How to Create a Compelling College Application: All Components Count – College Bound Mentor Podcast #12

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Welcome to the College Bound Mentor podcast! Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all.

This is Episode #12 and you’ll hear Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie put together all the puzzle pieces that make up the college application puzzle. Listen to the episode on Apple Podcasts, Spotify, and your other favorite podcast spots – follow and leave a 5-star review if you’re enjoying the show!

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  • Transcript

College Bound Mentor Podcast Episode #12: How to Create a Compelling College Application: All Components Count

How do you stand out in college admissions? It all goes back to your college application. In this episode, Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie put together all the puzzle pieces that make up the college application puzzle. Hear the components of the college application, the most important component, whether to submit your test scores, how to handle letters of recommendation, and how specific colleges differ with their applications. This episode covers everything from applying to college to letters of recommendation. Here’s a small sample of what you will hear in this episode:

  • What components make up a college application?
  • How do test scores play into a college application?
  • What is the most important part of a college application?
  • How many activities should you include in your college application?
  • Who should write your Letters of Recommendation?
  • How should you approach supplemental essays?
  • What is the Why College/Why Academic Interest essay?
  • How important are Letters of Recommendation?

Subscribe to College Bound Mentor on your favorite podcast platform and learn more at CollegeBoundMentor.com.

Check out the episode and show notes below for much more detail.

Show Notes

What is the College Bound Mentor podcast?

Lisa, Abby, and Stefanie know college. They also know students. With over 30 years combined experience mentoring young people, they’ll show you why understanding yourself is the key to finding the right college. Each episode, hear trends, case studies, and interviews with students who have gone through it all – giving you valuable insight to survive the college application process and beyond. Hosted by Lisa Bleich, Abby Power, and Stefanie Forman, Partners of College Bound Mentor.

Transcript

Please note: this transcript is not 100% accurate.

Lisa Bleich 0:01
There’s nothing more satisfying than reviewing a final application and seeing everything come together.

Hey, CBMers. Welcome back to College Bound Mentor, where we help you survive the college application process and beyond. We’re your co hosts, Lisa

Stefanie Forman 0:28
Abby and Stefanie.

Lisa Bleich 0:30
And on today’s episode, we’re going to discuss how to create a compelling application to make you stand out in admissions. Let’s start off talking about all the components that go into the application and how they should all connect. And then we’re going to break down each of those components and give you tips and how you can attack each one. So first of all, Stef, why don’t you just walk us through what are all the components that make up an application?

Stefanie Forman 0:54
So first we have the classes that a student takes in their transcripts, so the grades that they’ve received their resume, so everything that they have done in an out of school since freshman year. So only high school always students ask, well, I’ve done this, you know, for the past 16 years, but only the the resumes, only for what the student has done throughout their high school experience, testing. So SATs, ACTS, AP scores, IB international bachelor, bachelorette, if anyone’s doing an IB program, academic interest, so that could be research or projects that they’re doing in or out of the classroom, if they’re into robotics, if they’re building them activities. So activities are all encompassing. That could be a special talent like singing or musical theater or dance or ceramics, that could be it could be a sport model, un truly anything, letters of recommendation, so usually from academic teachers, and also there’s other recommenders, which we’ll talk about in a little bit. And then the essays, so you’ll have the personal statement, and then the supplemental essays, which are the specific are the specific essays for the different colleges?

Lisa Bleich 2:17
All right, so thanks Steph for outlining all of the different pieces. Can you talk about each of them, and are there any parts of it that are more important than other parts within the application?

Stefanie Forman 2:27
I’ll start with Classes and Academics, because we feel that number one, at the end of the day, a college wants to make sure that an applicant can handle the rigor of that college or university. So they’re going to be looking at the transcript. What should that transcript show? That should show that a student is challenging themselves to the best of their ability at their high school. So if they are interested in the humanities, and that school offers AP Lang or AP Lit, or a push, a US history or government or or any humanities courses, they’re going to want to see that that student is challenging themselves and taking the most rigorous courses in the humanities, and vice versa, if they’re More of a stem student or they have a specific interest. So again, that’s that’s super important. The other thing right? Because most applicants right, they’re only going to see colleges are only going to see what they’ve done junior year. So what do you do about senior year? Still, senior year grades are super important, and so colleges want to make sure that these students are maintaining that rigor, or they’re even increasing that rigor senior year.

Lisa Bleich 3:49
Well, I think what you’re trying to say is that sometimes they’ll have they’ll ask for a mid year report. So the mid year report covers the first semester of senior year. So if you’re applying for a regular decision school, then that a lot of the schools will want to see your major report. They also will want to see first marking period. So if you’ve applied early decision, they’re going to many schools will want to see, particularly, if your grades were trending upwards, or there was a there wasn’t a consistency in your grades. They might, may want to see what happens that senior year. So they might ask for a first marking period. It’s called an other transcript, another letter, so that they can get that information. So keep in mind that senior year grades can be very important. There are some schools like Penn State that they’re like, Nope, we’re not looking at senior year grades. We’re not going to pay attention to that. But there are other schools that will, and particularly if a student gets deferred from their early application. Those senior year grades are super important. Let’s talk about testing. Abby, how does that play into the application pieces? Yeah, so

Abby Power 4:52
the testing world is very interesting right now, because since covid, many schools have been test optional because some kids didn’t have. Access to taking the test. Actually, most kids didn’t, but now that students are able to take the test, some schools have decided to remain test optional, meaning that you have a choice whether or not to submit your tests. So and when I talk about tests, I mean SAT scores or ACT scores. And the interesting thing about that is that you may make a different decision depending on this each school that you’re applying to. So what you would want to do is look at the mid 50% range of the accepted freshmen at that school to see if you sit in the middle 50% range or higher. And if you do, we recommend, generally speaking, that you submit your score, if you’re in the bottom 25% then your score is not going to help you, and we recommend that you don’t submit to those schools. The other kind of benchmark that you can look at for your test scores is the middle 50% range, or the average of your high school. So you would look on your school profile to see where that makes you sit in your class. So for example, if you’re in the top 10% or 20% academically in your high school class, you would want to be sitting in the same place with your test scores. So that’s how we think about test scores. And you may submit to some schools and not other schools. You may not submit to any schools. We really don’t know until we start submitting, because we have to see the data for for the middle 50, middle 50% range, for the scores for the prior year, for the college. And it seems to us that more schools are going back to testing, especially the most highly selective, but it’s really fluid, lot of movement, and you know, it’s changing every minute, right?

Lisa Bleich 6:50
And the schools that are going to be requiring testing for this year, they’re giving the data from last year when they were test optional. So that also may change, because the mid 50 percentile may be skewed higher, as we’ve seen that’s happening since things went test optional. So like everything in admissions, it really depends with regard to the next section, which is resume activities. So Stephanie mentioned how students can submit a resume, and it really depends on the school. Not all schools will allow you to submit a resume, but many of them will, and some of them, they’re very, very very important, and we’ll talk about that a little bit later. But with the activity listing on the common app, or on the UC application, those area and even on UT, UT, Austin, the Texas application, that part is super important for showing the consistency and making a compelling narrative. A lot of times, what we see with students do is that they they list it, but they don’t really put a lot of detail. They don’t really give the specifics. They don’t give the numbers around it. And so some of the questions that we ask students to think about is, how did, how did you get your role? What specifically do you do in your role? What are your responsibilities? Have your responsibilities increased over time. What goals have you set and met? So for example, if you entered into a club and you were trying to revamp it, or you started a club, did it go from zero to 20 members? Did it go from 20 to 100 members? So all of those quantitative measures are important to put in there. If you’ve won certain awards or gotten certain accolades, that’s also important to put in there. What is the impact that you’ve had, have you mentored other students and seen them grow as a result of your involvement? What accomplishments have you had? Have you had to have any challenges in those activities, and how did you overcome them? You don’t have a lot of words or a lot of characters. So it’s important that every single character counts. If you love something about the activity, you could put that into it. If you could talk about why you did it, that you could put into it, it’s just important that you want to put as much specifics in the activity section. It’s all about what you do and what’s the impact that you made when you get to writing some of the supplemental essays, and you’re talking more specifically about the activity, then you could talk about why you do it, how you do it, and what’s the impact that you’ve made and why it’s meaningful to you. So that’s the way to think about the activities.

Abby Power 9:16
One thing I see some students struggle with is, if they’re doing an activity that’s not that compelling, it’s a challenge to talk about why they do it or what’s important about it, but if you think about what your team or the group will miss about you when you’re gone, it often helps you to think about how important you are to that group. And one really quick example is I had a young woman who played JV tennis for four years at a small school that was a pretty low performing tennis team, so there was nothing impressive, if you will, about her playing on that team. But one thing that she had noticed over the years, because she was a doubles player, is by the end of the tennis match, so at the beginning singles play. Players play, and all the parents are there, and everybody’s rooting, and they have snacks, and by time third doubles comes up, it’s dark and lonely and cold and nobody’s there. And she worked with the coach to make a rule that at least three teammates would have to be stay till the very last match. And that’s an impact, and that also shows her character and how supportive she was to the team. So even if it’s not a high performing thing, where you’re winning accolades and awards, if you really think deeply, you can figure out how you’ve contributed

Lisa Bleich 10:30
Exactly. And even if you’re not, don’t have a title, and that’s a great example, Abby, if you don’t have a title, a lot of people will say, Oh, well, I wasn’t captain, or I wasn’t I wasn’t on the executive board, I didn’t really have a position. That doesn’t mean that you haven’t made an impact. And so just like Abby said, if it’s that, you know, making sure that someone is there so that the last play, the last third, single, third doubles, have people watching them, that’s an impact. If you’re the one who stays behind and helps clean up to make sure that there isn’t a problem with a group activity that you did that’s an impact. If you help somebody learn a different language or understand something or clarify something, that’s an impact. So that’s what is really important to put in those activities. Don’t always think about that. You had to have a specific title, but just what was the impact that you made exactly how does the portfolio, the audition, the athletic recruit, tie into a piece of your application? It’s gotta be connected to what the things are that you’re doing. So each of those things, if you’re applying for a school where it’s a portfolio or an audition required for it, then it could be 50% of your application, and that’s going to be as important as the other pieces that we talked about, if not more important. And so you just have to put the same energy into doing those things as you would be doing the essays an athletic recruit is going to be much more focused on. If you have a coach that’s recruiting you, there’s a very specific process, and then that also could be a very big piece of your wheel, a big piece of your application process. So we’re not getting into the ins and outs of that process right now, but just knowing that that could be a very big piece, all right, letters of recommendation. Now, this is something that we I don’t know that we were surprised by, but it really confirmed us a couple of our students who went to Duke were able to get their applications review and read their application review and really see how admissions evaluated them. Remember, you got a I had a student and you had a student who both showed us what was surprising to you when you saw that each

Abby Power 12:38
school, Duke, included, has a rubric. In the case of Duke, it’s they score things one out of five, and you can actually see the admissions reps comments. It’s pretty cool. So once you’re a student at a school, you have the right to request your application. And like Lisa said, some of our students have shared them with us. I’ve seen Cornell and Duke a WashU. So most recently with this Duke one what really stood out was the influence of the letters of recommendation, because this student, a very highly qualified applicant to Duke, was you could see with the academics, with the testing, with the activities, really solid, but not a sure thing. And then you could see how the admissions reps quoted the letters of recommendation, picked very specific words that stood out from the letters of recommendation. And then in the end, when they did their summary, they could they showed how to her interview jived with the letters of recommendation, and brought the whole thing together. I was really surprised at how influential it seemed. It completely seemed like it was the tipping point for her. So on this particular applicant’s scores, everything was between a four and a four plus, except for the letter of recommendation one was a five. And then they created a new score of five plus for one of them. And basically, in the end, said, You know, we heeding the letters of recommendation. This sounds like someone we want to be part of our community, but

Lisa Bleich 14:08
you have no control over that. Do you how do you control over letters of recommendation? Yeah,

Abby Power 14:13
it’s such a good question. And you know what? Sometimes you don’t have control. If you’re at a huge public school and you haven’t had the opportunity to get to know your teachers that well. You don’t have much control, but you can always go in for extra help. You can always engage your teachers in conversations about the work you’re doing. I mean, one piece of advice I give my you know, kids in their English classes is, when you’re given a paper, come up with a couple of potential thesis statements and go talk to your teacher about it, so they understand that you’re hitting it early, and then you can engage them so they can see how you think. So there are definitely things that you can do every time I again, tell clients, every time you show up in class, show up as your best self, come prepared for class discussion. Options. I mean, this is your job. This is your job. Your junior year. This is what you have to do. You have to show everybody what your potential is, inside and outside the classroom, and that’s how you can really affect it. Also. One quick thing is before, usually after, you request your letters of recommendation, your teachers or your school will give you the opportunity to do something called a brad sheet. Different schools have different names for it, but it’s a survey about what you know to give your teachers and your counselor feedback or input into what they might write about for your letters of recommendation. And you should spend a lot of time on that. You should ask your parents to look at it, because it’s, it’s really what the teachers are going to base their letters on. So be incredibly thoughtful about that. When they say, What was your favorite thing about the class? Don’t just say, oh, you know, your lectures are funny. Don’t say that talk. Figure out something very specific that you want them to talk about, where you really, you know, shown as a student?

Lisa Bleich 16:00
No, I think that’s really, really right spot on in terms of the advice. I mean, I think what’s interesting about the letters of recommendation and why they hold so much weight is because at the end of the day, that teacher is seeing you over the course of a year, there’s or over the course of an entire year, and how you show up every day. How do you impact other students? Are you someone who is engaging in the conversations? Are you someone who’s a leader in the class? And that’s really important, because testing is, I mean, obviously you’ve spent a lot of time preparing for the test, but it’s a one day. All of us can have a bad day. I know we’re having a bad day today, some of us. So, I mean, it’s, it’s hard, yeah, show up. It’s how you show how you show up every day, and what you do and what you put into it. And I think that’s a really a good thing. And so that’s how you could have control over it. I was facetious in terms of like you have no control over it, but you do have control over how you present yourself every day and what you put forth, and really thinking about the classes that you’re interested in. And one of the things that I looked at when I one of my students shared with me her it was also Duke. It was interesting. She was going for something that was more stem oriented. But it was her English teacher that actually gave her the top few, which is the one of the categories all TFS is what they call a top view. And it was because she she showed up, and she was just really engaged in the classroom, and she was really interested in learning. Now, for students who don’t have access to strong letters of recommendation, as Abby said, The brag sheet is is critical, and that’s really where you can bring all of your pieces of your application together so that your teachers are corroborating what you’re saying in the other in the the rest of your application. And I think that’s what’s really important, because they don’t always know everything that goes on. They don’t have anything that goes on outside of school, but they can speak to what you do inside the classroom. Now, what about non academic letters? Are they something that you should submit? Like, what do you think

Stefanie Forman 17:53
I used to be an English teacher the last school that I was at, I taught middle school, so I didn’t really have an opportunity to write recommendations as an English teacher I had previously, but I was the girls varsity tennis coach, so I was the other recommender. And I’ll explain what that is, but I will say to what Lisa, Lisa and Abby were saying, especially with that with that Duke example is when I was writing my first other recommender as a as a coach, I asked the college department, and it was a very strong college department. It was a it was a prep school, was a private school in New York City. They showed me examples of coaches recommendations, and what stood out to me was that it wasn’t so of course, we had many amazing athletes, but I’ll never forget this. The basketball coach wrote about a student, and he never played. He was on the bench. And like Abby was saying with that, with that JV tennis player, was that it didn’t matter that he was at the bench. He was at his best self every day. He had more energy than everyone else. And I just thought that was incredible, that he just wrote this beautiful recommendation about someone who never really played but brought so much to the team, and that’s the type of person that anyone would want at their school, like, that’s the epitome of an asset so, and that’s what I learned when I was writing as a tennis coach, that so many Different levels on on my team, but those team players, like those, were the easiest ones for me to write. So the other recommendation, so that’s from someone who’s not an academic teacher. Most schools take them. Sometimes public, large public universities do not take them. So just note that they won’t accept them. But you want someone you want to submit it if it’s from someone that knows you really well, that can talk about your character, that can talk about your leadership, that it’s super personal. It so it can be a coach, obviously, it can be a boss. It can be maybe another faculty member who’s a mentor or an advisor of a club that you’re at. So not necessarily like has taught you in the classroom. So it can be so a dance instructor that you’ve had forever. But again, the number one thing is, if they can talk to you personally, if it’s just like a coach that you don’t have that rapport with, you probably shouldn’t ask them, even if you were on the team for years. But what about

Lisa Bleich 20:19
somebody who is the you know who’s on the board of or graduated from the college that you want to go to, but doesn’t know you should that person write your letter.

Abby Power 20:28
There’s lots of difference of difference of opinion about this in the industry. I think we’ve all had specific experiences with clients, but I would just say that we live in the in the real world. So if you’re having someone influential write you a letter of recommendation, they better be darn influential. I mean, kind of quid pro quo, influential, because these schools are being inundated with letters from, you know, quote, unquote, influential people that don’t really know the kids. Now, if it’s someone that you’ve worked with, like I had an occasion, a young woman who ended up attending an Ivy League school who did a summer project, a very substantive summer project, with a judge in California who was on the board of this school, and that was very different, because they worked together for 12 weeks, and she really spoke. I saw the letter of recommendation, she spoke to her qualities and her abilities and her skills and her facing challenges. So that’s different. But if it’s just someone you know, you know, in my opinion, it can really backfire, yeah, especially now, yeah, yeah. I think there’s, yeah, there’s also it puts an air of privilege, sort of Paul of privilege, if you will, over your application. So I usually counsel not to do it.

Lisa Bleich 21:55
Yeah. I mean the letters, the non academic letters, as everyone said, is about speaking about your character, and that’s what and knowing you really well and talking about that. Now I want to talk a little bit about the the UCs, the University of California schools, UCLA, Berkeley, etc, because they don’t take letters of recommendation. They only look at your academics from starting in 10th grade. They also have a very different application, because it’s their own application rather than the common application, and their activity section is really important. And so they give you about 350 characters for each description of what you’re writing about. And so you really want to use that space to answer all of those questions that we were talking about earlier, because that’s where they’re going to identify how and why and what you’ve done to make impact in the activities that you’re doing. So take that space and use every character that you can for those activities. Because I was speaking with somebody, I believe, from UC Irvine, and she said, I read those first, and I can make my decision based on those activities. Then they’ll look at the piqs, which are the personal insight questions, and that’s really how they make their decision. So you want to use that space very carefully. We didn’t talk about supplemental essays, and we did a whole podcast before on the Y college major essay. But I think that it’s really important that for the supplemental essays, that that’s the opportunity to really show a different side of you. So Abby, can you talk a little bit about the supplemental essays and how you counsel people to approach those

Abby Power 23:38
so there’s all different kinds of questions that the colleges ask from why you want to come to the school, which we did cover in a different podcast, and others ask about your leadership or community you belong to your

Lisa Bleich 23:52
diverse experienced experiences, right?

Abby Power 23:56
Overcoming challenges. Academic interest. Yeah, academic interests. It’s really all over the place in general. What I would say about these, this is a the supplemental essays are a really great opportunity to help you tie your application together. I mean, one problem that I see sometimes is a student will or a client will answer supplemental essay question like, what’s the biggest problem in the world right now that you’d like to solve? And they say something that has nothing to do with anything they’re doing, or anything they’ve mentioned in their personal statement, or anything that shows up anywhere else, and then it just sits out there, kind of like a meatball, as as they say in baseball, just kind of hanging out there on not tied to anything else. So I feel like the supplemental essay should be looked at as an opportunity to talk about things that you maybe didn’t have enough space to talk about in other parts of your application, like maybe it’s just 150 characters on your activity section, and then you take. You use that same activity, and you talk about your leadership and impact and why

Lisa Bleich 25:04
you do it, and why and how you did it, because I think that’s what’s important and why it was meaningful to you. I think what’s interesting about the supplemental questions, it’s it’s really like the whole application is like a puzzle, and so all of the pieces have to fit together. So when you look at the whole application, there’s nothing more satisfying than than reviewing a final application and seeing everything come together, and then when you finish reading it, you like, yes, this totally captured this student really well on all of the pieces and a lot of the we’ve been told that a lot of admissions people will actually start with the supplemental questions. They’ll read those first and see how they fit within the rest, and then they’ll go back and read the personal statement. And we’ve also been told that a lot of kids don’t spend as much time on the supplemental questions. They spend a lot of time on their personal statement, and then they will just really quickly write the supplemental questions. And that’s not a good strategy. You want to put as much time and energy into those supplemental questions, and that the biggest thing is, just, are you answering the question? I mean, the prompts have gotten better at being very specific about what they want to answer, so really read that and answer. Have you answered that prompt, both parts of the prompt? Because sometimes it’ll be like, Why do you want to go to our school? Or why do you want to what’s attracted your intellectual curiosity and why do you want to do it at our school? Or what’s a conversation that you had, and how did you grow from that experience or change your perspective? So you need to answer both elements of the prompt, or all elements of the prompt, and then also just make sure that you’ve really done your research. We again went into a great detail about the why school essay and how to do that, so you can listen to that podcast, which I believe is podcast number nine. And so that would be important to do a couple

Abby Power 26:47
of other quick things about the supplemental essays. Michigan’s The best example of one that gets misread all the time, because the Michigan why Michigan essay says very specifically, why are you interested in the academic opportunities in the college that you’ve chosen at the University of Michigan. And nine times out of 10 students write about Go blue and see football in the big house and the spirit and Ann Arbor is being such a great town. And Michigan is saying very specifically, we know we’re awesome. We don’t hear anything about that. We want to hear about what you want to study and why. And the other thing that I just wanted to build off of what you’d said, Lisa, is many reps have also told us that the supplements, not only do they read them first, but they’re the most important. Because if you think about it, colleges can ask anything they want. There’s no limit to how many essays or what they ask about so you have to try to figure out why they’re asking this and an answer. And sometimes they’re kind of crazy questions, like, for example, Wake Forest has this question. Pick a Maya Angelou. She was a quote a former professor here poem, pick a line from it and tell us why it resonates with you. And that’s, you know, a little bit of a recipe for disaster, because you might pick something that has nothing to do with the rest of your application. It seems like you have all the freedom in the world, but no you have to personalize it. You have to figure out something that relates to who you are as a person, right? So all of them are an opportunity for you to show them in many different from many different angles, who you are.

Lisa Bleich 28:14
Exactly. And then the last piece of the application is the additional information, and really just very quickly on when and how to use this is, this is really your opportunity to explain anything that needs to be explaining. So if you had a bad sophomore year because you were out with a concussion, opportunity to explain it. If you couldn’t take a particular class because there was a conflict in your schedule, opportunity to explain it if you miss taking your AP exam because there was a power outage when you were supposed to take it, that’s the place to put it. So it’s really an opportunity to put in any additional information that you want to put it is not an opportunity for an additional essay. It’s also, if you have a don’t have the opportunity to put a resume in and you want to explain your activities in more detail about the what you did for them. That’s another place that you could do within the additional information. Thank you, CBMers, for tuning in. To catch more episodes of College Bound Mentor, make sure to Follow or Subscribe to your favorite podcast platform and tell a fellow parent or student about the podcast. To learn more, visit CollegeBoundMentor.com Until next time, you got this!

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