S02 EP03: Interview with Sam Hassell - Great Minds Advising - Avoid These Mistakes In Your College Application Essays
In this engaging episode, we have the pleasure of interviewing Sam Hassell, a fellow admissions professional with a fascinating background in research and academia.
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In this engaging episode, we have the pleasure of interviewing Sam Hassell, a fellow admissions professional with a fascinating background in research and academia.
Throughout the conversation, Sam and Thomas share valuable insights and strategies for students navigating the college admissions process.
Key Highlights
Crafting a focused and compelling narrative is essential in the college admissions process.
Parallels can be drawn between research storytelling in academia and constructing an admissions story.
Understanding human behavior and how evaluators perceive applicants is crucial.
Avoid gratuitous displays of privilege and ensure experiences are conveyed meaningfully.
Starting early in the admissions process allows for more time to build a strong resume and narrative.
For late-starting students, creativity and abstraction are necessary to construct a compelling narrative from existing experiences.
Strategy plays a vital role in selecting the right school and effectively communicating with it.
Depth and coherence in presenting experiences and achievements are favored over breadth.
Personal growth and triumph over adversity make for impactful narratives.
Best way to demonstrate interest in a particular University Choosing summer activities that will benefit your college application
Navigating cost and the best way to receive a merit scholarship
About Sam Hassell
Sam Hassell graduated from the University of Southern California and is a published research scientist, having spent four years in psychology and neuroscience research at Columbia University. Building upon his experiences in research and academia—as well as over a decade in educational services—Sam spearheaded the Great Minds Advising program, a premium college consulting service at Westchester Prep, where he is also currently an owner. His college advising team leverages cutting-edge strategy and insight into the college review process while helping students intricately craft the intellectual depth, niches, and admissions stories that set them apart at even the most elite colleges.
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.
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Thomas: Hello and welcome to admittedly I'm your host, Thomas Caleel. And today we have a very special guest, Sam Hassel. Sam is coming to us from New York City and he graduated from the University of Southern California. He's a published research scientist having spent four years in psychology and neuroscience research at Columbia University. Building upon his experiences in research and academia, as well as over a decade in educational services, Sam spearheaded the great minds advising program, a premium college consulting service at Westchester Prep, where he is also currently an owner. His college advising team leverages cutting-edge strategy and insight into the college review process while helping students intricately craft the intellectual depth knishes and admission stories that set them apart even at the most elite colleges.
For the most recent 2022-23 application cycle, 100% of the great minds advising team students applied to a top choice early decision school and were accepted. Over the past three years, Sam and his team of students have earned admission to Columbia, Yale, Stanford, Penn, Duke, Dartmouth, Vanderbilt, WashU, UC Berkeley and many other top institutions gained admission to the Ivy League at a rate of 11 times the national average and have earned over $1 million in merit scholarships.
Sam, we're really fortunate to have you on today really look forward to talking to you, you know, one admissions professional to another. Love your background. And the question that I always like to start with when I speak with people in admissions, admissions advising is, how did you find your way to this profession?
Sam: Sure. So I often kind of explain the connection, I think, between research and my background and academia. So while I was in research, and I was on a Ph.D. sort of route, particularly in neuroscience, I was doing a lot of work with tutoring students and preparing them for college applications and whatnot. And I think that that sort of began my interest in sort of the educational services sector and working with students and teenagers and helping them to build, you know, their college applications. At the same time, I think that you can take a lot from the paradigm of research and how research is conducted in academia, and sort of borrow that as a pretty helpful framework for the college admissions process.
So the way that I explained it a lot of times is, you know, if you're a research professor, you run a lab, your principal investigator, you're typically you're sort of telling a story, right? And sort of particularly the best science communicators, if you go and watch a TED talk. And you're listening to Dan Gilbert from Harvard, or Paul Bloom from Yale, they tell a really articulate story that captivates an audience about what their research is, what it does, what its past, present, and future is. And, you know, if you're applying for grants, you know, if you want to grant from the Templeton Foundation, or from NIH to sponsor your lab, you have to really appeal to that body in terms of okay, here's what I've done in the past, here's my resume, this is a topic or an issue or question that I'm investigating. And I have sort of this past body, I've conducted these experiments. Here's what I want to do next. And I'm gonna keep pushing this line forward.
And I think that's very, very similar to the way that a lot of, you know, graduate school in academia works, how research functions, it's a story. You've committed yourself to a particular topic and investigation with particular hypotheses and theories. But you have the evidence from the past to support why you are a capable person investigating this topic. And it really is the same in undergraduate admissions, it's, I want to come to your college work with these professors doing research or taking this class, this tool, I'm going to take this tool and put this in my tool belt. I'm going to serve the community in this way. But not just that. It's not just future-oriented. It's here's my resume and how I've already begun investigating this topic or this issue, or whatever I've particularly committed myself to, and that's why I'm qualified.
And I think there's a really interesting sort of intersection between the two that I brought from my background. The other sort of kicker there is, I think, coming from psychology and neuroscience. I think we've built a lot of our strategic approach to understanding how humans operate and how they evaluate other humans. And there's a lot of sort of social hacking, social engineering that goes into any evaluative process, whether it's college admissions, undergraduate, graduate, you're applying for a job. You have to understand how somebody else is going to evaluate you. It's a lot more logical as well,
Thomas: I love that answer. And I have to caveat to our listeners that I did not set that answer up. Because you and I, you know, we speak about a lot of very similar things, I think the unique piece that that you're really bringing gear and I'd like to probe on a little bit is this concept of because I've, I've spoken often as somebody who, you know, who ran admissions department, you know, it's not about your perspective of the school, it's really about the school's perspective of you and how they're viewing you. So and you touched on that at the end with your background in psychology at those fascinating.
So, do you have a rubric that you use? Do you have a particular methodology or approach or thesis that you apply to this?
Sam: So we have a lot of, sort of different principles. One thing is, I think this is really important for applicants to understand your application is receiving a certain finite amount of time in terms of its review. Human beings also have a very constrained working memory. And they're also only able to keep so many things in their head if forgiven, you know, time range. And so I think one interesting thing that people will talk a lot about, but I'll give you sort of some of the psychological relevance is, they talk a lot about like this admission story. You need to have a hook, you need to have like a narrative, a focused narrative. We shouted at the top of the rooftops endlessly about students who tried to build this jack-of-all-trades narrative, that is not what a lot of the elite colleges want.
They want the depth of that focused narrative. And there's a lot of reasons why that deeper, more focused narrative, you know, I think works much more effectively and is what is sought after. But one of them very simply is the more coherent the information is that's being presented to somebody, the easier it is to understand, right, it's very difficult to understand if a kid you know, they are part of the business club, they were part of the forensics club, they were the editor of the newspaper, they played the craw, what did these all have to do with each other?
And I think there's kind of an interesting, just like, if you have a very small window of time, the coherence of the narrative and being able to connect the dots between all these pieces is exceptionally important. And the admissions officer doesn't want to be Sherlock Holmes, right? I don't know, what does x have to do with why would Z and so even just that principle, or sort of just understanding how working memory operates, understanding just the psychological constraints of the evaluation process, I think is really helpful. I'll give you another one.
So we have a lot of students who go to private schools, private high schools, and they a lot of students say a lot of things that I think, you know, if you kind of get into, you know, like stereotyping or interpersonal perception, they say a lot of things that are very stereotypical private school things. They say, like, I play squash, I play golf, I've been to like 98 countries in the world. And we're like, not so fast. It doesn't sound the way that you think it sounds to an admissions officer just sounds like your privilege, right? And a lot of the 16, 17-year-olds, they're like, you know, I tell the story about a kid and they're like, Well, I started this recycling program, and then tuck it at my summer home, it's like, just don't mention that it's not good summer.
Thomas: Right, just truncate that sentence.
Sam: Yeah, let's stick to the sustainability focus, but get rid of the rest. And, but they don't understand that because they're 16 or 17. And a lot of them particularly grow up in a bubble. And they don't understand exactly how to contextualize. But if you're an admissions officer, and you might be reading from a certain geographic region, you're certainly going to have a much bigger, more macro understanding of social economics. And, you know, a lot of diversity versus a kid who's just, you know, stayed mostly within 20 miles of where they live and where they grew up. And it's very homogenous.
So I think those sort of social perception factors, even you know, working memory, do they want to root for you or not root for you, there was an article in The Atlantic yesterday about how affirmative action goes away. Everybody now should start telling stories about trauma, because like, the lot more trauma-like traumas basically equals like, you're from a diverse background or something. And it's like, it's not the trauma itself. It's nobody. When you think of your hero, you don't think victim, right? When you think of somebody who's going to change the world, you don't usually think of the word victim, right?
And, if you kind of can spin it and show how you've converted that negative energy into something positive and translated it that is really interesting, but it's not just like on-the back Demand nuance right? And so there are all of these psychological mechanisms that I think come into play in the evaluation process.
Thomas: Well, I think you raise so many great points there. And, you know, having had been, you know, neck deep in several admissions cycles for on the other side on the mission side, I think, you know, not only are the readers not going to do the legwork, you know, as you said, Be Sherlock Holmes about it. They just don't have the time.
So it's incumbent on you to construct that narrative. And I think it sounds like that's something you're really focusing on. I also think, you know, I think it's, it's, you know, there are these trends, and you've seen them, that sweep through admissions, right, you need to have volunteering, hook, or you need to have this, you know, as you just brought up this trauma hook. And I think that it's very dangerous when students are looking at other students and conveying their outcomes with their own stories because you don't need trauma to be effective in this process. And I think you see a lot of students manufacturing or overstretching a small incident, that kind of negates a more interesting voice.
So you know, the main question, then the people always ask is, Okay, I'm coming from a background of relative privilege, maybe extreme privilege. How do I stand out? because it's not my fault, but it's also my environment. So how do I communicate my uniqueness to the school?
Sam: Yeah, so I think that a lot of students, quite honestly, in terms of the perception, we have a lot of students who they come from, I mean, we've had students who come from extreme privilege.
In some cases, some of them have actually experienced a lot of adversity, it might not have been financial adversity or geographic adversity. But they might have had something that happened to one of their parents, we had a student a couple of years ago, who did scientific research on Post Traumatic Stress Disorder, particularly insofar as it affected females versus males. And a lot of the pharmaceutical side of treating post-traumatic stress disorder, and the research is mostly focused on male subjects, not female subjects.
And that's really interesting, right, as she kind of identified this very particular niche science research angle, but it was connected to adversity that came that afflicted her mother, and her grandmother, right in her family. Now, her dad was in the C suite of a major organization. So she didn't have financial adversity, but it didn't mean that she didn't have anything. And at the same time, she didn't just use it, as you know, okay, I'm going to try to offset my socio-economic privilege by just kind of throwing trauma at the wall and see if seeing it sticks. It wasn't a wall. Here's the negative part of the story. You never watch a movie where the protagonist experiences adversity or symbols, you know, the father dies, and then there's like, there's always a triumph at the end, right? There's always like, there's the adversity, but then usually, it's triumphant at the end.
And I think if you are authoring an admission story, I want to see that you're triumphant at the end, I don't want the movie to end with like, well, I don't know, Mustafa pushed your father off. And that's the end of the sport. It's not great. Yeah. So she really, you know, I think took what she had, but she sponsored in a way that is, you know if if I'm a top school, and I'm, I'm kind of sorting between applicants who maybe have the trauma or maybe have just the intellectual component.
So there could be some other student who also is studying post-traumatic stress disorder, and has a lot of intellectual side of it. But I don't know, when you're gonna put your money on a kid who has both the intellectual side, and they have the personal side that says, I don't know if this gets really hard, or their experiments aren't going right, or they don't get that fun for their lab, who do I think is going to push through more probably the person who has the intellectual side and capabilities, right? And also the person who has like, the personal motivation?
Because the answer to this question is very personally relevant and important to them. So that's an example I think of a student who maybe did come from privilege, but they can channel in other ways. And then other students too, I think, you know, with just if they're running a business, like how do they use it to make, you know, a social impact, for example, instead of just you know, what the revenue number is of the business? You know, how are they? How are they giving back? And in ways this is where it gets really subtle, because, you know, we have a student, last cycle, I call this phenomenon that comes from sociology. There's the term conspicuous consumption, which is people try to signal their status.
Basically, it's sort of like the peacocking. But there's another offshoot of that that's called conspicuous compassion. And that's when people do virtue signaling and try to show their morality. And we get a lot of kids who do that too. And that also comes across terribly when you're like, I'm such a great person because I went down to the South Bronx or Westchester or Scarsdale or one of these areas to go to the homeless shelter. And it's like there are a million kids mentioning that, and the rest is anyway, so it's not even unique. And be it's like, look at me, I'm such a great person, it doesn't land well, either. So there's a lot of deaf touch. I think it's how you even convey your service in the first place.
Thomas: Right. And, I think, right, because when do you start working with what is your preferred timeline to start working with a student?
Sam: As soon as possible? Oh, exactly. When we start, kindergarten is our earliest, No, I'm just kidding.
I think we, I would say a more moderate range would be like ninth or 10th, grade 11th, you're getting really towards the end of the process. And that presents a lot of really unique challenges. When you're that late in the process. seventh, and eighth, I think we will take a student on it doesn't mean has to be the same process. As for an 11th grader, it could be much more kind of hands-off. And they have much more sort of space to organically iterate through those interests, but they have at least a little bit of insight or advice or a little bit of feedback. But you're not meeting with them every week. And sort of I don't know where you're like super passionate about, you know, coding yet. Are you super passionate about the business yet? It's been a week. That's not how it works.
So I would say ninth or 10th grade, but we have kids who start as early as seventh grade who will honestly we have seen kids who in seventh grade, I think have a resume for top 10 College and seventh grade. So yeah, probably ninth or 10th. And then, you know, plus one or two years on either end of that.
Thomas: And what what do you say? Because, you know, I think we both get approached by people who maybe are very late in the process, right? Juniors, late juniors, second semester, juniors? How do you deal with them? You know, what, do you have a particular approach? Because kind of all those data points are set. Right? And it's more now you don't have a lot of room for improvisation or creativity in there. How do you approach that?
Sam: Sure. So I would differentiate, I actually think at that point, you need maximum creativity, actually, right, because now you're given a much more rigid set of data, because most of the horses mostly in the barn at this point, right in terms of what they have in their resume. So for a student who's starting very late in the process, there are pros and cons. Actually, there are advantages and disadvantages to a student starting early versus a student starting later.
So an advantage of a student starting earlier is, of course, you have way more time. And you could build up and a lot of resumes are very cumulative. It's like sort of like a career. It's like, if you're building a resume, for an industry or a job, you understand, you have to start building some entry-level skills first, then you maybe move up to the middle tier, you're not applying to MTSI, as a ninth grader, and like, you have no skills yet and management technology. Like, you need to build things first. And then a lot of times that will open more doors and further opportunities. And sometimes people just try to go to like, they want to apply to like the best, most competitive summer program. And it's like, well, you didn't start aggregating the resume. And things open up further opportunities, it's cumulative.
So if you're starting with a kid very early on, you have the benefit of time. But your drawback often tends to be you don't have as much data, right? You don't know as much where which directions to sort of steer the story. So you're working under much higher conditions of uncertainty, typically, for the trajectory, right on the strategic trajectory.
For a student later in the process, they kind of have the opposite problem, the time is very low. And the data is much more rigid and fixed, the narrative is much more fixed. But you kind of have a little bit more certainty as to what the narrative needs to be. And now what you have to do, you're not building it from scratch, you now need to abstract a narrative from what they've done. And that's very important.
So we get a lot of students and it's like, okay, well, what if I have an 11th grade, and I didn't understand that I was applying for business and I used to do things that were relevant to this? It's like well, unfortunately, you can't probably apply for business then because you didn't build a business resume. So you know, what you did actually build a resume in is in psychology and that's the story we're gonna have to tell because that's the narrative that you built.
And quite honestly, if you anytime we gotta kill them or like I want to do business, they want to do like these three or four pre-professional things. It's the most common, It's pretty math or science. Yes, five things. Right? Um, and it's like, honestly, if you want to do business, why didn't you do best? The easiest way to do business is I've done business. So it's like if you did all this stuff, and it's like, I see seven things in your resume, and they're all psychology, it's like, do you really want to do business? Or do you want to do psychology?
Like, because I'm just gonna look at the evidence of what you've done, I don't really care what you say you want to do, I just want to see what the evidence is that you've actually done because actions are stronger than words. And I think admissions officers are going to view things with quite a bit of skepticism. I don't think that it's lost on admissions officers that a lot of parents play a pretty big role in the process as far as what students want to do. Or they're simply more familiar with certain professional backgrounds because their parents come from those backgrounds. It's like you have two MD parents, we almost never have our students put their parent's professional backgrounds in the Common Application for these reasons.
Because if, if you're trying to do something in BioMed, and both of your parents or MD is, I don't know, it seems like you have a bit of an unfair advantage compared to another student who doesn't have parents who come from that background. And, so I think that it's, it's very much in terms of the young versus the older, I think older, it's a lot of the strategic positioning, it's what's the most clever, well evidence narrative that we can now abstract from the data that we've mostly been given and is now fairly rigid. Earlier on, you have more uncertainty, because you have less data, you have more time to build a resume in a certain direction. You can't abstract one, but you can build it.
So there's kind of actually unique, some unique advantages and disadvantages, in some cases, because the eighth grader might, you know, like, you might not know as much because they haven't done as much in terms of where you're trying to steer the ship.
Thomas: Fair enough. And that was an excellent answer. Thank you very much. And I think it also touches on something that I think you see often where students, for lack of a better term, try and major shop at a university and say, oh, you know, I heard that, that journalism is easy to get into. So I'm applying as a journalism major and TierPoint, their whole resume is psychology. And you're like, you know, these are actually professionals reading your file, some of them have been doing it for decades, you're not fooling them, not even close.
So, one of the important things, you talk a lot about strategy. And I love that, because it's a conversation I have over and over again that, you know, the overall strategy is so important. And your success rate getting your students into top choice, EA ED programs is, you know, 100% killing it. So there's a very important part of that is kind of selecting the right school and then communicating to the school effectively. Right? How do you approach that?
Sam: In terms of communicating with the school? Do you mean more like demonstrated interest or in the applications?
Thomas: in the applications? Because I mean, you can talk you're welcome to talk about demonstrated interest? Because I think it varies from school to school, and so very interested to hear your take on that as well.
Sam: Sure. And there is obviously some overlap between demonstrated interest insofar as the supplements are used as a gauge of your interest in the school. And so, yes, I think what's really important, and I was actually doing a presentation this past weekend, and I mentioned a lot of the mistakes that students make in the application insofar as motivating their very particular, unique differentiated interest in this college and even potentially, this program or major at the college versus other colleges, right. And so we actually happen to get hold of a student's application from this past application cycle, who was a friend of one of our advising students, basically.
So she got into her top choice, this kid's process didn't go so well. And so we got his applications and were able to sort of do a case study of sort of what went wrong. And in his essays, the student had applied ed to Tufts, and, you know, you sort of saw these very generic, nonspecific statements like, you know, the reason I want to go to Tufts is because it will help set me up for like a successful career. Thomas has a very collaborative, interdisciplinary. Yeah, right. And you're like, here's a metric for knowing whether you wrote a good supplement or not. If you could make the statement about any college, essentially, it's not a good thing to include in your supplement for this college.
And so if you could say like, oh, this school has a good liberal arts per Oh crap. It's like, well, you could say that about thousands of colleges, right? So and I think students really, don't understand, I'm just motivating through very clear specifics on going to your undergraduate institution. I want to take this very particular class because I need this as a tool to further you know, we had a student who was running a business, and we're like, I want to understand more how consumers think.
So I need this classic consumer psychology. And you're like, Okay, that makes sense, right? It's like, there's this kid he runs, he runs a business. So he has a reason for gaining this tool. He's telling you why this tool would be helpful. And then he's making it very concrete by saying this class with this professor, and these topics are parts of the syllabus, I would use them this very particular way to help my business. It's like, oh, yeah, I tend to believe that that's fairly legitimate. I'm not I want to go to Columbia, because it's in the greatest city in the world. It's like how many students do you think mentioned New York City and their Columbia NYU essays, right? Because New York City has so many museums, it's like, that's not good. It's not good enough.
Thomas: I want to ask a question that students always seem to ask, which is okay. It's not that we don't believe you. But how, you know, you go to these websites, and they're just mind-numbing, they all say the same thing, right? Diversity, leadership, and intellectual, all look the same. So how do you distill, especially if you don't have the resources or the time to go visit each individual school? How do you do that?
Sam: Well, I think those specifics, honestly, actually, I think one thing that people sort of don't understand is because you mentioned the school visit, right? Here's a reason why a school visit is not a great source, a great source of information to include specifics in your essays. A lot of the other kids who are applying and writing their supplements also did the same school visit and got the same information, which means it's much more likely that you're going to cite specifics that other students are citing, right, which means you're going to fail to be rare and unique, which is essentially all of what admissions is there are a lot of students applying for a very small select number of spots.
So I always say admissions is just essentially a stock exchange of scarcity, right? It's just how scarce can be. So actually, I would say I, we've caught a lot of our students who mentioned everything that was mentioned on the school tour, basically. And we tell them why that's a terrible idea. So it's really I think diving super deep into the websites, looking at the faculty looking at the department looking at the course syllabus, looking at the research labs, reading their papers, reading the abstracts, like really doing a deep dive.
In some cases, we've actually had students who've done research with the professors at that top-choice school. And so we had a student this past year, who worked in Engineering Department at a top 10 school. And he worked with one of the deans in the engineering school. And they like his supplements for that school. We're basically like, I want to take this professor's class because like he told me about the class, like in person, like I knew this person. One tactic we actually try to do is we try to make it sound like the kid already is there. Like they're already part of the school, it sounded like he was already at Duke. Like he did research there.
And we had another student who didn't do research specifically, it a lot of times I think in those supplements, it's almost really like instantiating, it sounds like you're almost already a member of the community. Sometimes we have the student rights, sort of what I call a day in the life supplements, which sort of just shows them moving like a very particular class to like a club and extracurricular like, shows what they would look like on campus, like in a very specific, concrete way.
But I think the answer is just like doing your really specific research through the website, not just like, what the tagline says of like, we're a global institution because that a lot of that is going to sound like boilerplate.
Thomas: Fair enough. And I want to be aware of time and respectful of time. But you talk about students doing research or students being involved, and that, you know, we're in the summer right now. How do you advise students to make the most of their summers? and obviously, it's different each year, your summer and you spoke about this before this kind of accumulation and growth over time. But do you have any basic principles that students should think about for their summers?
Sam: Sure. Number one, don't go to Ace don't go to sleepaway camp. I'm just kidding. So I think what's important one really big misconception that I see from a lot of students and families is they overvalue the significance of "Summer programs as really being like, just like the only or the primary already a vehicle for doing productive things over the summer." And I think that couldn't be further from the truth. A lot of summer programs also get further exacerbated by the fact that a lot of summer programs have very fancy college titles next to them. Stanford, Cornell, Columbia, as you know, program. Now there are some very select high-value programs. Obviously, RSI, which a lot of people say is harder to get into than most of the top colleges, Iowa writers workshop you have, you have very legitimate summer programs, and TSI.
But those tend to be fewer and far between and what most of the summer programs are, is just like a college course that was watered down for high scores, which isn't that impressive at all. And it's certainly not that great if you spend $12,000, on like, kind of fake college credits that college isn't everything except anyway. But that's how the summer program markets itself because they have a fancy next to it. So I think it's really important that people understand most summer programs are not really high-value resume builders.
Now, they can have some place in your resume building, like if you're just if you're in ninth grade, and you're just trying to start learning some coding because you're at the entry-level of your resume or your seventh or eighth grade, that's okay, you're not trying to make it a high-value thing, because you're not at that point in your resume, you're just trying to get some introductions to your fields, right? So that by the 10th or 11th, you can be in the middle upper tier of your resume, right? Or you can do some other high-value things.
So the thing is, people understand they understand that about summer programs, other things that they can do, I think it's a very multifaceted approach, they might do a summer program, I would consider that more of a low middle tier value activity. Doing independent research, obviously, with a university professor tends to be much more high value. Anything that takes a lot of initiative. So we have a lot of students who reach out to the mayor, the Chamber of Commerce are launching business initiatives in their town over the summer. They're launching the sustainability program in their town over the summer.
So it could be you know, a political internship, anything like that. They could be building up their clubs for the coming year, we've had a lot of students who take over a club, they're doing the planning for the clubs or doing more events over the summer for their clubs in some cases. And so it really should be a multifaceted, multi-tiered approach where there are different kinds of activities, right?
And then they might also kind of fall into different tiers, like not everything you're going to do is always going to be the highest value but you might need to take a course that's an intro level course because you need to gain some skills, but then you might do something has some more initiative, as well, or science research. So I think it's important that people understand that summers don't have to be for summer programs, a lot of times those are not the highest value extracurriculars anyway, and to sort of take that multifaceted approach.
Thomas: I love that I think it ties back to something you brought up earlier on privilege, and how those courses really, really go directly to the issue of privilege. But also, I think you bring up a good point that's always annoyed me is that there are a lot of programs that are absolutely unaffiliated with the schools. That license is essentially the school's name for renting out space. Right. And it's to admissions professionals. They know exactly what those courses are. They see that very clearly.
But I think a lot of times students and parents are not as aware of that. And they're paying thousands and thousands of dollars for a course that is not highly regarded, just because it's held on the Tufts campus or another University's campus. And I think that's just it's unfair and slightly deceptive.
Okay, one last question. I wanted to pose to you because everybody's gonna want to know this, you know, a million dollars in merit scholarships, that's quite a bit of money. Do you have any guidance for families? Because, you know, obviously, the cost of education is skyrocketing and continues to just go up every single year. Any advice in terms of getting scholarships to pay for school?
Sam: Yeah, so I think, certainly, first of all, when you're looking at colleges, so for instance, if you are in New York State, like we are, and Cornell is a very popular I mean, you can make the case that it's the most popular college among our demographic region. You know, Cornell, for instance, has New York State contract colleges right there endowed by New York State. They're not the private colleges like engineering, you know, Arts and Sciences, etc, business.
And so I mean, even just that if you're applying to Cornell, and let's say that you intend to do something in the biomedical sector, you could be in a lot of different colleges in Cornell, you could be in Arts and Sciences, you could be in human ecology. You can be in cows Agriculture and Life Sciences. And there's about a $20,000 per year difference in terms of your tuition if it's a New York State contract college All right.
So if you happen to be a New York State resident, and there's a lot, even just understanding that, like that would be huge tuition, residual there. Now, a similar principle that would be a little bit more generally applicable not to just New York State residents, is just any state residency tuition benefit potentially. And even if you're not an in-state resident, not everybody can be from Virginia and have UVA or California and have Berkeley, UCLA. And then for other top 50, State campuses, or Michigan, it'd be really nice. Unfortunately, in New York State, you don't you know, we don't have one of those, you could say that maybe Cornell serves a little bit of that purpose with some of the New York State endowment.
But I think to look at you know, certainly a lot of these out-of-state public flagships, the tuition is still going to be cheaper, even if you are an out-of-state resident, if you're an in-state resident, of course, then you have an exceptional public flagship, provided that it's the right climate for you and the right ethos and that school is particularly strong in some of your areas, and we'll get to where you want to get to potentially, then certainly take that into account.
In terms of scholarships, if you want merit scholarships, it's not that we, a lot of times, didn't really plan, the scholarship part of it, we just did what we were supposed to do, making the kid the best, most competitive applicant that they could be. And those scholarships came as a function of that, but they were more a byproduct versus a sort of intentional design, right?
So and a lot of times, you don't even have to do a separate scholarship application, there are a lot of schools that will just automatically give you merit, potentially, if you are a very competitive applicant. So what I would say is, instead of worrying about and this is a lot of what we try to do with even college admissions, I explain to a lot of people, we had a family yesterday I spoke to and they're like, well, he's really good in classics, and he had this metal on the National Latin Exam, we know the classics would be a more favorable positioning strategy, right? Like linguistics, or whatever. I'm like, but he has three years to build a resume. So if we just haven't built a resume, it's something he doesn't want to do, just because it will get him to college.
Do you really think you won? Or did you lose because he could have spent three years building a resume and something that he really wants to do in life and really would have been way more advantaged? So it's like you kind of beat the result just because you did it for college. So it's like even with admissions, we say, it's, it should be viewed as a byproduct benefit of the student building excellence and pursuing it. And if you do that, you will get the other stuff that comes with it, which means you will be a very competitive applicant. So if you want scholarships, you want accolades, you want optionality to do what you're supposed to do to build your candidacy. And those things you should do, I think, as byproducts in a lot of cases.
Thomas: And so now my audience is absolutely going to be convinced that I was giving you those answers. You know, I love your approach. And, you know, for people listening to this podcast, Sam, how do they get in touch with you? How can they engage with you and with great minds advising?
Sam: Sure. So um, we are parent companies, Westchester per app that we're still affiliated with. So you go to Westchester prep.com, we will have our separate advising website soon. That will be great minds. advising.com is not up yet. But we're about to relaunch it. And then we have things like advising newsletters, if you go to the Westchester prep website, you go to our advising page, we actually have a newsletter that you can just put in your email. And if you liked this information and content, we have a whole bunch of it for free, we send out those newsletter blasts. And obviously, you have a contact form and whatnot, on the Westchester Prep website, and soon the great minds advising also.
Thomas: Great, well, thank you very much. And I would encourage people to engage with Sam and his team because really, it's just a very thoughtful and unique approach to psychology research. It's a broach that, you know, I haven't heard anybody talk about before. And so kudos to you on that. Any last words? Any last wisdom before we wrap this up?
Sam: I think probably the last point is just you mentioned sort of, I think the role of scholarships and whatnot, the financial component of the process. I think it's really important, a little bit crazy, I think in terms of the financial commitments nowadays in terms of college tuition, and how little time a lot of people put into the process, and figuring out what their goals are, what they're trying to accomplish from undergraduate education.
Do they think they might go to graduate school? What's the particular you know, quality of the major or the program at the College? There's a lot of people who look at, you know, Ohio State, and they're like, you know, Ohio State's not that great or not a shiny name, but it's like, I don't know you have a lot of professors in the psychology department at Ohio State who are like all time prominent figures in the psychology department in 20th-century psychology, right? And a lot of people just don't do the research.
And one of the things that we try to motivate with the admissions consulting process is do you want your kid going for four years of opportunity costs, which a lot of people don't even put any premium on kids' time at all, is like you're going spending four years $320,000 Potentially, if you're going to a private university, and you chose it based off of a one-day campus visit, in which you are sold by somebody who has every reason to sell you on that college. And it's totally biased. It's like nobody would ever make that purchasing decision for anything else, except for college admissions. Right? And do that, like a total lack of due diligence.
So I think it's really important to be very well-researched and understand why you're going, what you're going for, and what tools you're trying to garner, right? Because, you know, it's like the clock's ticking, and you want to go to school with a purpose. And if you can't really justify why you want to go to the school, study this, it's like, it's a lot of money to spend and a lot of time to spend with, we got a lot of parents and we're like, I don't know, if they'll just figure it out somehow, magically, at some point, perhaps, and maybe go to graduate school. It's like, I don't know, it's like, I'm not so sure. They're just gonna magically figure it out at some point. Let's try to have them go in with an intention. So they know why they're there. And they know what they're trying to do
Thomas: a great closing statement, and I think words of wisdom for everybody. So thank you very much, but really appreciate your time and look forward to speaking with you again.
Sam: Yeah, it was a pleasure. Thank you.
