Bettany Townsend shares how to get into oversubscribed Yale classes: email professors before registration, visit their offices early in the semester, and show up in person so they recognize your face when reviewing applications. Small, direct actions often beat polished written statements.
Hey, guys, it's Ramit Sethi from I Will Teach youh Be Rich. I'm here with my friend Bettany Townsend, and we are going to talk about systems today. Now, Bettany, you and I are kind of weirdos because we. By the way, what a great introduction, right? You're a weirdo. Weirdo. Bettney Townsend. Here we go. So you and I are weirdos because we both love systems and applying systems to our lives right? Now, just to give you guys some context, Betney is Yale undergrad. She's going to Harvard Law School. She used systems to win hundreds of thousands of dollars in scholarships to get into Yale and Harvard. And basically, I'm just gonna plug you because I know you're too modest to do so, which, by the way, I am not. Okay, so, Bettany, first of all, you and I have been talking about this awesome thing that you did to get into some oversubscribed classes at Yale where there were too many students and you had to apply to get in, but you had a great technique for getting in. How'd you do it?
Yeah. So how it works at Yale is you don't sign up for classes until about two weeks into the semester. You get two weeks to kind of go to classes and shop them, essentially decide what you want to take. The flip side to that is that professors don't have to take you. You could decide, this is my ideal schedule. And you could not actually get into any of those classes because it does happen with seminars at Yale. They're capped at 15 or 18, and sometimes 50 or 100 people will show up for a very popular one. And I made an interesting strategic choice in that area. I majored in astronomy.
What? Get a job?
Seriously?
Right.
I was gonna be a physics major. It didn't go well. Astronomy was a lot more fun. But that meant that for a lot of the classes that I thought were really interesting ones having to do with human rights or poli sci or history, I had no priority because I was an astronomy major. And normally, the way it works is, you know, the professors say they take into account a variety of factors, including your major, including whether or not you need the class to graduate. And so I never really had anything going for me, whereas the 35 Poli Sci majors had that leg up. And so what I would do for classes that I thought were interesting that did not apply to my major is about a week before classes started, I'd send the professor an email and say, you know, hey, your class looks really interesting. You know, it vaguely applies to this other work that I'm doing. I would love to talk with you about it in the fall. And then what I do is during the first couple days of class, I stop by their office and be like, hey, yeah, I was just walking by and I know you're teaching that really interesting class. You know, I just wanted to get a sense of what it's all about. And then I'd show up for the first day of class and, you know, they have you write a little statement on a card about why you want to take it. And everyone thinks those statements are so important. And mine were generally okay, but most of the time I got into the classes I wanted to go to or that I wanted to get into. And my friends who would pour over their statements and come in with them, like pre rehearsed, you know, they spent hours writing them beforehand or they'd even take the card away and they'd email the professor later so they had more time to work on it. Didn't always get in. And so, not surprisingly, it turns out that the professors were choosing people that they could put faces to that made themselves unique. And so instead of cashing in my card with a lot, I tried to figure out how I could do that.
You know, what I love about that story is that it reveals that so many people focus on the wrong things. And some of your friends spent hours poring over their statements while you were playing an entirely different game. Right? You're just dominating people before they even know it. Because you're smart, you're thinking ahead of time. And I mean, someone might say, well, betney, that sounds like a lot of work. Well, guess what you got in the class, right?
Yeah. I mean, what a lot of people would actually say is, oh, but it's not fair. You know, we hate those people that go and they talk to the professor instead of just writing a good statement. But, you know, it is a rather arbitrary decision, you know, clearly based on choosing someone based on five sentences. Whatever can fit on the back of the card isn't necessarily the most fair either. And so what it took was doing something to tip the scale in your favor, particularly when you were coming from a disadvantage of not fitting the typical mold of the student the professor was looking for.
Yeah, I love that. I love that story. And by the way, life isn't fair, right? The question is, what do you want and how do you go about getting it in an ethical way? And I think you did a great job.
