Quick Updates
Level 1 - Baby Steps
Welcome!
A brief interruption in our college selection tool series. If you have missed it, this series is designed to walk you through how to select colleges and graduate programs to apply to.
If you have any questions on how to select colleges or universities, this is THE way to learn how.
This post will be pretty quick - we just wanted to provide some updates and comments on some of the changes happening in the college admissions landscape. A lot of things to cover!
SAT Required Again
If you have been paying attention to the news, you may have noticed that many selective colleges have announced they will be requiring standardized tests again from applicants.
To any of our readers, this is no surprise to us. We have been saying that this is the direction things would go for about a year now, because colleges want to have the most flexibility in who they choose.
There are some cynics who will say that selective colleges are experiencing regret in admissions because they could not find the best students.
That’s fairly laughable, given the number of data points that are available to select students. It would suggest that without the SAT, highly selective colleges have no way of identifying who the best applicants are. Other data points would have to be fairly meaningless. If you are optimistic, the SAT and ACT do not determine college success. If you are pessimistic, you can look at the high schools where accepted students are accepted and recognize that clearly, certain high schools have higher levels of admissions than others.
The real importance though is knowing where you are in relation to taking the SAT and ACT.
If you are a freshman, it is hardly an issue - it just means that you cannot avoid standardized testing in the future.
If you are a junior or even a sophomore…hope you were not banking on the lack of standardized tests to get into colleges.
If you were not paying attention or chose to bank on not having to take standardized tests, then the most important thing you can do is try to take a standardized test as soon as possible and see how you do. Once you know how you perform on the SAT/ACT, then you can start modifying your selected colleges to apply.
Unfortunately, at this point there is just limited time to pivot.
Waitlist Window
May 1st officially kicks off the time for waitlisted individuals to begin receiving notifications on whether they will be offered an acceptance.
If you have not heard of a waitlist, it is a list of individuals who are given special consideration for acceptance. All acceptances are due by May 1st, and at that point, colleges then know how large their class is and whether they want to bring in any additional applicants into the class.
The waitlist is the list that colleges use for that purpose.
In our experience, you should plan that you will not be called off of the waitlist. Move forward as if you have been rejected.
A lot of students will hold out hope on their dream school accepting them. This is far worse in the graduate school space, where some programs will call you off of your waitlist a week before you start classes.
That does not mean that you cannot decide to make a different decision if you are offered a place off the waitlist, it just means that you need to plan differently.
College is not just a simple acceptance - it is also a mental readiness. One of the factors that ruins an incoming freshman is when they are not fully committed to a given college.
We have seen it - a college student has their heart set on a school, they get waitlisted there, and they never fully accept that they are going to a different college.
Then everything turns into an effort to transfer out, or they wonder about some other life.
Do not be that person.
Summer Internships
Nothing unites people like summer internships - no matter where you are or how old you are, you should be looking for some form of a summer experience.
More important than having the summer experience is making sure that you have the right experience.
If you have not yet, you need to make sure that you get three things out of the summer experience:
Need to ensure that what you do has a quantifiable impact - it does not matter if you just report how many widgets you created, do not take a summer experience with no quantifiable impact.
Make sure that there is a tangible benefit to someone - what did someone else get out of your efforts?
Make sure that your experience is as unique as possible - how do you separate yourself from others in a similar situation?
If you can stick with this strategy, you’ll be fine.
Next up, we’ll discuss some additional considerations to further help refine the colleges you choose to apply to.