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MARK: Welcome back to Inside the Yale admissions office. My name is Mark, and I’m a Yale admissions officer.
HANNAH: And I’m Hannah. I’m also a Yale admissions officer. And today’s episode is the first in a new, little mini series we’re going to try out designed to highlight the specific things that admissions officers like us look for when reviewing applications.
MARK: Another way to think about these episodes is a collection of what matters or what counts in the admissions process.
HANNAH: Yes. You may remember a Mythbusters episode that we did last year centered around what Yale looks for, and now we want to go more deliberately through the things that are important in our process to give you a really clear idea of what admissions officers like to see when we open up an application.
MARK: And we’re starting with the single most important factor in our review process, your academic strength. In some ways, this episode, it’s kind of a little surprising that we haven’t devoted a whole episode to this topic before. It is a little like our recent episode that we did on selecting high school courses where we were looking through things and said, well, gosh, how have we been doing this podcast for so many years and we haven’t done this episode yet?
HANNAH: Yeah. I mean, I will say, we do talk a lot about this, the importance of academic preparation in many, many, many other episodes that we’ve done when we talk about how we evaluate things like transcripts and testing. So we’ve definitely talked about it, but now it’s time to devote a whole episode.
MARK: Yeah, it is true. We typically assume that people who are tuning into our podcast generally already understand that academic strength is really, really important. But of course, in our process, it’s not based simply on academic metrics. And I find that when people hear that, they tend to be most curious about those other nonacademic factors. So we spend a lot of our time answering questions about those other parts of the process that are less straightforward than what we’re going to talk about today, things like essays and leadership and supplementary music submissions—
HANNAH: Sure.
MARK: —and all those other things.
HANNAH: Yeah. But today, let’s just lay it all out in one episode, give a clear picture of what we mean when we say that academic strength is our most important consideration.
MARK: And as part of this mini series, we’ll do some other episodes about those other considerations, including things concern for others, and the desire to grow and stretch yourself, and how you’ll contribute to a rich, residential learning environment. Stay tuned for more on that in the next few months.
HANNAH: Yeah. OK. So for today, we’re going to break it down into three parts. So part 1 will be how we quickly gauge an applicant’s baseline academic preparedness.
MARK: Part 2 will be how we go beyond that to gauge if a student is a good academic fit for the Yale liberal arts education.
HANNAH: And then part 3, how each individual piece of the application gives us the kinds of evidence and insights we need to understand both your academic strengths and how those make you a compelling applicant for Yale specifically.
MARK: All right, that’s the plan.
HANNAH: Let’s see if we can stick to it.
MARK: We’ll try our best. And let’s start with the basics. So establishing that you as an applicant are well prepared to succeed in Yale courses is the single most important component of our application review.
HANNAH: Yes. So it’s the most important component, even though it’s probably actually the quickest part of the reading process for us to digest and read when we’re looking at your application. And it’s also not the thing on its own that is ever going to get you admitted.
MARK: Instead, it is the most important component that we’d consider necessary, but not sufficient. We talked about this idea before. In other words, if you aren’t academically well prepared, it doesn’t matter who you are. It doesn’t matter what your other talents are. You will not be admitted to Yale.
HANNAH: Yeah, and that’s the first thing that we do when we open up an application. We ask ourselves, do I see evidence here that this student is prepared to complete a bachelor’s degree in Yale College?
MARK: If the answer to that question is no, we are not going to go any further. Sorry, game over.
HANNAH: Right. That’s part of our initial review process that we’ve had in place for a few years now. We outlined what that process looks like in our Reading Reloaded episode a couple years ago. And the short version is that the first stage of review for every application is that they have an experienced admissions officer open up the file and quickly review the transcript, the test scores, activities, and honors, just go over the basics. And if the file looks strong, it moves on to a full read by their area admissions officer. But if the file is obviously weak at that point, missing some of those necessary criteria, it’s moved to the side.
MARK: We added this initial review process a few years ago because we found that the quantity of applications that we’ve been receiving, it has increased much faster than the quality. In other words, we receive many more applications from academically unprepared students than we did just in the recent past. There are many reasons for this. And frankly, we will go ahead and say it’s not a good development. But listen to an episode that’s called Should I Even Apply? to learn more about that dynamic.
HANNAH: Yeah. And I think one of the reasons that we wanted to do this episode today is to try to be even more explicit about what we expect from our applicants. So if what we describe is not what your academic preparation looks like, we just don’t recommend applying to Yale or other highly-selective colleges.
MARK: But you are going to find dozens or even hundreds of other fantastic colleges that will help you realize your goals. We are not telling you that a college education is not for you. It’s simply trying to convey the realities of our process and what we’re looking for in students who are going to succeed at Yale specifically. All right. So, Hannah, what does academic preparation look like?
HANNAH: Yes, just the very basics. First, you have a record of strong, consistent achievement in your high school courses across all the core disciplines. So math, science, social studies, languages, and literature. And then that record from your high school is supported with evidence from one or more standardized tests that reinforce what your transcript tells us.
MARK: So here’s where things get tricky. Even though this is essential and relatively straightforward as far as these things go in our process, we can’t pinpoint a minimum GPA, or a specific number of advanced courses, or even a specific minimum test score. The reason is that these things can simply be influenced by so many different factors, and they can mean very different things in different contexts. It’s our job, as admissions officers, to manage that complexity that we get from applications coming from tens of thousands of high schools from all around the world and interpret what we’re seeing in your application. That work that we do, it just doesn’t translate easily into something a specific required GPA or specific course choices.
HANNAH: Which is probably the most requested piece of information we get–
MARK: Completely understandably.
HANNAH: –from prospective applicants.
MARK: Yes. We’d be–
HANNAH: Yeah. It would be like, what’s the minimum?
MARK: We would love to be able to give that to you. It would be a better, easier task for us. The world just doesn’t work that way, folks.
HANNAH: Right. So instead, we’re taking a holistic view of your achievement in high school. That does not mean that if your academic record has real areas of weakness, that holistic admissions means we look past them. It just means that we are trying to understand all the context.
MARK: So let’s go and be even more specific. When we are looking at your academic record, we want to see that you have consistently challenged yourself by taking the most rigorous coursework available in your high school. We also want to see that you have received consistently-strong grades in all of those courses. No, one grade of B is not going to undo your application. That’s not what we’re saying. But we should see that you are consistently excelling in all of your courses. And that’s going to be true regardless of how your school grades or regardless of the grades that your peers received as well. This is going to be about you and your academic performance over four years.
HANNAH: And then when we look at your standardized tests, whatever those tests are, so the SAT or the ACT, which, as a reminder, we now require for Yale, plus anything like AP or IB exams, those test scores should communicate that you are among the most well-prepared students for college.
MARK: Testing does not tell us everything, or even all that much about your academic strength. But we’ve got lots of data and analysis that tells us that it is a very good predictor of your academic performance at Yale. And it’s good to know that the overwhelming majority of Yale students scored in the top 5% of test takers on either the SAT or the ACT. And those who didn’t, they’re typically very close to that level, and they also are going to have very strong high school records.
HANNAH: Yeah. And just a reminder, you can always listen to our other episodes about standardized testing, especially the one titled The Big Picture and our most recent application update episode for lots more on this. Something that we, I think, don’t say often enough, which is like the key word in standardized testing, is the standardized part.
MARK: Yes.
HANNAH: So going back to all of those different transcripts and GPAs and all these things that we’re trying to contextualize and understand. These SATs and ACTs are really the only universally standardized measure that we have.
MARK: Yes. If you can put yourself in our shoes, you can imagine the task of reviewing transcripts from thousands of high schools across the country and around the world. You would want some kind of even imperfect, even incomplete standardized measure across them. That’s where standardized tests come in. As we think about those components together, though, we’re pretty confident in saying that your high school transcript still stands as the single most important piece of the application. And that’s true, even though I just said our research has shown that test scores are actually a greater predictor of a student’s success at Yale. So here’s why.
If you think about it, a student who has very strong grades in a challenging curriculum, who also has slightly weaker testing, they’ve still shown, through their four years of work, and even through that testing, that they are well prepared for what’s going to be asked of them in Yale courses. It’s not that we’re ignoring the weaker testing in this case, but it’s not a deal breaker on its own unless it’s truly flashing warning signs that a student would seriously struggle with the level of reading and quantitative analysis needed in Yale courses.
So just as an example, let’s say that you scored in the 90th percentile of test takers. That would be lower than most of our incoming students, but it would still show that you were predicted to do well in your Yale courses. If, however, you scored, let’s say, closer to the 50th percentile, that’s something where we would worry pretty seriously about your readiness for Yale classes.
HANNAH: Now, if you think about the reverse situation where a student has very strong testing but a weak transcript, that would raise pretty significant concerns for us because it’s evidence that you aren’t really reaching your potential or that you haven’t developed the academic habits that you need to succeed in Yale courses. So we think about your transcript as telling us a lot about who you are as a student over time, whereas standardized testing is just one piece of data from one point in time.
MARK: Yeah and just one final note here on the topic of baseline academic preparedness. It is true that most, most of our applicants demonstrate the level of academic preparedness that Hannah and I are talking about right now. So just on one dimension, about 60% of all of our applicants last year had SAT or ACT scores that fell in the top 5% of test takers, and that was in a cycle when those scores weren’t even required.
HANNAH: And we also look at a lot of transcripts, and we see a lot of A’s on transcripts.
MARK: Yes, we do.
HANNAH: Yeah. So if you are a straight-A student who’s taken the most rigorous curriculum, done well on a standardized test, awesome, good for you. You are a good candidate for selective colleges, but that means you’re also still in the running with tens of thousands of others with similar academic profiles.
MARK: All right. So let’s go to the next step of this, Hannah, and talk about what it means to move beyond just being academically prepared at the baseline to actually being a good academic fit for Yale’s program and also being compelling on the academic dimension to your admissions officer.
HANNAH: Yeah. So it might be easy to hear what we just said and think, OK, I meet the baseline of academic preparation, so then admissions officers will move on to everything else. They’ll say, OK, academically qualified, let’s move on. But there is a lot more related to your academic case for us to consider beyond those grades and those test scores.
MARK: Yes. It is true that students stand out in our selection process for many different reasons, and some of those reasons are not specifically academic. The most compelling cases that we read, though, however, stand out in our process across multiple areas, including academic strength.
HANNAH: So when we’re talking about standing out academically, one of the first things that comes to mind is that the student is a good academic fit for the Yale College academic program specifically. So that means they are both prepared for the specific types of courses they can expect to take at Yale, and their academic goals and interests align with what we actually have to offer at Yale.
MARK: OK. So on part 1 here, the specific types of courses that you would expect to take at Yale. It’s a good reminder, Yale students do not apply to a specific major, and they don’t even declare a major until the end of their second year. But we are going to ask our applicants what majors they are most interested at the time that they’re applying. If you, for example, select chemistry on the application but you didn’t opt to take AP chemistry that was offered in your high school, that’s not a good sign. Or let’s say if you select comparative literature, but the English sections of your standardized tests are the weakest, that’s also going to be something that’s going to give us some pause.
HANNAH: Yeah. And regardless of what major you put on your application or what you eventually select, every student at Yale has to take courses in the humanities, the social sciences, natural sciences, writing, quantitative reasoning, and foreign language. It is a fully liberal arts immersive experience. So we need to see evidence in your academic record from high school that you’re ready for college-level work across all of those areas, and that’s going to make clear that your academic preparation is specifically a good fit for Yale.
MARK: Yes. So that stands out. That is a compelling case when we see this student is well rounded and that their academic strengths align with maybe one or more of the academic interests that they are identifying right now. So part 2 of this, beyond that component, has to do with what you expect to get out of the college experience generally. Now, we are really interested to see that you are open to the kinds of broad learning for its own sake that characterizes the liberal arts approach.
I would define a student who’s going to be a good fit for liberal arts education in this way. A student should be really broadly curious about many different areas, not just fixated on one field or one topic. That’s not what your academic program is going to look like at Yale. I also think a student should be open to changing their mind about their academic goals. A student shouldn’t be arriving on campus thinking that they’ve got everything figured out already.
I would also say, this should be a student who wants to contribute to research and really dig into complex topics that don’t have easy answers. And I would put that in opposition to the idea that you just kind of want to absorb existing knowledge and regurgitate it. Sort of like, teach me how to do this thing. I’ll get an A on the test, and you can give me the credential for that. And along those lines, I’d also say, a good liberal arts college student is one who views the college learning experience as an end in and of itself, not merely just as a kind of stepping stone as a professional credential for use after graduating.
HANNAH: Yeah. So you can start to imagine how beyond just the basic numbers, your admissions officer is really thinking about all of these more complex ideas when we’re thinking about your academic fit for Yale. And we see lots of applications from students who are very, very academically impressive, but Yale may simply not be the right place for them because their goals, their strengths, and their interests just don’t align with what we have to offer.
MARK: Yeah. Remember, our job as admissions officers is to enroll a group of students who will thrive at Yale specifically. Our job isn’t to pin laurels on the world’s youth or tell them that they are better than somebody else. They’re not. And it’s not our job to say that they are, because they’ve achieved something on some academic metric somewhere.
HANNAH: We’re also thinking about your potential, and we have to try and understand where you are as a student now, but also where you want to go and how you might continue to grow and develop in college.
MARK: So all to say that this evaluation of your academic strength, it’s not as simple as just saying, who has the best grades and who has the best test scores? All right. So we have a whole application that helps us get to these things. That’s why we don’t just look at your test scores and your transcript and say, OK, this student’s admitted, this student is not. We have all these other components. So how about for our last chapter here, Hannah, we actually walk through the other components of the application and help applicants understand how we can use those pieces to get a sense of their academic strength?
HANNAH: OK. Let’s go in order of how we would see these things when we read an application. First, we’ll see your transcript and testing. We’ve talked about that. And then we’re generally going to see your activities list, the things that you have engaged in outside of the classroom.
MARK: Sometimes a student has engaged in academic activities. You can imagine things like the math team, or Science Olympiad, or Odyssey of the mind. I would put debate team and mock trial and all those things in that category as well.
HANNAH: Sure, yeah. That is a good way, if those things excite you and interest you and you are engaged in them, to demonstrate to us this idea of curiosity and excitement about learning. Some students will have engaged in research. That is not a requirement for you to be a compelling academic candidate, but it does tell us something about how you’ve chosen to spend your time.
MARK: Yeah, I think there’s two dimensions of an academically-related activity that can make a student exciting, in my mind. One is that it’s adding a new kind of different academic dimension to their case because that activity is allowing them to expand into an area that’s different than what they’re getting in their classes.
HANNAH: Yeah, right.
MARK: And I think the other element of this is when we see that students are pursuing this just for pure curiosity’s sake. We hope that you are excited and engaged by all of your classes, but you probably have some that are more of your favorites than others. That’s OK. We hope that you’re still challenging yourself, even in those areas that aren’t your favorite. But engaging in research or engaging in an academic student group at your school can be a great way to just demonstrate, hey, I’m excited by this, and I want to do more of it. With a caveat though. I’m going to give the warning that I’m giving in just about every podcast episode now, Hannah.
HANNAH: OK.
MARK: This should not be a reason to try to present a spike.
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: Oftentimes, students think I need to present myself as capital P passionate about this one particular academic area, and so my transcript needs to be doubled and tripled down on this one particular area. Maybe it’s math, maybe it’s science, maybe it’s history, or anything.
And then I want to show that I have every imaginable academic activity that you could do in that area I am so passionate about. That’s all that I’m doing. Sometimes there are students for whom that’s just what animates them. Go back what we just said, you are running a risk of potentially presenting yourself as not a great fit for a liberal arts college if you have narrowly defined your academic interests already. So when we talk about this, we hope that it is a reflection of just your excitement and interest in learning in different contexts and not some sort of strategy for, I am a physicist. And so all you’re going to see is physics in my application all the time, and that’s going to be what gets me in and helps me stand out.
HANNAH: Right. I’ll also just add that your activities list can tell us a little bit about how you choose to engage in the things that you’re interested in. Like so, for example, if you are hoping to be an engineer in college and you’ve got great math and engineering and science grades and test scores, that’s awesome. But then we see that you’re also doing robotics on your activities list. That’s a team sport. You are learning collaboratively. You’re like working with a team there. So that’s giving us another dimension of your academic interest that we can’t get from your grades or your test scores.
MARK: Yeah. And I think maybe one final note here, it is absolutely a-OK if you are the kind of student for whom the activities that you pursue outside of the classroom are not fundamentally or even primarily academic.
HANNAH: Oh, yeah. Totally.
MARK: If what excites you is your athletic endeavors and the teams that you are part of, or service, or the arts, and that’s really what we see filled up on your activities list, that is absolutely fine. That is demonstrating other important considerations and dimensions that we care about that we’ll talk about in future episodes. But there is, for many students, an important academic component that we see coming through on the activities list.
HANNAH: All right. The next thing that we’re going to see is your essays.
MARK: Yeah. Another instance where I think there is a fantastic opportunity to convey your academic strength and what’s going to make you stand out as a future liberal arts college student through the essay, even if what you’re writing about is not fundamentally connected to an academic topic.
HANNAH: Right. A great college essay will show us a little bit about how you think and how you engage with the world around you. Even if you’re not writing about something that is academic, it’s going to give us a sort of view into the way your mind works.
MARK: Yes. And what Hannah is not saying is that the essays demonstrate your skill as a writer.
HANNAH: No.
MARK: No.
HANNAH: Yeah.
MARK: That’s an important distinction. What Hannah is saying is that we’re going to get a sense of how you can analyze something, how you can investigate something, how you can break something down, and how you can communicate about it. Those are really important just mental skills that you’re going to need to activate in just about every class that you are at Yale. How you break something down and talk about it in your essays gives us a great sense of how you would do that in lots of different academic contexts.
HANNAH: Right. And as a reminder, these essays are not meant to be academic in their nature. They are meant to be reflective and personal. So we’re getting a sense of how you might engage in academic work via this lens of the personal essay, if that makes sense.
MARK: And you might decide that you want to talk about your engagement with a particular academic topic or activity in the essays, and that’s great. But a word of warning, your space is limited. And we are not interested in just hearing in that space about your academic accomplishments or even just the fact of your academic interests. We want it to reveal something important about who you are and how your brain is excited by that thing that you’re talking about.
HANNAH: And then we have our Yale-specific questions. So I think probably the most relevant one is what we call the AA in–
MARK: Yes.
HANNAH: –our office, where we ask you to list up to three majors that you might be interested in at Yale and then to reflect on what about them is exciting to you.
MARK: Yeah. We call it AA because it stands for academic appeal, which is, why do these academic areas appeal to you? And we as phrased this question specifically around a topic or idea that excites you. And so this is the place to nerd out.
HANNAH: Yes. Yes, totally. And we get really excited when we see you get excited about an academic topic. It doesn’t have to be very, very specifically aligned with a major. It doesn’t have to be a big topic. It can be something small. We just want to see a demonstration that you get excited about something academically.
MARK: Yeah. Imagine that a friend of yours just ask you a question about something that’s exciting to you. And they say, what’s that? Think about how you might answer that question in a way that you say, oh, this thing is super cool. Here’s why.
HANNAH: Yeah.
MARK: That is the right starting place for what works in this Yale-specific question.
HANNAH: Yeah. Some things that we get really excited about when we read these, and that I’ve noticed sort of committee members, especially faculty members sitting in committee, get excited about is when you ask questions or present–
MARK: Yes.
HANNAH: –a new idea or you’re thinking about– it’s not just describing, this is the thing that I’m interested in. It’s taking the next steps of, what else do you want to explore about this? Or some new thought or idea. You’re presenting about that topic to us.
MARK: Yes. I’ll give a little Nugget here for people who’ve made it all the way through this episode of the podcast so far. We love seeing question marks in this piece.
HANNAH: Yes.
MARK: It is a great sign–
HANNAH: Totally.
MARK: –that you are wrapping your head around this question the right way if you were actually posing a question. That shows the kind of curiosity and openness to, hey, I don’t have it all figured out. That gets us really excited.
HANNAH: Right. Yes.
MARK: So, Hannah, there’s another Yale-specific question that’s one of our short takes. And we’ve had this for a few years, and we really like it. And this one is phrased this way. If you could teach any college course, write a book, or create an original piece of art of any kind, what would it be? And we only give you 35 words–
HANNAH: Yes.
MARK: –to answer it. This is another space where I think a student’s sort of academic strengths and just their academic kind of case, what might make them compelling as a future student can come out in a neat way.
HANNAH: I feel like this is the only question on the application where we are explicitly asking you to be creative–
MARK: Exactly.
HANNAH: –also. And I think creativity and how you think is broadly defined is a great trait to have to bring to a place like Yale. That doesn’t mean you’re specifically artistic. It just means that you’re thinking creatively.
MARK: Yeah. And this gets to the dimension that in a liberal arts college, you are not simply going to be asked to remember a bunch of information and then take tests on that information later on. you’re going to be asked to contribute to the fields that you are studying. And so weak answers to this question are things like, I would teach calculus 102, period.
HANNAH: Yeah. Like, OK, but–
MARK: You like calculus–
HANNAH: –missed opportunity–
MARK: –great.
HANNAH: –here, yeah.
MARK: But no, anything in the whole world, you could teach any kind of class, you could write any kind of book, how would you contribute to the academic knowledge base out there? How would you enter the conversation yourself?
HANNAH: Yes.
MARK: A really important part of the application for this, Hannah. I would actually say probably the most important next to the transcript and the test scores would be recommendations. We get a lot of really important academic insights from the letters of recommendation that we will receive from your teachers. That’s why we ask that they are from core academic subjects, and the best ones tell us much more than simply that you did well in the class.
HANNAH: Your transcript tells us your basic sort of performance in the class. What we want to see from your teacher recommendations is, how did you reach that grade that you got? What kind of student were you in the classroom? How did you deal with challenges that might have come up? What do you bring to the table in the classroom?
MARK: Yeah. I know that we’re going to come back to talking about teacher recommendations in other episodes of this mini series, because they give us all kinds of insights into other dimensions as well. But I think the advice for our students that we want to share here is, when you’re thinking about teacher recommendations, you want to think about the teachers who can really speak to your engagement with the topic of that class.
HANNAH: Yeah.
MARK: They can get to how you led maybe class discussions, how you grappled with challenging ideas, how you developed in that space. We talked a lot about growth as an important factor, so seeing that you’ve grown in that area is really important. Don’t underestimate the power of these recommendations. Let’s go ahead and add a few things that we like to see and a few things that we don’t like to see in these letters of recommendation. Well, I’ll start with the things we don’t want to see.
HANNAH: Yeah, OK.
MARK: The things we don’t want to see are particularly instances, and we get this from teachers and from counselors, where they are giving us a sense either explicitly or pretty clearly implicitly that your academic focus has not been on learning and growing and developing but on amassing points. On making sure that you get the highest grade possible on one particular exam and/or that your GPA is weighted such that it is 100th of a point higher than somebody else. That is not something that gets us excited about you.
HANNAH: Yeah, and it’s something that we see plenty of. So yes, that is, I think, a very good note. Another thing that we don’t love hearing about in teacher recommendations is just competitiveness in the classroom setting or one upmanship or succeeding to the detriment of your classmates.
MARK: Yes. We love to hear about the opposite– a student who is excited by ideas, and their excitement brings others along with them, that they contribute positively to the classroom environment, and that they’re interested in helping others succeed in that space as well. Similarly, I love hearing particularly from a counselor who says, this student has pursued their academic interests and their academic challenges without worrying about the GPA game, without worrying about the rank game.
In our conversations about what their junior schedule would look like and their senior year schedule would look like, they were not motivated by being ranked number one in the class. That kind of thing gives us a great sense that, oh, wow, when you get to this kind of environment, you’re going to be in the right kind of headspace. And frankly, you have the right kind of maturity to really do well in this environment.
HANNAH: Yeah. I love a teacher recommendation that talks about how you dealt with a specific challenge. So that doesn’t mean that we want to hear about how you were just struggling all year in this class. But if you encountered a challenge or there was something that didn’t come quite as easy to you and a teacher can talk about how you overcame that challenge–
MARK: Yes.
HANNAH: –that can be really powerful for us. And the reason is that when you go off to college, especially if you are coming to a place like Yale, it’s going to be challenging.
MARK: Absolutely.
HANNAH: You’re going to run into roadblocks. Things are going to be difficult. It’s going to be hard. College is hard, and it should be hard.
MARK: Yes.
HANNAH: And we want to make sure that when you inevitably run into those challenges, you have the tools to deal with it.
MARK: Yes. Your ability to react to setbacks, your overall resilience is a critical academic skill right up there with your math preparation–
HANNAH: Sure.
MARK: –and your reading comprehension, that’s essential to us. And teachers probably give us the best insights than anybody else in the application to that.
HANNAH: So as you are thinking about who to ask to write a teacher recommendation for you, think about all of these things. Think about not just what class did I perform the best, but in what class am I most proud of how I approached the learning, and do I feel like my teacher can talk about that in their recommendation?
MARK: Yeah. All right. Let’s move on to what’s often the last thing that we read in an application, a report from an interviewer.
HANNAH: Yes.
MARK: And your interviewer is either going to be a Yale College alumnus, may have graduated in the last two, three years, maybe graduated in the last 40 or 50 years.
HANNAH: You never know what you’re going to get.
MARK: And you may also be interviewed by a current Yale College senior who’s a member of a group of student employees that do these interviews for us virtually. These tend to be pretty free flowing conversations. They don’t have a script that they follow, but every single one of them is going to have opportunities for you to talk about what excites you academically.
HANNAH: And this is just another way for us to get at that idea of, again, this academic fit for Yale beyond just what we’re seeing on your transcript. So the ability to have a conversation with another human being who is or was a student at Yale and loves Yale and to get them excited about your excitement for learning at Yale is something that we love to see.
MARK: Yeah. I think the dimension that’s most interesting about these conversations around academics is that there’s always going to be something very important that’s different between you, the high school student, and your interviewer. It might be the thing that excites you academically is very different than what that individual majored in at Yale does professionally. Even if they’re aligned, even if you say, wow, like, yes, I want to major in comparative literature, and you’re a professor of comparative literature who got a BA at Yale in this, you’re still at very different places. That interviewer is a PhD in the area. You are a high school student.
And so what I love getting from these reports is how individuals can connect across those differences and how your excitement and interest can be communicated to that person. I think it’s most exciting when it is totally different. When someone says, I’m a comparative literature professor, and this student is planning to major in chemistry. But wow, her excitement for chemistry was totally infectious. It’s making me think I should maybe go back and get another bachelor’s degree in chemistry.
HANNAH: Totally. Yeah, we love to see that.
MARK: That’s really exciting because that demonstrates that you aren’t just excited about it, you can share it with others. And that’s an exciting academic dimension for us.
HANNAH: Yeah. Another line that I love to see is, she was able to communicate this complex topic to me, a layperson, in a way that I totally understood. And we see that line a lot, and it is a great indicator that you are a strong communicator.
MARK: And so I want to be careful to say that it’s not the role of the student to impress that interviewer academically. We aren’t asking the interviewer to evaluate your academic preparation.
HANNAH: No.
MARK: The interviewer’s real area of expertise, we believe, is their familiarity with the Yale College learning environment. No matter what they majored in, they were closely connected with peers who were engaging all kinds of different majors and fields. And so they’re used to those kinds of conversations where they say, wow, I don’t know anything about sociology. I don’t know anything about chemical engineering.
But you, my classmate, are sitting across from me in the Pearson college dining Hall, and you’re getting me excited about that. Those are the kinds of conversations that happen on our campus all the time. And I know that our interviewers get very excited when they feel like, wow, the conversation I had with one of those high school seniors applying to Yale felt just like one of those conversations I had at Yale.
HANNAH: Yeah. OK. So we have gone over a lot in this episode. And hopefully, we’ve conveyed just how important academic strength is to our review. It’s not the only thing we consider, and it can’t be reduced to something as simple as test scores and GPA. But it is the single most important thing we consider, and it’s an area where every applicant should try to make a compelling case for themselves.
MARK: We see that folks sometimes overemphasize the academic component, especially when they think that getting one more point on the ACT, or having a GPA that is 1/100 of a point higher than somebody else is going to be the reason why they are admitted. We can also see that folks underemphasize this, either because they actually lack an important piece of academic preparation, and they don’t meet that very first test that we are going through when review applications, or because they think that some other skill or talent is going to set them apart and that they don’t need to engage in their academic program beyond meeting that basic baseline.
HANNAH: Right. So your academic strengths, your preparation, and your goals should all be at the center of your college search process and at the center of the application that you put together. But of course, our admissions process is designed to consider you as a whole person, not just a student. So we can’t just stop at academics.
MARK: And we are going to talk lots more about those other important things that Yale looks for in our future episodes. But for now, let’s say thanks to former admissions officer Andrew Brick Johnson, who composes our music. You should check him out at andrewbrickjohnson.com.
HANNAH: If you have comments or an idea for an episode, drop us a line at yaleadmissionspodcast@gmail.com. And finally, remember that the views expressed in this podcast are ours and don’t necessarily represent those of Yale University. Thanks for listening.
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