if you indicate that you want to be a liberal arts major, a certain set of essay, prompts might pop up, if you indicate you want to be a STEM major, again, a different set of essay prompts might pop up, this is not the case for every single supplement. But it's true for a lot of supplements. And so you don't want to be surprised.
Certainly, I've heard from students who are surprised because they leave this to the last minute they're doing the data entry. And all of a sudden, it's a night before the deadline. And two essays pop out of nowhere when they input their desired major. And that is not a good feeling and usually does not lead to a very good outcome. So all of that is changeable until you submit it. So don't worry about the answers you're putting in, you're just kind of playing around and seeing what happens when I do this. What happens when I do that?
The other important thing is when you read a supplement, a supplement is actually a marketing document for the school. The school is saying this is what we value, these are our values, right? This is what matters to us. So I want you to think about that very carefully. And then as you are doing additional research on the schools, you can let that inform your research, right?
So if a school, for example, says tell us about you know, go to our website, look at this list of 30 or 40. questions or thoughts, pick one, and write an essay about it. Those essays and those thoughts will tell you a lot about what the school values. If we look at a very famous example is the University of Chicago, and we'll talk about the University of Chicago, probably in a unique one-off podcast because their application is so different from everything else.
Their essays are so different and what the University of Chicago tells you is to look, and be creative. Make up your own essay topic, pick up an essay topic, I don't know but show us your creativity of thought. They want to see Are you an original thing? or do you have a voice? Even if they don't agree with your voice? Can you present your argument in a compelling way in a way that is creative that grabs their attention?
And I would say of all the schools, the University of Chicago probably has the essays that students struggle with the most. But the irony is that they are the simplest essays because they ask, Who are you in a very fundamental way that allows you to express that answer in the way that suits you best, I always love the University of Chicago essays. I love what they're trying to do with that. And it definitely is a good gating mechanism that weeds out the students that are not willing to make the commitment to answer these questions and therefore would not be a good fit for the University of Chicago.
So now that you've got your basic data entry done, you're looking at the common app prompt, you're looking at the prompts from the supplements, and you can start to figure out what your strategy is. And you can start to say, okay, look, there's an opportunity to talk about this aspect of me here. I'm going to talk about this aspect of me here. And I'm going to synthesize this aspect in the Common App essay.
The one thing I would tell you about the Common App essay is don't get too caught up in the questions.
A lot of times I see common app essays that are ineffectively written because the student is so focused on answering that question, that they forget why the question is being asked, and the question is being asked because the university wants to know more about you.
So don't respond to their prompt, tell them what you want them to know. And there's always that prompt that says, pick a topic of your choice. And in most cases, I urge students to pick that last topic because it gives them the freedom to frame the narrative to their advantage. You're not reacting to the school question, you're posing your own question that if you pose it correctly, gives you an opportunity to put yourself in the best light, and communicate those values, those ideas that you deem most important about yourself and your strategy and your candidacy, and convey those to the school on your terms.
So now, what do we do, if you know the school that you're going to apply to early or schools if you know what your strategy is, and if you're clear about your path, you can start to write. And what I usually recommend is to map out all of the essay questions and start to jot down notes, right, your sticky notes, use different pieces of paper, map it out on your computer, whatever works for you, right, but map out all the different things you want to talk about, make sure that they all tie together that they make sense as a whole. Don't view the common app as discrete from the supplements. They're all viewed together when you're reviewing the application. So all of those things have to tie together.
And you're going to have to tweak your common app a little bit, depending on what supplement and what school you're applying to. Because some schools like Stanford or Harvard have many, many, many, many questions, and you really get a chance to build yourself out. Other schools might have one question or two questions. And so you have to say, Okay, those things that I can't include here, how do I make sure I include them in my common app, somehow, please do not use the COVID essay, if it's still available in the coming year, or the Additional Information section. To simply write more, more is not your friend, effective writing is your friend.
So if you feel that there is an extenuating circumstance if you have to address a bad grade, or trouble that you got in, or a mistake that you made, or a special opportunity that you got to take advantage of. And there's truly no other place in the application for you to discuss that, then certainly use that additional information essay. But what I see too often are students who say, Oh, look, I can write another essay here. And that essay not only doesn't advance their narrative, it actually hurts them.
Because again, we get to judgment, right? We get to does the student have good judgment. And if you're simply using every square inch available real estate, to cram more information into this application, you're not being smart, you're not being effective, you're not being strategic. And so it's very, very important for you, to step back and say, does this add value? We talked about this with recommenders. Does this recommender add value? Do they provide a perspective that the admissions committee could not possibly get from any other data point? All right.
So we don't just want to generate letters from alumni of the school. We don't just want to write additional essays about things that are not you know, critically important to them understanding our path and our journey. Two very important caveats. Okay. Please do not start writing your essays before August 1. Why? Well, because some universities will go out beginning in the summer, and some of them will actually publish their upcoming essay questions. And they'll say, for the next upcoming application cycle, Here are questions, okay. In that case, if you are 100% sure that those are the essay questions that they're going to ask, you can start working early, that's fine.
Now, I hesitate to start essays early in the summer, because you still have your summer experience to go through and you're not sure about the growth, the opportunities, and the experiences that are going to happen during that, that you may want to incorporate into your essays, you're being a little premature there. The other danger and we have this happen every year is that students are in such a hurry to get their essays done. That they write last year's essays.
And we had this issue last year with one student in particular, who was very kind of recalcitrant and did not want to go revisit their essays. And at the last minute, you know, after pushing, pushing, pushing, they came back and said, Oh, my gosh, I'm putting my trying to put my essays in the supplement. And those are not the essay questions that are being asked. And that's not something you want to experience, quite frankly.
So take your time, and wait for the essay questions to come out either on the school's website or through the common app. And even if you have them off the school's website, I would say August 1, when the common app opens, go in there, dig around, and make sure that you have the correct essay questions because the schools can always change, they can change their mind, they reserve the right to do that. And they might put a different essay question in there.
The last thing I want to talk about is that you don't get extra points for being early. Inevitably, every year in August, the newspapers or news sources will publish something about a student who submitted their common application on August 2, they open it right up, wrote all the essays boom and submitted it. And I can't think of anything more self-defeating than that.
Because when you submit your application, it just goes into a queue and the schools don't even look at the applications until the deadline of that November 1 deadline. They're batch they're downloaded. They're put in the system. And then they start reviewing. Right? Nobody cares. You submitted on August 1, nobody cares if you submitted on October 31 Or even November 1, right? What matters is the quality of your application.
And what happens if you let's say submit your application at the end of August? What happens if you win an award? What happens if life happens, and you have to miss a couple of weeks of school, there are so many things that can happen between August 1 and November 1 or early January when the regular decision applications are due. Why submit early when you get no benefit for it, I could see if there was a benefit, but there's not.
So take your time. Try not to submit on November 1 for early decision and early action. That's not ideal. The servers are straining under the load. It's just a lot of pressure, right? Ideally, we want to submit three, four days two to three days before the deadline which gives you plenty of time to address issues. Maybe the credit card processor isn't working whatever it is want to be cool, calm collected, and ahead of the game, but not so far ahead of the game that we are doing ourselves a disservice.
So that having been said, You know what to be doing in school now, to prepare for the summer. You know what you should be doing during the summer. You know what you should be doing on August 1 When the application drops, we're going to get into much greater detail as we get closer to admission season about all of this, but for now, trying to send you out, finish up your junior year and head into the summer. informed, well-armed, and ready to take this process by the horns. Thank you.
Thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to the admittedly podcast and download this episode. I welcome you to share your thoughts and questions with me. You can find us on social media at admittedly podcast. I look forward to continuing our journey together.
