Ep.10/ 1:1 Coaching Session [Part 3]: How to Start Thinking about College Admissions as a Freshman
In this episode We continue our CONVERSATION with a high school freshman and we talk about what a freshman in high school should be doing over summer break.
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In this episode of Admittedly Podcast, Thomas takes us through a coaching session with a participant who is currently a freshman. Thinking about college admissions ahead of time can make a difference when it comes to analyzing all the options and alleviating the pressure.
Part 3 of this coaching session discusses what a student should do over the summer. There are a lot of courses, extracurricular activities, and summer jobs available for high school students, and colleges really value this type of commitment.
These summer activities can also make a difference for students to find out what they like to do, their passions, and which interests they would like to keep and turn into a career.
Key Highlights
It’s normal to feel pressure as a freshman when thinking about college.
A good college is fundamental, but it’s not a guarantee of success.
Why is it important to think about college ahead of time?
A lot of students have the same thoughts and concerns by this time.
It’s ok not to know what you’re passionate about as a freshman.
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
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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.
Welcome back to the admittedly podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Caleel. And this is our third and final part of my most recent live coaching session with Maui, a ninth grade student from California. Maui and his parents have been asking for guidance about his high school career. And he's been understandably skeptical about why he should start thinking about college admissions now, when he has so much time ahead of him.
We've talked at length about his academic choices, his extracurricular activities, and today we're going to go into summer, what should he do in terms of programs, activities, and jobs. Things that can help him discover who he is, and help craft a compelling narrative for when he's ready to apply in the fall of his senior year.
So you bring up some very, very interesting themes here. You know, we're not showing the video of this, so they can't see your mother. shake her head, when you talk about the relevancy of a 400 year old English author. All I can say, Christine, is that we had pretty much this exact same conversation at our dinner table two nights ago. I know, look, I'm a liberal arts guy. I loved, I love to read. I love Shakespeare, but I get it, right, I get it. And I think the great thing here is, is that, you know, I will talk with students who love their English and history classes, right? And really can't stand math. Math to them is this foreign language that they can't possibly figure out.
Okay.
And so what this means, of course, is that each of us, each student really needs to figure out what their path is. Okay? And it's very important. You really need to, and it's great that you've already started kind of picking these threads apart and realizing, okay, I like math, not just math, but what do I like about math? I like the progressive nature of it. I like how it builds, I like how it grows, I like the challenge of it. Right? And that's great. That's, you know, our, everybody's mind works differently. And that, and not surprisingly, knowing your parents, you know, this, this kind of, you know, a very mathematical creative structure approach is something that works for you. And that's great.
And so I would, I would encourage you to do is absolutely embrace that. Okay, if it, if it turns out that that's what you like, is you're challenging yourself, you're getting into progressively harder math classes. Bingo, right? Look for opportunities there, look for opportunities outside of school, math teams, to even be a TA for one of your teachers, doing, you know, kind of advanced math, mathematics work over the summers. And you might find that, that this kind of mathematics work leads you into different fields. Okay. And you can explore those as well. That's great.
However, the same conversation I've had with my son with many, many students over the years, is that does not give you free, free hand to ignore your other studies. Right? You can't unless you are some absolute savant, who figures out how to solve some previously unsolved theorem. You can't roll up to your university, your college admissions, and say, “Hey, I know I got C's and everything else, but I got A's in all my math classes because math, rock on right”. It does not work like that.
Why? Because most US universities, US education system is based around this concept of Liberal Arts. Okay. And if you when you start looking at universities, with very, very few exceptions, they will tell you, we have a liberal arts ethos here and you will take cloud, you will need to take classes across the university because they really believe firmly in the fact that a whole student, an educated person needs to understand problems from a variety of perspectives. Right? If you're just laser focused in on one way to solve a problem, you might miss some really interesting opportunities there. So they want you to take literature, classes, music, art, language, all of these things, right, sciences. You might need to only take one class in that discipline, but they really want to just kind of stretch your mind a little bit. Okay? And so, we have to really, really have the discipline, right even if you and it's okay to say I don't care for Romeo and Juliet, totally fine, right? But what they want to see is, do you have the discipline to still do well in those things that do not interest you particularly, right?
And as you go further and further along in your, in your academic career as you move into the higher, you know, later years of your university, and then perhaps go on to graduate school, right, that scope narrows. So if you go to get your master's degree in applied math, they're not going to make you take, you know, geopolitical world history in there, right, you get to just kind of put your pocket protector in and, you know, get calculator fired up and go to work. Right.
So it's that discipline, though, over time that we really need to pay attention to. Right. And you will find, I know this sounds strange, but you will find that, that discipline that focus that creativity of thought, in history, and I know high school history, I love history. I'm an absolutely history, not I hated high school history, because you just have to sit there and memorize pages of dates. Right? When was the Reformation? When did? Okay, great. That's, you know, and I completely understand and most students do deal with, like, how does memorizing a list of dates helped me? And that's, I think, a broader conversation around education. But just keeping that in mind, right?
So as you go through your your high school career, you'll be able to look at what your AP balances, like, what AP courses am I taking, etc. And it's important to keep in mind that it's not a race. So there was a few years ago, and the schools actually had to weigh in on this, where students were taking as many AP courses as they could, right. Just making themselves absolutely miserable. It's okay to not, if you say, “Look, I don't want to take AP Lit, AP Lang, you know, A push, those those classes, those don't interest me. But I'm going to take, absolutely, I'm going to be taking like college level math courses. You can balance out your transcript like that. Okay, but even if you're just taking, you know, senior English, you have to pull that A, if possible, you need the discipline to pull that. Okay.
Yeah. So, the other the other tip that I would give you on the Shakespeare, if you do get jammed up on the Shakespeare, there actually have been some pretty good movies made of Shakespearean dramas that help bring some of these stories to life. Right. Some of them are a bit of a slog, yes, but some of them actually are pretty well done. And I've found for myself, for some of our students that are struggling with some of these works. Sometimes when you see it in movie form, you realize that it's basically a universal theme that you've seen in 20 other movies or read in, you know, five or 10 other books. And you get past that language barrier that sometimes is really hard to kind of slog through on, on paper. And the story reveals itself and you, you can say a little bit “Oh, okay. Yeah, I get this”, right. This is, I get what's going on here.
London: Playslays are meant to be watched live, not read in the book.
Thomas: Exactly, exactly. You and your brother can can do a little improv there. I've never seen somebody's eyes open so quickly with that, with that suggestion. All right. So we're, we're at an hour I want to be respectful of, of your time. We've covered a lot of ground. Any questions from mom, dad? Maui.
Maui: So you mentioned that summers were, the question I have, what should I start focusing on doing over the summer. To like, boost my process application process, instead of thinking like, he's a freshman or sophomore having a free pass. What should I start focusing on?
Thomas: Okay, so a couple things there. First of all, I would walk back the term Free Pass, right? It's not a, you know, you can't just do anything that you want. But you're allowed to experiment a little bit more. Right.
So I think, I think you've got a couple good things going on this summer, especially with junior lifeguards. I think there's a lot of life lessons and very valuable learning and, and discipline that goes on there. That are self discipline that goes on in that that is gonna be really good for you. Right. And then plus, with the work, I think you'll have a very full, very interesting summer. What I want to do is pull you back a little bit from what should I be doing? Right? Because, and I'm not picking on you, this is a very, very common conversation that I have all the time, right. Well, what courses should I take, what extracurricular activities should I do? What should I do over the summer? And what I want you to do is kind of step back a little bit and think about the conversations that we've had, right? The conversation we had today and it's about really helping you figure out what it is that interests you. And as you go through the summers, as you kind of get older and older and go through your summers, you want to incorporate a bit probably of academic or, or academic interest in that. Or, if you're an athlete, you know, maybe you're really bearing down on your athletics, or if you're a recent, if you really like research chemistry or research scientist, kind of a person, you're spending your summers in the lab, right?
What I would wave you off of is, are a lot of these really expensive summer programs in mathematics or things like that, because what the universities have realized is that they are by and large, very, you know, socio economically exclusionary. There's certain amount of privilege required to be able to get into them. And they're less a marker of ability and more a marker of where you are, in terms of your support system. So there are, you know, there are fantastic programs, and you just need to look for them. But you don't really want to go to like the Harvard Summer Institute for six weeks, that's not going to be a really defining experience for you.
If you're targeting, you know, the more competitive schools, okay, so you might do a course or two. And really, the nice thing for you, for your generation, is that after the pandemic, this concept of remote education is so accepted that you can do a really tough, really interesting, really good course from like, let's say Stanford over the summer remotely, while you're still at home doing other really interesting things. Right? Or maybe you're in Japan, spending the summer in Japan, you know, sharpening your language, pursuing a love of music, or mathematics or cooking or whatever it is.
So that when you get to the admissions process, right, and you're, the school is basically saying to you tell us about this Maui? Who are you? And what do you want, right? You have this clear idea of, this is what I want now, and this is how I came to realize this. This is what I've done to really prove that out to myself. And then you're able to talk about and your school offers this specifically, that map's exactly to what I want to do.
The other thing to keep in mind is that you are a high school student, and so nobody expects you to get it right on the first try. So it may be we see sometimes our students who have a parent or both parents who are doctors, and their whole life, their parents are like, Oh, being a doctor is great, you should be a doctor. And so it kind of gets in their head. And the students like I want to be a doctor, I want to be a doctor, I want to be a doctor. And then they take bio and they get a B, they take chemistry, they barely pull a B plus, they do a summer internship in the hospital, you know, doing whatever it is, and they just don't like it. And they don’t like it. They get to junior year and they're panicking because they're like, oh my god, I fully committed to being a doctor, and I realized this is not my path at all.
So it's okay, though, to own that, right. And we would own that during the process and say, This is why I did the things that I did. And through that journey of discovery, I realized that this not who I want to be, but I also realized that I think I really have a passion for math for history. And so now I've gotten more involved in that. And I realized that the timeline is shorter, but this is why. And this is why I'm applying to be a history major at your school. And you know, XYZ.
So I don't want you to think that, you know, whatever, what steps you take now early in the process, you're committing yourself to a lifetime at that, right? There is flexibility. There is an ability to make a mistake or make a course correction or make an absolute reversal, if you need to. It really is dependent on how you do it, how you articulate it, and then how you make the case.
But that case is kind of later. Right? There's, I don't know if you've seen Steve Jobs had a had a commencement speech at Stanford when he talks about being able to make sense of your life by looking backwards. If you haven't seen it, Google it. It's very, very interesting. And he talks about the steps that he took during his life that he didn't realize at the time, but were really giving him a love of, you know, beauty and form and style and perfection and discipline and things like that. So it's a very interesting thing. The only caveat that I would add to that is that, yes, it makes sense looking backwards, but that never hurts to look forward, as well, and think about what you're doing and think about the repercussions and implications of decisions that you're making to help you kind of down this path and through this growth and maturity. Right.
So to answer your question, what you should do next summer I think that's a conversation we can have, you know, in a couple months, let's see how you like this summer. Let's see how your academics go. Let's see how your extracurricular activities go as you enter sophomore year. And then there's a conversation of okay, I've learned more about myself, I'm more sure that this is something that I want to do, that I like that I dislike. And then you know, I would say, we do need to start thinking a little bit early. Because, especially if you want to do a summer program, the summer programs, generally the admissions process kicks off in January. And they fill up very, very quickly because they tend to be first come first served. So if you decided next summer, hey, you know, I want to go to MIT, I want to do this really cool pre college math program, those will fill up very quickly. So you want to be on top of that. You want to be looking at it over Thanksgiving break. Make your list of these are four or five programs I think I might want to do, here are the due dates. And so you get ahead of that, right, because you don't have to pick your head up in March, and they have three spots available. And then you're you're really swimming upstream there. Okay?
Maui: Yeah. That makes sense.
Thomas: Okay. Mom, dad, any questions?
Christine: No, I think this has been super helpful for us as parents as well. And as I look between, you know, dad and I, Dad's had a fairly steady career doing engineering his entire life. I've had a very varied career since graduating college. And so all that to say, thinking through the foundations of who you are, what's your passion, will end up assisting you with ways to, if you want to stay in one field, that's great. If you want to switch up fields, that's great, too. And it's okay, we're both we're all equipped to be able to do that and make those choices and do that, well.
Thomas: That's a great, that's a great observation, and I think, great family and his brother, because they can see, you know, you have two great examples there of people who have been extremely successful, doing very different, you know, very different ways and very different paths. And so I hope, you know, providing, providing at least a good idea there that you don't need to be locked into one thing. But you also can be locked into one thing, right. And it's, it's knowing yourself and really understanding what it is that interests you. And like I said before, you know, ninth grade, we don't necessarily expect you to have that all figured out right now. Right.
And I do want to say thank you very much. I know that you got thrown into this a little bit. But you've, you've made some really interesting points. I think you were very, very, both insightful and articulate. And, you know, I hope that this conversation at least has, if not clarified things maybe removed a little bit of pressure, and also clarified that, you know, it's okay to think ahead without making it a big overwhelming, you know, stifling thing, right.
Maui: Yeah.
Thomas: All right. Thank you, everybody. I really… Did you have something else?
London: I just want to say, you know, as an engineer, I work at JPL and very few of us still wear the pocket protectors.
Thomas: I knew I was gonna get called out. If it's any, if it's any consolation, I used to, and we're going way back here when I was in high school, and then early in college, I used to clerk on the floor of the Chicago Mercantile Exchange you know. If you, if you saw a trading places or any of those, they're all dead now. It's all a relic of history, but the open outcry pits and we all wore, you had to wear pocket protectors in your jackets because you know, so that you didn't destroy the jacket with a, with a broken pen. So yes, I've been there. I proudly, I think I have my pocket protector somewhere in a box of mementos that my mother has very kindly saved for me. And pull, pulls out whenever I whenever she thinks I need a little humility.
So, well, thank you everybody. Maui, you have a great afternoon working. London, Christine. Thank you. I really appreciate it. And you know, if, we'll see how this goes, if, if Maui, if you enjoyed this, you know, be happy to make this a more regular conversation if you'd like. And if not, you never have to, you can put me, put me on the shelf with your, with your Shakespeare books and never have to hear from me again. Okay?
Maui: Yeah.
Thomas: All right. Take care everybody. Have a great Sunday.
Group: Thank you. Take care. Bye.
Thomas: Thank you again for tuning in today. If you are a parent or student who'd like to be a guest on a future episode of the admittedly podcast, please apply at Thomas caleel.com.
Thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to the admittedly podcast 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.
