[MUSIC PLAYING] MARK: Hello, and welcome 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.
MARK: And we are very excited that today we are doing something that we’ve never, ever done before. We are doing a live virtual recording of an episode that is all driven by questions submitted by real high school students.
HANNAH: Yeah, some of my favorite episodes that we do are the mailbag ones or the MythBusters ones, where rather than having a full episode dedicated to a single topic, we tackle a handful of questions, or topics, or things that have come in. And we get to cover a wide range of things. So we’re going to be doing that today.
MARK: Yeah, we’ve done this with real questions. We’ve also done them with fake questions with our MythBusters episode– things that sound like the real questions that we answer all the time. We also had a lot of fun doing our first recording in front of a live audience at Bulldog Days last spring. So this event is sort of trying to tie all these things together. This was an idea that was generated by our office’s virtual events team. And we’re really excited about it.
HANNAH: Yeah. And today, our program is going to be driven by questions submitted by current high school seniors working on their applications, many of whom are tuned in live tonight on Zoom. We have a couple hundred folks joining us over Zoom, so thank you all for spending your evening with us.
MARK: Yeah. And since this is going to be a podcast, those of you who are tuning in live, we think you’re here probably to see what we look like. And I have to wonder, is it what you imagined if you’ve listened to our voices? And will you ever be able to listen to the podcast the same way ever again?
HANNAH: Hopefully, this is not a never meet your heroes situation.
MARK: Seriously, though, I think the real benefit for our live audience is that they will have the chance to ask some questions live. We have behind the scenes today our friend and colleague Corinne, who is working in Zoom land tonight to look at the Q&A feature that’s on our Zoom. And she’s going to surface some questions for us to answer in the second half of our session today.
HANNAH: Sounds good. But let’s start first by answering some questions that registrants submitted beforehand. We got over 100 questions for this. We are, of course, not going to get to all of them, but we pulled out the ones that we thought might provide the most insights or would be relevant to the largest number of people.
MARK: And we found that for just about every theme, there were multiple questions. And so what we did is we grouped some of them together. And rather than just asking one question and doing one answer, we’re going to ask several questions that several folks submitted, and try to give you a comprehensive answer that ties them all together. You ready for this, Hannah?
HANNAH: I’m ready. Let’s do it.
MARK: OK, so the first set of questions was all about the activities list. This is that section in the application where you’re going to tell us about extracurricular activities, or work responsibilities, or just things that you do outside of classes. So we got a question from Audra from Wisconsin. And she said, should I pick and choose certain activities to include on my application, or just include anything that I dedicate time to?
Joseph from New York said, hey, does Yale hold extracurriculars, started in my junior year, in lower regard than others? And then Sarah from New Jersey asked, hey, if I have extracurriculars that are important to me, but they don’t fit on my activities list, would it hurt me to include them in maybe the additional information section?
HANNAH: OK, so when it comes to figuring out what you’re going to include and if you should include extra information, I feel like my advice here would be to list out your activities in the order of importance to you. So start with what you spend the most time on or what you’re most excited about, what you feel is most important for us to learn about, and then kind of go down from there.
If you get to the end of the space on the Common app, or the QuestBridge app, or the Coalition app, and you run out of space and you still have more activities, you can certainly put them in the additional information. But also think to yourself, OK, are these activities really relevant and important in addition to the ones I’ve already listed?
MARK: Right. This question about whether something should be included in the application really comes down to, is it important to you? And particularly, is it important to just how you wind up spending your time? So it’s important to remember that this is not graded on some rubric where you get 100 points for being a varsity athlete and 97 points if you were a supporting actor in the latest musical or something like that. We’re trying to get to know your story and understand who you are, where you’re from, what you do.
Oftentimes, this is what you like to do. But I also want to make clear it can also be what you have to do, or what you are asked to do, or what you’re expected to do in your family especially. So things like work, things like family responsibilities. Those are very relevant here. You do not, however, need to feel that you need to fill it up just to fill it up. And so if something is not meaningful to you or important to you and those around you, it doesn’t need to be there just to fill up the space.
HANNAH: Yeah. And then there was another question in there about, how do we feel about extracurriculars that were started just in the junior year, and do we hold those in lower regard? Certainly, not necessarily. I think it can be tempting to load up on extra extracurriculars to beef up your resume before you apply to college. But it’s also perfectly reasonable to discover something new and start doing it at age 16, and we fully understand that. So we’re not necessarily going to look down on an activity just because you haven’t been doing it all four years.
MARK: Right. I know that it’s tempting to imagine that we go into this process with a whole lot of assumptions about students. But truly, that would not be a fun way to read an application, right? If we picked it up and we said, oh, we know what’s going on here. That wouldn’t be illuminating. It wouldn’t be interesting. Our job is interesting because different folks do different things. They have different stories. And when a student later on in high school discovers something that’s meaningful to them, that can be an interesting dimension of their application.
HANNAH: All right, Mark, we have some questions about the additional information section.
MARK: All right.
HANNAH: Starting with Jay from Minnesota who said, I’d like to know how admissions offices feel about using the additional information section to elaborate on extracurriculars. And also, Will from Florida is wondering, how have you seen students use the additional information section that is annoying or bothersome? What aren’t you looking for here other than an extra essay?
MARK: Yeah, good question. So we really like having the additional information section. I’m going to put it that way. We like that it exists. It’s very useful just because it, I think, reinforces the fact that this is a contextual read and you are complicated people who don’t fit neatly in boxes.
The additional information section, however, can be quite dangerous, in my experience, just because it is just entirely open-ended. And sometimes, students just feel the need to add more and more and more and more and more in that space. And I don’t think it will surprise anyone listening that we oftentimes don’t read every single word in an additional information section if a student is clearly just going on and on and on in that space.
And so use it strategically. Use it to give truly additional important information. Don’t use it to just sort of dump everything that you might ever want to say or record about your high school experience into that one place.
HANNAH: Right. Yeah, be really deliberate about what you’re including there. And just really think about whether it’s adding some new, truly additional, and important information to your application. And please don’t write an extra essay there. Just [INAUDIBLE].
MARK: Good, I’m glad. Will had already figured that out. That’s right. Do not just write an additional essay there. And I would say also, don’t skip this step of using the activity section for what it’s designed for. The activity section allows you to tell us the activity and give some insights on it. And when someone just says see additional information and then has written three paragraphs about everything there, I would frame that as bothersome in Will’s excellent words there.
HANNAH: Yeah. And 99% of the time, completely unnecessary, right? This is not our first rodeo. We have a pretty firm grasp of what it means to be in various extracurriculars that you’re listing. So you do not need to give us all this extra information on those things. Use the space that is provided.
MARK: And use it for context. I would say that is where it is most helpful– context, circumstances, things swirling around, the surround sound that have affected the bigger picture of what we’ve seen, not just additional laundry list of accomplishments, for example. That’s the kind of thing where you just sort of say, OK, yes. Excellent. Good for you. Let’s move on and get ourselves to the interesting stuff here.
All right. So, Hannah, next set of questions. I call these the kind of pointy versus well-rounded questions. And we’ve gotten questions like this in lots of different forms. So Mikayla who’s from Louisiana, she asked, I’ve been told that I need to have a passion project in order to get into Yale. Is that true?
And then Alexa, who’s from Guam– very cool that we’ve got a Guamanian tuning in today. Alexa asks, it feels like if we’re not national award winners in a science competition or completed published research, there’s no use applying as a STEM applicant. Is there truth to this? So two slightly different things, but I grouped these together.
HANNAH: Yeah, so I’ll do the second one first. Just a reminder, most people are not national award winners in science competitions or in math competitions, right. And if you don’t have that experience, that doesn’t mean that you are unworthy of being in our applicant pool or anything like that. Also, lots of serious STEM applicants have done research, but just as many have not had that opportunity, or maybe they discovered their passion for science recently and haven’t had a chance to pursue it outside of school.
So my general advice is don’t compare yourself to the imaginary other applicants out there when you’re putting together your application and thinking about whether you should even bother applying to a school, right? If you are a STEM applicant and you’re super passionate about it, you can demonstrate that in ways beyond just competitions and research.
MARK: And I would say this more general question from Mikayla, no, you certainly do not need a passion project to get into Yale. But beyond just that simple no, what I want to say here is that what you really don’t want to do is try to present yourself as a sort of pointy, passionate student when that’s not your jam, when that’s not your personality and your style.
Similarly, if you are really passionate about something, you don’t want to try to come off as a really well-rounded student by just kind of adding things on in the application because you fear oh, I need to have all these other dimensions. So we see students do very well in the process who are very well-rounded. We see students who do very well in the process who are more pointy.
I know it’s part of admissions officer lore that admissions officers are looking for well-rounded student bodies, right? This is one of the old counseling tropes out there. People say, well, they’re not looking for well-rounded students. They’re looking for a well-rounded student body. And a well-rounded student body is full of really pointy students. And I would just dismiss that characterization of how we approach the process.
We’re looking for students who are a great fit, who are going to add a lot, who are going to take a lot away. Some of those students are pointy and passionate. Some of them are well-rounded. We want a mix of all of these things. And most importantly, you got to do you. Trying to present yourself as something else that’s not going to work out.
HANNAH: All right, we also have a few questions about majors. Elanor from Wisconsin is wondering, does applying undecided hurt a student’s chance of admission? And Emily from Georgia– Mark, that’s your home state.
MARK: All right, Emily.
HANNAH: Does the major in which you apply have an impact on your chances of getting in? For example, if one major is less popular than another, are you more likely to get into Yale if you apply with less common major?
MARK: Yeah, I really like these questions. And I always have to approach them from a very Yale-specific angle because different schools do this different ways. Different schools have different processes and administrative structures for different schools and different majors. At Yale, it’s very important to us that we are admitting students to just one single undergraduate college. And so, truly, everybody is arriving technically undeclared.
Students at Yale don’t declare their major until the end of their sophomore year. They don’t they don’t have to until the end of their sophomore year. And so we aren’t admitting students to a particular major. And that’s why on our application, we give students the option for selecting up to three different areas. Here’s where the strategy piece does play into it.
Again, it’s related to what we were saying in the last set of questions as well. You got to do you what does not make sense is for you to try to present yourself as an aspiring blank major just because you think that that’s going to set you apart in the process. If you’re doing that, even though we are admitting students just to Yale College and we want them to be generalists, you are priming us to look at you through that lens.
And I’ve definitely had the experience of seeing an applicant who uses that section of the application to try to pitch themselves as a prospective blank major. And I say, oh, that student’s strengths kind of aren’t there. I could see them being a great y major, but they didn’t show any interest in that whatsoever. And it’s kind of hard for me to then make the case that they would do well there.
So think about how you are presenting yourself. And if you are truly undecided and you’re applying to a place like Yale where it’s a great place to be an undecided student, own it. Live it up. I will say a last note on this. And sorry, I’m giving a long monologue answer here. Hannah, I’m going to let you chime in.
HANNAH: This is what you get when we don’t have the editing process for the podcast.
MARK: That’s right.
HANNAH: People are really getting behind the scenes.
MARK: They’re seeing how I just go on and on and on. I’m in college fair mode, too, because I was just answering this question at a college fair on Friday. So, yeah, the last note here is if you are undecided, don’t miss the opportunity when we said up to three majors in this space to select up to three majors. Even if they are just, oh, hey, that sounds cool, you don’t need to be wedded to those things. Again, just talking about our process here. Over to you, Hannah.
HANNAH: I don’t know what I could possibly add to that thorough answer. I think you covered it all. Yeah, I think you covered it all. I guess what I usually say when people ask me this is, the list of majors that you put on your application is only important to us as much as it’s important to you, right? So if you are really truly interested in these majors and you’re reflecting on that in another part of the application, then we are going to pay attention to that. If not, then we’re going to consider you more kind of generally curious and undecided, which is a great way to be at a liberal arts college.
MARK: And people are now seeing the other editing trick, which is that I go on and on and on about something for way too long, and then Hannah summarizes it way better and way shorter immediately afterwards. I say, we’ll use that. We’ll use what Hannah said, and we’ll just cut out all of what Mark said. All right, over to you for these questions, Hannah. This is the first set of questions about essays.
Understandably, we got a lot of questions about essays. So Joseph from New York, he asked, should you focus on one idea or set of characteristics in an essay, or should you try to talk about multitudes of sides that you have in your essays? Focus on one thing, focus on multiple things?
And then Clotilda from Texas asked, should your short takes be related to other parts of your application, or should each one reveal something different about you? So thinking about consistency versus variation either in one essay or across multiple statements in an application.
HANNAH: OK. Yeah, so when people ask me, which of these is better when it comes to writing an essay, I almost always hesitate to choose one over the other because I really believe a great college essay can be written under almost any circumstance and with almost any choice that you make here. I would say that if you try to pack too much into one essay, you run the risk of running out of the room you need to do some actual deep and personal reflection.
And think about the different pieces of the application and how they go together. And remember that a single essay is never being read in a vacuum, right? We’re also seeing your extracurriculars. We’re hearing from your teachers. We might be interviewing you. So we have all these sources of information about you. So you don’t need to pack everything into one essay.
And then in terms of the short takes being related to the other essays, this is really up to you. But I would always advise you to consider the limited real estate you have on the application, and make sure you’re using it well and not repeating yourself. Think of it as a dinner plate at a buffet where you only have so much room to pile the food on. I love an application that reads like a well-organized bento box. Different compartments for different things, but they all taste good when you put them together, right? So that’s my advice.
MARK: Hannah, I haven’t heard that bento box analogy before. I like that.
HANNAH: That’s a new one I’m testing out. Yeah.
MARK: That’s good. Well, I was going to trot out the one that I talked about way back in our interviews, which is the analogy that makes my high school physics teacher cringe, which is my analogy of constructive interference when wave physics.
HANNAH: Yeah.
MARK: Which I’m going to summarize without going into my really bad explanation of high school physics. These things should resonate and build upon each other. You actually want them to have, in the simplest terms, good vibes and similar vibes so that they are building upon each other. And the same person that I’m meeting in this part of the application is the same part that I meet in others. And, like the bento box– I like this– we carve out different sections of the application specifically to give you those different chances to give us something that is different, but also the same. You got to find that thread between them.
HANNAH: All right, we have more questions about essays. Jesse from Maryland is wondering, what is something that applicants often overlook when writing college essays? Sadhana from Florida says, when I see successful college essay examples– uh-oh– they almost always are artistically crafted, and I think to myself, I would never have thought of that. While I believe I have great ideas, I’m concerned about being able to communicate them in a creative way. Would this be an issue for the essays in my application?
And then Faraz us from Washington State says, when you guys say reflect on essays, what does this really mean? Is it personal insights? Is it a lesson we’ve learned from an experience? If so, how do we tell that without sounding cheesy, fake, and superficially deep? Three great questions about the content of the essays.
MARK: Yeah, really good questions. And I think in this case, we might actually want to take them kind of one at a time. So I really liked this question from Jesse. And I was thinking about it because I was just watching the US Open. And so I saw Coco Gauff win yesterday. And it was so incredible. And I don’t like tennis. I never watch tennis, but I was so excited about this.
And I was thinking about how whenever someone is interviewing an athlete after they’ve done something, the first question that I always ask them is, how did it feel? What does it feel like? And that’s where my brain goes when Jesse’s asking, what’s something that applicants often overlook in writing essays? Feeling. That’s the thing that I feel like I feel– I feel like is most frequently missing. I get some nice analysis.
And I usually get a kind of the moral of the story is at the end where you tie it up and you sort of say, I had this experience, and here’s what I learned from it. And it’s a kind of purely intellectual, or just even sort of mental exercise. And I find myself wanting to know, what did it feel like in that moment? How did you respond and react? How do you feel about all of this now?
That is something that I think can really add an extra dimension to an application when we see not just how you think, and how you analyze and reflect, but actually how you felt in the moment and the kind of feeling that you got in response to it. So I’m going to say, I think applicants often overlook the power of emotion and describing their emotions authentically when they’re putting their application essays together.
HANNAH: So then going to the third question, what would you say about sounding cheesy, or fake, or superficial when you’re pouring out your feelings and your college admissions essay?
MARK: Folks, go for it. This is your time. I’m going to throw something else out here. Who’s a very successful teenager who can sound very cheesy, but you know exactly how she feels? One Miss Olivia Rodrigo, right? She is very effective as a songwriter and as a performer because she is all out there.
And I have mixed feelings about Miss Rodrigo, but I will give it to her that her emotion is in her performance. Same with Taylor. Same with Adele. That’s what makes them great performers. And so I would say, I much more frequently roll my eyes and I say, oh, you just made something much simpler and cleaner than it actually was than I do, oh, wow, you’re a mess of emotions, you teenager. Right?
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: You are.
HANNAH: Right.
MARK: And I say that as someone who was not a very angsty and emotional teenager myself, but we know what kind of territory we’re in. And I’m going to encourage you to own those emotions as much as you can in that space. I don’t know if you disagree with that, Hannah, characterization of Olivia Rodrigo.
HANNAH: I would agree. I would say go for it. We see it all in the admissions office. And we know that what we’re asking you to do with the college essay is not an easy task. And we’re asking you to be vulnerable and very reflective, and that is not something that comes naturally to everyone. Doesn’t come naturally to me or my co-host, I imagine. And we appreciate that it doesn’t always come naturally to the folks writing the essays.
I also really like the question about seeing examples of successful college essays and thinking, oh, I could never write that. First of all, don’t read too many examples of successful college essays. They are very cherry picked. And they are not going to be helpful to you in writing your college essay because your college essay needs to be about you. And these examples of other essays that seem really impressive are not about you.
The other thing I would say about this is we are not looking for pieces of publishable work that would be at home in The New Yorker when we’re reading college essays. The content and the reflection really is what matters to us. And often, if that’s more raw, it’s much more telling to us as an essay, but that is never going to make it into one of those anthologies of successful college essays. So just keep that in mind.
I’ll also say, I’ll save essays that I really like that I feel are really creative and extremely well done, and just amazing examples of essays. I read thousands of essays every year. I probably save two or three. So I’m hoping this doesn’t sound intimidating. I’m hoping it sort of humanizes the process and you kind of realize most of the stuff that we’re reading sounds like the voice of a normal 17-year-old, and that’s what we’re looking for. And those exceptional ones that you might see examples of are few and far between. And most of the students who are admitted don’t necessarily make it onto my saved desktop folder.
MARK: Yes. And because these are short pieces of writing, clarity, simplicity, straightforwardness, they can all be great assets in you speaking clearly to that admissions committee. And so if you say, listen, adding in some sort of creative either gimmick or just kind of wrap-around theme is not my style. Don’t feel like you got to put that packaging on. Say it like it is.
All right, so, Hannah, let’s move on to the next set of questions. And these are specifically about the supplemental essays or the Yale-specific questions. So Hannah from New York said, how do you make your supplement stand out, especially the why Yale one? Evelyn, also from New York– New Yorkers are really digging into our Yale-specific questions right now. Evelyn asked, how would you advise a student to create a unique voice in their supplements?
HANNAH: OK, general reminder. Standing out is not the goal. Again, we are reading thousands of these things every year. There’s nothing you can write that is going to shock us. There’s nothing new under the sun, right? So standing out isn’t the goal here. The goal is, again, reflection and sounding like yourself. And having these written pieces of the application be in conversation with all the other pieces of the application in a way that helps us understand who you are, why you’re applying to our school, what would make us excited about bringing you to our school, and all those things.
So with supplements, just as with the Common App essay, reflection is really important. So for that why Yale essay, we’re not looking for a list of things at Yale that excite you. We’re looking for reflection on why certain things about Yale excite you and why you’re drawn to applying to Yale. Those feelings. Again, we want all the feelings.
MARK: All the feels. All the feels. When we say why Yale, think about that specifically in terms of connecting the dots. And I would say, especially thinking about voice, you’ve heard us talk about the short takes where we feel like we sometimes get the clearest sense of a student’s voice in part because the space is just so limited. And so I’m going to encourage you to take a look at those really short four questions that we ask. Take stock of essentially, where does your brain first go? And then sit on it for a little while.
I recommend kind of just saying, yeah, I think I’d like to write about that. Don’t immediately write it down. Just kind of sit on it, think about it. And I think if you actually let your brain just sort of stew on it for a little bit, you’ll actually start to think about how you can say something in your own voice that’s going to feel distinctive for those short pieces especially. We like those because we often find that we get the most distinctive, most authentic voice from students in those short pieces.
HANNAH: All right, we have some big picture questions. And then we’re going to get to the questions that you all are asking in the Q&A feature on the Zoom. But first, Dan from Iowa says, what does holistic review mean? Are some areas of the application considered more important than others?
MARK: So good question. I always like to say the word holistic is probably not one that you use in your everyday conversation. You probably weren’t in the cafeteria at your school last week, and you were like, well, I took a holistic approach to last night’s homework, right? It’s this word that sort of only exists in the college admissions process it seems. I prefer the term whole person review to holistic review because I think that captures better what we’re looking for.
Whole person means the whole thing. And specifically when we’re talking about the whole thing in this case, we’re talking about the whole application. And we have these different parts of the application because it is not the case that one thing is considered more than others. There are some instances where one part of an application is ultimately the most important thing that a committee gets excited about. And we say, oh, yes, this strength here in conjunction with these other things, but this strength is the thing that stands out and kind of pushes the student over.
Next applicant down the list, it can be an entirely different part of the application. So it’s not that we go in with a weighting schema where we say, OK, 40% of the decision will be based on the essays and 20% will be based on the activities list. They are all there to shine some light on the individual person. And for individual applicants, it’s always a little bit different in terms of how much of the thing ultimately pushes the student into the class.
And so we think about it in terms of different students with different strengths. And we like the fact that we can respond to those different strengths in context and with some flexibility because you all are a wonderfully interesting and diverse group of students. You contain multitudes. And our process is designed to accommodate that, not just kind of fit you into boxes.
HANNAH: Totally.
MARK: So, Hannah, I’ll give this one to you. This is from Juana in California. And she’s asked, how subjective do you think the admissions process is? If you had two groups of Yale admissions officers look at the same students, would both groups end up making the same admit, deny, and waitlist decisions? I like that question.
HANNAH: Yeah, that’s an interesting question. I don’t know that I have a neat and tidy answer for that because I think it probably depends on a lot of things. What I will say is that we are often in the position where a student has gone through admissions committee, and then they come back for a review committee where we’re seeing a little bit of new information or something. And the conversation is never, what was that other committee thinking putting this decision on this student? It’s always more like, OK, we see how you arrived at this decision and this all makes logical sense to us.
And the same thing with reading. Many applications get two reads. And it’s pretty rare that they are completely disparate in their understanding of the application and their general feeling about whether that would be a strong application for Yale. There are essay topics that I personally enjoy reading about more than others maybe, but that’s not necessarily going to affect my decision about does this student belong in the Yale class.
MARK: I always try to make very clear this process is subjective. But I think, as Hannah just said, it is kind of collectively subjective. And through the collective subjectiveness, we reach consensus. And that consensus is pretty steady across the board. So I encourage you to embrace the subjectivity of this process by starting with the fact that there’s real people on the other end. There’s real subjects. We have points of views, and you want to convey yourself as a real person in that process to those people.
But you shouldn’t worry that, oh, if Hannah’s just having a bad day, that’s going to torpedo my chances. We have these checks and balances. And by having a collective of people with different points of view, we feel like we reach good consensus and in some ways balance each other out. That’s why it’s really important to us that our committees have people from different perspectives in the room together. That definitely makes for better work. I think it also makes for more consistent work, as you were saying.
HANNAH: Speaking of the committee process, Alex from Massachusetts is wondering, during the committee process, does a similar topic or section of the application come up more often for a wide range of applicants, or is the committee process unique for each potential student?
MARK: Yeah, that’s a good question. And I think it’s a little bit of both. And I don’t want to just keep saying, well, it depends, it depends, it depends. That is the true answer. But I think, in my experience, one of the things that often we go to first is an interview report. And I think the reason for that is that the application work cards that we write gives this nice kind of summary for the committee of the different moving pieces of the file.
So when Hannah or I are presenting a committee, we will just walk through, essentially, our notes on a file. And we’ll say, here’s the activities, here’s what the essays are about, my thoughts on the essays, here are the things that the teacher said. We’ll give some notes on the interview, and then we will give a summary. One of the reasons I think we often go to the interview report is that we’re interested in the fact that it’s from a disinterested third party.
An interviewer is someone who didn’t see the rest of the application. The interviewer didn’t see your essays. They didn’t see your letters of recommendation. And they’re just writing based off of that experience with you. And so I find that for a lot of us, we often say, can we see the interview because we think we might actually get a nice summary in that space. And already having all these details in my mind about what’s in the application, hearing the impressions from someone who didn’t have that can help to really reinforce all of those things.
I don’t know if you had a different thought, Hannah, in terms of where we often go in that committee room. It can be everywhere. And sometimes, the whole thing.
HANNAH: It can be everywhere. It’s going to depend a little bit on, yeah, what the reader’s point us to in the committee room. But that interview is often the most recent piece of information we have. So it’s something that does get seen quite a lot.
MARK: All right, last question before we switch to live Q&A. So Varsha from North Carolina said, what do you guys do while taking a break from reading applications?
HANNAH: Well, other than recording podcasts, New Haven is a very walkable city. Plug for New Haven. So I like to get away from my computer and take a walk and clear my clear my head. I also live in, I think, one of the most scenic neighborhood of New Haven. Very walkable little area. I don’t know if I’ve revealed this on the podcast before, but I am a huge crossword puzzle nerd and really like the whole lineup of puzzles kind of on the New York Times puzzle app. Whenever I need to turn my brain to something else, I just say, OK, which puzzles have I not done yet today? Crossword, spelling bee, all those things.
MARK: Nice. Well, I’ll make a quick other New Haven plug, which is that I often read newspapers. I read a lot of newspapers. And one of my favorites is an online newspaper that’s called the New Haven Independent that’s run here in town. So I often take a break from reading applications just by reading up on what’s happening in New Haven. So you should check out New NewHavenIndependent.org.
All right, what do you think, Hannah? Are we ready to switch some gears now and answer some questions that folks have submitted live? I know Corinne has surfaced a few here. Do you have one to pick out already?
HANNAH: I’ve seen some really good questions pop up. So, yeah, let’s do it. This is an interesting one. Do you have any essay icks where whenever a phrase or technique is used, it automatically makes you dislike the essay? This is from Laura.
MARK: That’s a good question, Laura. Truthfully, no. Truthfully, no. What’s funny is that I remember my first year in the office, I had two sticky notes on my board. And I was tracking every time that someone said plethora or myriad. And both sticky notes got filled up pretty quickly. Truly, no, though. We did our we did our episode a few years ago, Hannah, about what doesn’t work in essays.
HANNAH: Yeah.
MARK: And I wouldn’t describe those things as icks. I would describe them as, oh, rats. There it goes and we missed the chance. So, yeah, I know it’s not going to be super satisfying answer, but I would say there’s not much– OK, well, I came up with one. All right, I’ve got one. An unpowerful descriptor. And the case study of this is so. The word so in the English language does not do a whole lot for you.
And so when I see a piece of writing and it describes something in an essay as that was so blank, I just want to say, oh, there was a better adjective that you could have used there. That makes me go, you missed it. You missed a chance right there. It doesn’t make me go ick. It doesn’t make me roll my eyes. But I’m just like, oh, there was a better word than so in that space.
HANNAH: Right. I will say, I would recommend that if you haven’t, go back to that “Essays, What Doesn’t Work” episode that we did a while ago. And I will say an interesting thing about that episode is we made separate lists, Mark, of what we feel doesn’t work, and then we compared them. And I feel like there were things on my list that I felt didn’t work for me, where you were like, oh, actually, I think this can be kind of interesting. So, again, there’s a little bit of that subjectivity. And ultimately, we just want you to use the space as best you can to convey your message.
MARK: Yeah, great one. Let’s see. OK, here’s one for you, Hannah. We’ve both covered different parts of the country, different parts of the world. Someone asked– this is a good MythBusters kind of question. Is it true that students from the East Coast typically get in more often than West Coast students from states like California?
HANNAH: Am I wrong that California is maybe one of the most represented states on Yale’s campus? So I think we can go ahead and bust that myth. That is not true. I would say we get generally more applications from our backyard– the state of Connecticut. We probably get more applications than a school that is not located in the state of Connecticut. But we’re looking for students from all over the country. I do international admissions, so I’m looking for students from all over the world. And we don’t have a preference for East Coast versus West Coast.
MARK: And there’s no sense like, oh, we can only take four students from Nevada in a given year. We just don’t have room for a fifth or a sixth. That would be silly of us to limit ourselves. If we take it to the extremes here, we see really strong applicants from everywhere. So it’s not like we have to lower our standards to admit great students from North Dakota.
We can go through the process exactly the same as we would with applicants from other parts of the country with the caveat that, of course, we’re doing contextual evaluation and we understand that going to school in South Dakota is probably different than going to school in the South Bronx, right? That’s part of our review process, but it’s not saying, well, we have a certain number of students, or we have to line these students up and we can only take a certain number of them. So it’s tempting to think that, but we can tell you it’s not one of these dimensions that we add into our process at all.
HANNAH: All right, I see a question that I really want us to address, which is that with the overturning of affirmative action, does this mean I can’t mention my race in my application?
MARK: Great question. This is something that has been in the news obviously. And the simple answer is no, it does not mean that you can’t mention race in your application. This ruling changes nothing in terms of how you should or can approach the college application process. I’m going to say not only does it not prohibit you from talking about these things, I also want to say it just shouldn’t change your strategy.
So whatever you were thinking about the college application process on June 28 of 2023 is how you should be thinking about the college application process after June 29 of 2023. That’s when the ruling came out. So this ruling affects how admissions officers, and admissions offices, and colleges more generally do their work. It does not affect how you should approach the application. So I hope that’s reassuring to you.
All right, so I’m going to find the next one here. This is similar because one of our essay prompts this year– a new one gets at this– Margaret asked a question. For the essay question reflect on an element of your personal experience that you feel will enrich your college and how has it shaped you, you suggested discussing something that has shaped me and will be an asset in college. What does an asset in college mean? That’s a really good question. What kinds of things would fit into that, and how should a student think about that dimension as they’re putting together their application essay?
HANNAH: Yeah. so think about what we’re trying to do here in the admissions office where we are crafting a class of students. We’re not only thinking about who’s going to thrive academically at Yale, but who’s going to engage in interesting ways with their classmates, bring unique perspectives? Because one of the coolest experiences you have when you come to a place like Yale is the people that you meet, regardless of what you’re doing in the classroom. And you will learn a lot from those people outside of the classroom, as well as inside of the classroom.
So think about that. And think about what it is about you that someone would learn something about or gain something from simply by knowing you in the college setting, and reflect on that thing. And that can be a little hard because we’re asking you to think about yourself in a positive way. We’re asking you to put your best foot forward, or what do you think about is valuable? And that can be a hard question to answer for a lot of people. But that’s sort of what we’re getting at there.
MARK: Yeah, I think to keep it simple, just imagine a time when you shared something about yourself. Either you were just talking about it or someone saw you doing something, and they said, oh, that’s cool, or I didn’t know that, or thanks, that’s interesting, or I hadn’t been exposed to that thing before and you shared it with me, and that was exciting. Think about those kinds of experiences.
Those things that you have and that you’ve shared with people, those are the assets that you want to consider that you would add to a community. Focus on the community element of it. It’s not just me, me, me and how I’m so great, and I’m an asset because I’m awesome. It’s this thing, I’ve actually seen it benefiting people around me. And so I want to share it with you all, admissions committee, because I think that that’s the kind of thing that would be valuable in my college community. And I’d like to share it with those people as well.
HANNAH: We have a question from Savannah that I think is probably relevant to a lot of people in this particular time of year that we’re recording this, which is, is it worth it applying single choice early action to Yale if it’s your top choice? Specifically, does it have a significant impact on your admissions chances?
MARK: Yeah, great question, Savannah. A simple answer– no. This is, at Yale, all about you and how you want to put together your application timeline, and also how you want to put together your decision release timeline. I’m very impressed that you used the full acronym acronym– SCEA– Single Choice Early Action. We did an episode last fall all about this. And Hannah and I just came out and apologized because Yale’s early action program is just needlessly complicated. We’ll say it’s needlessly complicated.
So there is this restriction at Yale that if you’re going to apply early, you’re not applying early to other private universities. It’s complicated with the legalese around it. What’s not complicated is that it’s not going to give you an advantage. If you want to hear from Yale and you feel that your application is ready to go November 1, get it in just so that you can get that info back.
If both of those things aren’t true, wait until regular. It’s not going to change anything in terms of your outcome. So actually, a low stakes decision here is what I want you to leave with.
HANNAH: Yeah, and if you are looking at a college where it’s a high stakes decision, your chances are higher or there’s some scholarship money on the line or something like that, go ahead and apply to them early and apply to Yale regular because applying to Yale early is not going to give you a better chance of admission. It’s not going to get you a better financial aid package. That’s all going to be the same whether you apply early action or regular decision.
MARK: All right, Hannah, we got an early question from Trestle who asked about performance portfolios. We would call these supplementary material submissions. How do those factor into the admissions process?
HANNAH: Yeah, great question. So we allow you to submit supplementary materials. If you are particularly talented and passionate in the visual arts, music, or dance, or film, you can submit a supplement. The way that works is, first, the admissions officer reviews your entire application. And if they decide that this application is competitive and going to move through the process and we think that your talents or potential in the area that you’ve submitted your supplementary materials are going to be important to your admissions decision, then we’ll send it on to a faculty member in that discipline.
Faculty member will listen to your musical supplement or watch your dance supplement, and they will put together a little write-up for us, give it a little rating, send it back to the admissions office. So then we take that, and we add it into all the other pieces of the application that we already have. And it’s just kind of this extra piece of information of what this Yale faculty member thought about your supplemental portfolio, and should we take that into account as we are making your decision.
MARK: I saw another good question here. Lillian just wrote a question about, does the type of application you use change the way that you are reviewed as an applicant? And it sounds like Lillian is specifically asking about the QuestBridge application versus the Common application.
HANNAH: No, it does not. So we do accept three different application platforms at Yale– the QuestBridge application, the Common application, and the Coalition application. The review process is the same regardless of how you choose to apply. You can only pick one of those application platforms. And you’ll still have an area admissions reader. You’ll still have admissions committee. It’s all the same process.
And a lot of the same questions are also being asked on those applications. Specifically, the Common app and the Coalition app ask exactly the same questions. So it’s really about which feels most comfortable for you, which platform you want to use.
MARK: And I know that for students who are considering applying through QuestBridge, it can seem like the stakes are higher here. I’ll recommend listening to a very early episode that we did all about QuestBridge. It was important that we actually used the podcast to cover that because it can get a little bit complicated. But one of the reasons that we like the QuestBridge application is that for students who are from lower income backgrounds, we feel like the application itself gives students more space to tell their story.
And so we do like that, and it’s one of the reasons why we don’t ask students who are named QuestBridge finalists to complete another whole application. We say, hey, your QuestBridge application is great. We’re going to give you the chance to answer a few of our Yale specific questions just because we want you to have the chance to tell us a little bit more and connect the dots with Yale specifically. But I would recommend that if you are a high achieving student from a lower income background and you like the QuestBridge organization as a way to organize your college search, apply to schools that offer really awesome financial aid. There’s 50 partners now through QuestBridge.
Use that application. You are not going to be missing out on anything. I think this is what the question usually gets at is, I got this QuestBridge application and I’m going to submit it in September. Am I missing some opportunity that other students have by submitting the Common application? And the answer is absolutely not. If you’re a QuestBridge finalist, that QuestBridge application is going to be a great asset for you in the process.
HANNAH: This is a good question, which is, how can students from public schools who might have fewer resources or access to opportunities compare their activities or experiences to students from private schools or other areas?
MARK: Simple answer– don’t.
HANNAH: Yeah.
MARK: Don’t compare yourself to anybody. Don’t compare yourself to students at your school, students at other schools, whether it’s public, private, charter, magnet, parochial, boarding, international. We see it all. And what we want to tell you is that we don’t compare and contrast. We try to get to know you in your context. Our evaluation process is contextual. That’s what makes it interesting is that we get to know these places.
We get to know what’s offered there. And we don’t try to balance scales. We don’t try to say, well, this is worth this much in this space and this is worth that much in the other. We just try to understand where you are. And I will say that that’s just a baseline understanding that overwhelmingly, students don’t get to choose where they go to high school. You don’t get to choose where you grow up, what kind of household you’re in. You don’t get to choose where you go to high school.
And so we aren’t looking for things that aren’t offered in your context if they’re not offered in your context. And so you do not need to feel wherever you’re applying from that you’re coming at this from a deficit. You need to trust that we are going to understand what have you done with what you’ve been given in your space. And I’m going to encourage you to wear that proudly, even if there are elements of your context that just on a daily basis you feel like are deficient. I want you to go into this process saying, I’ve done what I’ve done in this space and I want to share that with you in the college application process. You shouldn’t feel that you’re coming at this needing to make up for anything.
HANNAH: Well said. I have another one for you, Mark, from Daniel. Since FAFSA opens in December this year, will early action students receive their financial aid award if they are admitted in December, or will they have to wait for it?
MARK: Oh, good question. So pretty technical answer here. And the simple answer is no. Yale does financial aid with something that’s called institutional methodology. And what that means is that we are going to assess your need with our own Yale-specific rules. They are overwhelmingly more generous than whatever the federal rules are. And the FAFSA– by the way, this is the Free Application for Federal Student Aid if folks don’t know that, or if you didn’t listen to Lingo Bingo where that was one of our bingo answers.
It is a very important form for applying for aid because the federal government has a lot of money available, and that can be great for you. It can also be great for colleges because it can wind up actually reducing what they need to pay for a student. So with early action applicants, we can still do our needs analysis this year with the other financial aid information that you will submit. And that’s going to include something called the CSS profile, which is run by the college board, and both of your biological parents, if they’re both living, their most recent tax returns.
We will do a needs analysis of that. We will package you. If you are admitted and you get one of those early packages, you will be asked to submit the FAFSA later. That’s not going to change your award, though. It’s just going to change essentially behind the scenes who’s paying for what, what dollars are coming from Uncle Sam, and what dollars are coming from Yale. So no difference there at all. I think we’re at time, Hannah. These have been some fantastic questions. Let’s call it a success for our very first live virtual MythBusters event. Many thanks to all the students who participated. You all are what made it successful tonight.
HANNAH: Yeah. And we didn’t get to all of your questions, but you can always submit them at admissions.yale.edu/questions. We will also do this again.
MARK: Thanks to former admissions officer Andrew Brick Johnson, who composes our music. Check him out at AndrewBrickJohnson.com. I’ll also say thank you to the Courtyard by Marriott Nashville for hosting me tonight and for Hannah, who’s just hanging out in her office in the admissions office.
HANNAH: And thanks to Corinne, who’s answering questions behind the scenes for us tonight and keeping the show going here. 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.