COLLEGE ADMISSIONS MASTERCLASS Week 7 Video 2- Jury Deliberations & Verdict

All right, the last video of the series. Congratulations. I hope this has really served you. This has been a true honor to talk you through some of these key points and considerations as you work your way through the college admissions process. I hope you've had fun. As you probably recognize, it's a lot different than a lot of people talk about, but this result in this plan ultimately works. Okay? Just. Just believe in it, go forward with it, see how it works for you. It also is a great thing for parents to do a lot of these exercises. A lot of the parents end up doing them for themselves. And I've had parents tell me that they've quit jobs over the mountain exercise. Don't put that on me. But it's just something to do, something I actually still do to this day. All right, so let's talk right now about what happens when you get the results back, when you get acceptance letters. We. What is the admissions committee doing when they're back behind closed doors? In the legal world, this is called jury deliberations, right? You present your case, the jury goes back to the jury room, and then they talk about the case, and then they ultimately come back with a verdict, either up or down or sometimes sideways, depending on the day. The same thing happens with admissions committee. You present your case for admission to the admissions committee. They go into a room, sometimes a virtual room. They deliberate, and at the end of the day, they come out with a verdict. And the verdict can be one of three things. It could be acceptance, which is a beautiful thing. They can come back with a denial, not a good thing. And they can come back with a wait list or a deferral. I'll talk about the difference here in a second, okay? There might be a double R there. Spelling is not my thing. Acceptance denial, or wait list deferral. Okay, so what do these things mean from a practical standpoint? Well, what they mean is that if you're accepted, the tables are now turning. They're now in your favor that all the way through the college admissions process, you're presenting yourself in the best light possible, and you're making the argument why the school should accept you after the acceptance letter comes to you or email or screenshot now comes to you saying that you are now being offered a spot at that university. The tables are turned, and now the university is trying to sell you on them. Okay? Now, they're trying to get you to say that you want to come there. Do you remember why? They're very concerned about that yield rate. Very concerned about the yield rate. The Yield rate, again, is the number or the percentage of students who accept offers of acceptance who ultimately end up matriculating to that school. So if they send out an acceptance letter, the school is going to try their hardest to make sure they ultimately accept their acceptance because they want to keep this yield rate high, because this is a key driver in the ranking of that school in a number of different places, including the U.S. news & World Report, which everyone is wrongfully obsessed about, but they are. So use that to your advantage. This is your time to hear them out. It's your time to go back to that school. If you visited them before or the first time, they oftentimes put in place admitted student orientations where they put out the fresh flowers, put up big balloons, the best food, decorate campus like it's never been decorated before, and welcome you to the campus and say, this is what things are like here at our school. Okay? Approach it with a jaundice eye, but recognizing that your view now has changed, that you may have visited that school before, but now you're visiting the school as an accepted student that you've been admitted there. So the lens that you're looking through is quite different. You're now looking through it as a lens, as a consumer. You're possibly going to be consuming the education that they're offering where before you. You're coming across as the timid student who would like to maybe go there. Right? Different. Completely different. Animal. Right? So now you're coming to the school, you're coming through it, looking it through the lens as an admitted student. Does it look the same? Go back to your opening statement. Read that again. Look at your list of schools. Does the criteria still apply to you? Has things changed in your world? Have you grown and evolved to the point where that school that seemed so good before now may fall over on your list? One of the students that I worked with recently had a list of about 15 like we had advised. And she had a good mix of schools, and she had a good mix of schools geographically. So she had some schools that are on the coast. She had some schools that were in the middle of the country. And in her spring semester of her senior year, she decided that she wanted to take a class at a local community college. And the class was on studying marine biology. It was like some aspect of marine biology. She lived near Point Pleasant, New Jersey, but she was fascinated with marine biology. All of a sudden there was this newfound passion. And here it was the spring semester of her senior year, and she's looking at her list of colleges. And then she was looking at her list of acceptances, and some of them were in places like Ithaca, New York. But fortunately, some of the schools were on the coast, and some of the schools, thank goodness, had good marine biology programs. So I tell that story because in your senior year, it's a stressful time, but it's also a time of tremendous growth for a lot of people. It's a time in which you actually evolve how you view the world. You're exposed to new subjects you've never been exposed to before. And that because of that experience and the journey that you've traveled since you pulled together your list many, many months before has now changed. So you're not only looking at some of these schools through a different lens of being an accepted student, but you're looking through the lens of being an evolved student whose interests and priorities may have changed. So go back, check yourself to make sure that this is actually a school that now fits your needs as you are today. Okay? Denials. Painful, right? Denials come to you, and it really is the end of the road for that school. Okay? That's okay. As long as you've done your homework correctly, you're going to have 14 other schools that are potentially in the running, and the other 14 schools are schools that you're happy with, remember? So if you get denied by a school, it doesn't reflect on you. Right? I've worked on cases in front of the Supreme Court. I've worked with senators and congressmen who attended colleges you've never heard of. Where you go to school does not mean where you're going to end up. Okay? We're spending all this time trying to get you into the college where you'd like to go. But recognize it's just one stop in your journey and that you're going to make the life that you want to live. Living a life of intention and driving where you want to go ultimately is going to make you happy. And. And nobody can deny that of you. Nobody can judge you because of that. Right? And even though somebody in a room, in a dark room, around a dark table, surrounded by people who don't know you, come out with a denial letter means nothing. Zero. Don't let this bring you down. Move forward. You got a lot of other stuff going, okay? And if parents are facing this situation with students who are getting a denial letter, talk to them, okay? Email me, call me. This is a difficult point, but you get past this because there's so many other wonderful things happening in your life. Okay? I Got a big soapbox on denials that I could talk to you all day about. Wait list and deferrals. It's like purgatory, right? Kind of like in the middle. Go back to my jury. They're still in deliberations. They're like sending a note back out to the judge saying, we're kind of hungry. We're a hung jury. Some of us say yes, some of us say no. We don't know. So what happens is when you apply early and they're hung and they haven't made a decision about you, they will defer your application to the regular application pool. So you applied early. It went into the black box of the admissions Committee, and they came back with a maybe. Came back with a maybe. What that says is, we're going to consider you with the rest of the applicant pool. We want to see what other applications we get in before we make our final decision. Doesn't mean anything other than your chances are still alive. And what that means is, unlike in the courtroom, you get to go back to the jury room and you get to present your case even more. You get to update the committee on things that have happened. For example, remember that upward trend they might be waiting to see if you actually have an upward trend in your grades the first semester of your senior year. So update them on your transcript. Make sure that that transcript gets to them. Explain some new activity you've taken on. Talk about the leadership positions you now have and how you're making an impact on the school during the first semester of your senior year. That this is the time where you want to sway the jury to ultimately come out with an acceptance. And this is the time where they're saying, we need to see more. Don't look at that as a denial. Quite the contrary. They're saying, we want to see more from you, so give them more. It's not a time to go through a letter writing campaign, but it is a time where you have something of significance, of improvement, of impact to make them aware of it. And every single student who applies to a college has an admissions committee officer assigned to them, who's the reader for their file. So you contact the admissions office, you find out who that person is, and you supply that person with the update and ask them what other information you could give them to make sure that they have a full picture of who you are as a student. This is an opportunity that too many students let go. Don't let it go. Your chances of getting in right now are worth it. If this truly Is a college where you want to go? If this is your number one, this is your chance to step up when others are stepping back. It's your chance to step up and say, no, I'm the kind of student you need here. I'm the kind of student you want because I bring all these things to the table for you. Imagine me on your campus doing all the wonderful things I've done over the last three months on. On your campus. This is your opportunity to shine. And the same thing happens on our wait list. So on a wait list, late March, early April, while all your friends are celebrating or they're upset, you're coming back with a maybe and you're left, like, what does this mean? It means the same thing as those who are deferred. They are hung. They are still deliberating your spot, quite, not quite sure about whether or not you deserve a spot at their school. Seize that opportunity. Right? We talk about in this program, seize your legacy. That we're not about a class of legacy students that just give stuff, have stuff given to them because of who your father was. Right? We're a group of people who seize our legacy and drive our life with intention that this is the opportunity. When others are stepping back, you're stepping forward and you're explaining who you are to your admissions committee so that they embrace you and ultimately accept you. One of the things you have to recognize is that some schools use the wait list differently than others. And you'll find out by talking to your peers and your student counselors, your school counselors, and by listening to us during the legacy class, we'll talk about this. Some schools use wait list as a way to make sure that they can fill their class and they will actually pull quite liberally from that wait list. Okay. Other schools put a lot of people on the wait list, but never take students from that. And if it's that latter one, then you may want to spend more of your time getting ready for your number two school and making it your number one. Okay. So it just really does depend on the college. We can help you work through that to try to figure out where you stand so the fun doesn't end at submitting the application. It. It continues all the way across the finish line until May 1st decision day, when you ultimately decide where you're going to go to school. So earlier I told you about Karen in a previous video. And Karen was the student who had dreams of going to a small liberal arts college where when she was picturing college, she was picturing a small, close knit group where professors would allow her to have class on the green. And her parents had always dreamed that she would go to the large state school with the large football program and the big buildings where she would be sitting in lecture halls with 758 of her classmates studying chemistry. And the two views of college could not be more different. And Karen, a few days before decision day on May 1, felt torn that she felt like to make her parents proud, she had to go to the state school where they had always dreamed of her going. That the pictures of her as a baby showed her in onesies with the name of the university across the front. But her vision of the university was quite different. And as I would talk to her a few days before decision day, I said, well, you know, why do you want to go to this state school? And she explained all those reasons that she envisioned a small campus. She felt more at home there. And she didn't want to be, in her words, just a number at the large state school. And as you remember, I said, there's something you need to know about parents and all parents will identify with this, that we just want our children to be happy. And that while you may think that your parents want you to go there to this large school, they ultimately just want you to be happy. So talk to them, explain to them what you explained to me. And over the weekend she had that conversation with her parents. And her parents contacted me later and said they didn't know, they didn't know that that's where her thought process was. It was a lack of communication between parents and students. And the reason why I have parents and students go through this program together and why I encourage parents and students to attend our weekly live classes is because that communication has to happen. That communication has to happen because at the end of the day, your child, your student, may end up going somewhere based on what they think you want from them. Don't let that happen. Let them be heard, let their voice be heard, let their dreams come a reality. Because at the end of the process, they are the one who has to live the next four years of their life at that school. And the last thing you want is for them to be unhappy.