COLLEGE ADMISSIONS MASTERCLASS Week 2 Video 3- The Extended Bench Test

All right, welcome back. Week two, video number three. This is the exercise of, remember, every single week I send you an exercise that I want you to work through, right? So here's the list from the last video, the different considerations that you want to think about. So now that you have your list of considerations, and hopefully you have rearranged this list into some kind of priority so that it becomes the filter by which you put all the colleges in America in and out comes the list, Right? So that's the goal that we're aiming for. So how are we going to do that? Well, you need to have certain resources and tools to help you do that. And the beautiful thing, unlike 20, 30 years ago, when I went to college, things have advanced. We have this thing called the Internet now and has wonderful tools that allows us to really do a deep dive dissection on colleges to understand what's going on there. Before, we had to do things like walk on campus for a day and try to make a decision based on that or use a big book that was dusty and was 20 years old. So right now, through different resources that are online, you have the ability to really hone in your list based on considerations that are important to you. And the idea here is that ultimately, while these things here, geography, settings, size, all that stuff is going to be the thing that ultimately widows down this list for you, the biggest one, whether or not colleges ultimately even make it into that funnel. Bullseye for you is your opening statement. Do you remember that? Remember the opening statement we talked about? How do you view yourself? How do you want to present yourself to the world? This, what did I call it before, is a filter. It's the ultimate filter by which you decide what gets in your funnel to begin with. If a school does not jive with your opening statement, in other words, if school does not help you along the path to climb the mountain you want to climb and go to where you want to go based on how you perceive yourself in the opening statement, it never should get in your funnel to begin with. This is this opening statement is the question of how you see yourself. Where do you want to go? What are your strengths? What are your passions? How do other people perceive you? How do you want to perceive yourself? How do you want to present yourself to the world? This opening statement is, is the ultimate filter by which you first screen out the colleges, that no college should waste your time working itself through these questions if it is not consistent with your opening statement, if it doesn't help move you forward. So we talked about the Opening statement being your filter. This is where it comes in on the front end when it comes to choosing your colleges. So start. Before you actually work through the college list, start by reviewing your opening statement, keeping that front in mind, keeping it by your computer. Some of our students actually print it out and put it at the bottom of their computer by the keyboard, or they even make it their screensaver during the college admissions process, which I love. Keep this front and center throughout this process. Your opening statement, it will filter out everything else by how you approach this process. So filter out the colleges. If they are consistent with your opening statement, then you put it through your filter. If it doesn't, that's one less college you got to think about. It's one less college you got to worry about as you ultimately work your way through this process. And it's going to save you time, it's going to save you heartache and allows you to really focus in on the colleges that might make your list and allows you to do your due diligence at a way that ultimately is going to bring out results that you're happy with. Okay, got limited time, especially in your senior year. I know a lot of people I talk to, their children are in three or four APs. They're taking the ACT again, the SAT again. They're applying to colleges, working on the essays. 58 million things happening. Adding colleges to your list that ultimately are not consistent with how you want to approach the world. Don't do it. It's not worth your time. Right, that's my little soapbox for that one. Opening statement filter. So the first one that we always help people with. So after you've gone through the criteria, you've made your list, and you've used your opening statement to try to drive that list down to a manageable list, you now start looking at those lists that have survived, they've worked their way to the funnel, and you start thinking about those things that are important, those factors. And one way you could do that. Big Future, it's put out by the College Board. Matter of fact, it's bigfuture.collegeboard.org we'll put a link to all these resources down below so you'll have. And of course, these are a lot of things that we supply in our legacy class to the Big Future College Board. It allows you to filter colleges based on the criteria we talked about before. Very cool. Allows you to compare and contrast colleges. It helps you out further so you can dissect those schools and see how it's different between the different schools. BigFutureCollegeBoard.org is how we start out doing that. The other one, which is very similar, it's put out by the Department of Education, is the College Navigator. Similar stuff. Also, a filtering device is not as good. But between these two, and I recommend using both because there's some things College Navigator is going to pick up that big future doesn't. Between the two of these, you're going to come up with a list. And some of those you'll notice there's overlap. So where there's an overlap in colleges being listed in the final generation, those are possible schools you want to keep on there because both of these research tools are coming back with the same responses for you. The other one, it used to be called College Prowler. It used to be called College Prowler. It's now called niche Search. Not as big of a fan of this one because it's kind of a ranking tool. So it ranks things, ranks colleges based on different criteria. Not a big fan of rankings, if you couldn't tell. But it's another source. It's another resource you can use to try to get an understanding of how people perceive that college allows you to see how. What strengths and weaknesses are of those schools as viewed by other people. So it's something that's very helpful and handy. It also gives you student reviews so you can see how students view that school. So that actually is probably one part that's very helpful. It's very good for students who go to small colleges or colleges that are rural or are far away from a college you're considering. So seeing student reviews from other students when you don't have access to students from those schools is very helpful. So that's where niche search comes in handy. But I really try to focus on these first two when it comes to making that list, or more importantly, making that list smaller for people. The other thing we direct people to are the actual college websites. My big caveat on college websites, colleges are businesses. What? Yes, colleges are businesses. They have enrollment managers and they have marketing departments. You'll never see a college website with a freshman crying or you'll never see a college website where the picture is on a rainy day. You'll never see a brochure from a college where they show you the cafeteria food that's really not good. They show you the best, right? So looking at the college websites and the brochures through a jaundiced eye, right? So you're looking at it, but you're recognizing you're being marketed to allows you to take it sometimes with a grain of salt, but they're still helpful because the college is presenting how they view themselves and, and where they want to take the university going forward. Right? So that part is very helpful. The other one, they're called big books. Okay? The one that's best known is the Fisk Guide to Colleges. Okay. The Fisk, they're called big books because literally they're big books. They're also online now, but I like books. But anyways, the big books are like the Fisk School Guide to Colleges. It gives a lot of demographic stats, it has a little blurb about it, talking about the campus. It's helpful at some level. Certainly these first two are the best resources when it comes to trying to get that initial list down. And then once you have that list to some level, the big book comes in handy to try to make that even smaller for you. The other resource, school counselors. So we talked last time about school counselors that although very well meaning, they are underfunded, they are not being supplied the resources necessary to understand schools outside of their geographic area. So they may know the local schools very, very well. But just recognize their knowledge outside of the geographic area where you live in might be limited. Okay. But it is helpful if you want to have a question about a local school and whether or not you're a fit for that particular school. But just recognize there might be other resources that are better available in understanding schools that are outside of the geographic area where your school is located. The other one is current college students. So these are students that are going to the school that you're considering. Ideally, these are students that you know, so you know they're going to be honest with you. Some of these students may not be honest with you. They might be paid tour guides. They might be on a work study program at the university, and the university picks them because they know they're going to give a very cheery, happy view of the school. So recognize that sometimes these people are marketers, but current college students that you know are a great resource to try to understand what the school is really like. So the next list that I'll give you serves a dual purpose. So there's four 1, 2, 3, 4 resources in addition to what I have here that are very helpful in understanding what the school is about. But it has a second purpose, and that is you show your demonstrated interest to the school. And we'll talk later about why that's so important. But I want to highlight it now at Some level. Because if a school sees that you have shown an interest in their school, they are more likely to accept you. Okay? A college is very, very concerned, most of them, about how they rank in the U.S. news & World Report. And one of the driving factors is the yield rate. And the yield rate is the percentage of students who accept the offers of admission. So what they want is if they send you an offer of admission, they want you to accept it. And the only way to figure out if you're going to do that with some level of comfort is by showing that you're very interested in that school. It's called demonstrated interest. And the way you do that is a number of different ways. The first one is if a college rep comes to your school, you should meet with the person if a college rep comes to your area. A lot of them do tours together. A lot of schools do a consortium together. We'll go to big cities. And then they invite students to come there and learn about the schools. They will keep track of who's there. They'll ask you to fill out a sign in sheet. Make sure you do that. You want to demonstrate your interest in that school by going there, meeting those people, making sure that they have record of you going there. Because at the end of the day, that becomes a positive point for you being accepted. Okay, we'll talk about this greater detail at a later point in the course. But demonstrated interest is one way to do that. And one way to do that is by meeting with your college rep. The other way to do that is by meeting with your college rep online. So they cannot go everywhere, right? 48,000 high schools in America. There's 48,000 valedictorians every single year. They can't meet with everybody. Okay, the other stat, there's less than 20,000 seats in the Ivy League, but 48,000 valedictorians, not everybody gets in. So you got to find some way to stand out. One way to do it is by showing demonstrated interest by meeting with your college rep. If they come to your school or by meeting with them online. Sometimes they have virtual office hours, right? Or campus fairs where they do it online. Whatever you can do, if you're truly interested in that school, to demonstrate your interest allows you to get that positive point up. Which brings to the next one virtual college tours. There's different ones. There's websites that are not affiliated with the universities that offer college tours. These are videography, videographers going on campus, touring the campus, interviewing with admissions officers, meeting with staff, basically trying to play the role of you being on campus so you can see it through the eyes of the camera because, face it, it's expensive, right? You can't visit every college in America that you might be interested in, but the virtual college tours are helpful. Colleges are getting into this game themselves. They're offering their own virtual college tours at some level to try to see who's really interested, recognizing that there's a certain percentage of the student body that may want to go there, but they just simply can't afford to go there. They don't have the time, resources to get there. So offering virtual college tours and then figuring out who actually attends those is helpful in the demonstrated interest level, which brings it out to the last one, actual tours. So these are the whirlwind tours that some parents go on, sometimes the summer between the junior and senior year. Helpful, very helpful by showing that you have demonstrated interest in going to that school. So my point earlier, it's not helpful to some level because it's just a snapshot, but very helpful, very helpful in showing that you're demonstrating an interest in that school. So never go to a college unless you show and register that you've been there. Most colleges are very good about this. They have an information session as you walk in, they have a sign in sheet and they're going to ask you for your name, email and address that's going to be added to your file when you apply. And one of the first things they look into is demonstrated interest. Have you attended an information session? Have you visited campus? Have you done any of these things to show that if they accept you, you are likely to accept an offer of admission? These are the things right here that ultimately are going to drive that decision for them at some level. But for the purposes of this video and this session, it's just one more way to get an understanding of what the college is like and whether or not it truly matches with how you want to move forward and whether or not it matches with your opening statement that we talked about on the front end. It's just one more filter against folly. It's a filter against you choosing the wrong school. So all these different points, data points, produce data points for you that allows you to take that list that we talked about on the front end if it gets past your opening statement. These are different points, different filters that ultimately is going to generate your list of colleges that you apply to and at the end of the day is going to generate the list of schools where you're accepted and ultimately where you go to school. And in order to end up with this smiley face, you have to do this process correctly. Okay. Next week, we're going to talk about why everything you know about college is wrong. It's very important that you join us next week, do this exercise prior to next week. It's going to help you hit the ground running as we move forward and actually put, as they say, the rubber hits the road next week as we actually put things into step and actually move you forward so that the end of the day, at the end of this course, you're going to be in a position of having a completed college application that presents you in a way that stands out above the crowd. So next week, join me back here for another round of college admissions.