CollegeAdvisor Masterclass: Organizing Your College Applications

Webinar Transcription

2023-03-22 – CollegeAdvisor Masterclass: Organizing Your College Applications

Hi everyone, and welcome to tonight’s webinar. My name is Anesha Grant. I’m a Senior Advisor at CollegeAdvisor, and I’m your moderator today. Today’s webinar is a CollegeAdvisor Masterclass on Organizing Your College Applications. Before we get started, I just wanna orient everyone with the webinar timing.

Our presenter will share some tips, resources, and guidance, and also walk you through our CollegeAdvisor portal as a resource tool for you all., and then afterwards, we will open up the floor to respond to your questions and a live Q&A on the sidebar. You can download the slides under the handouts tab and you can start so many questions whenever you get ready in the Q&A tab.

Now let’s meet our presenter, Ferrell. Hey Ferrell, how are you doing? I’m well. Thanks so much, Anesha. Good evening everyone. My name is Ferrell Armstrong. Uh, I’m a former admissions officer at uh, Vanderbilt University and the University of Georgia, most of my time being at Vanderbilt, where I became the primary international admissions officer and was later promoted to,, being on Vanderbilt’s admissions committee, making me one of only five people responsible for voting who’s accepted to the 14th rank school in the country.

Uh, very excited to be with you this evening and, and also looking forward to taking your questions a little bit later on as well. So, before I hand it over to you, we’re gonna do a quick poll for the folks in the room. So go ahead and let us know what grade level you are in. It’ll help give some context to how we should direct it if we’re getting folks prepared for applying next year, applying in a couple years,, and how we can really help you to strategize and set up these resources that we’ll share.

As we’re waiting, Ferrell, do you have a favorite area that you liked reading when you were an admissions officer? Was there a city or a state that, like, you felt like a lot of fun kids or interesting conversations were coming out of there? Tulsa, Oklahoma. Of all places. Yeah. Really? Okay. Yeah. I, that surprises a lot of people.

But, uh, Tulsa, Oklahoma, I think the Oakies have it figured it out out there. I really do. So a lot of great community, a lot of great culture, uh, a lot of cool community events that they do in Tulsa., you know, really, you know, bringing that city into some pretty unique developments into the future. So it was a really cool place to be able to travel, recruit, and then, uh, represent those students to.

Awesome. That’s cool. I’m glad you shared that. Uh, as a, as a New Yorker, I’m always, I’m always, I don’t know, I don’t have any opinions about the middle of the, of the country. I’m too biased, but,, I’m, I’m happy to hear that Tulsa is an interesting place,, we’ll go ahead and close our poll and I’ll just let you know that the majority of folks are in 11th grade.

About 60% of our attendees are in 11th grade. 29% are in 10th grade., and then we have a 5% split between eighth and ninth graders. Welcome eighth graders. You’re very early to this process,, and 2% with current 12th graders, but the majority of folks are in the 11th grade. So with that, I’ll hand it over to you and then feedback a little bit later.

Great. Thanks so much. Well, listen, I mean, it’s, it’s really an important process to understand, you know, that when you put together a plan for your applications, it, it’s very easy to become, frankly, very disorganized. And the more disorganized that you can be, uh, the more challenging it’s gonna make this process.

And unfortunately, I’ve seen families over the years come to me and, you know, they might already have written, you know, 20 to 30 essays and then you can even tell me what their most recent draft is. So before we even get that far into the process, now, it, the way that you can set yourself up for success is to establish a strong foundation.

And,, the best foundation is to understand what you need to be preparing for college applications. So starting off, I think the very first thing we should address is determining what the proper amount of schools will be that you should apply to right out of the gate. I think it’s important to note that in the last two years there’s been nearly a 90% increase in applications to all US schools, like all US schools in total together in the last two years.

And due to that increase in applications, there’s a significant standard shift in terms of how these schools are processing applications and what their review,, requirements are. So, notably test optional emissions has changed a lot of things., you know, when schools went test optional, that was the primary cause of this increase in applications.

But what that did is it forced more schools to implement, uh, new pieces into the review process to help shorten the amount of time they had to spend on each applicant, uh, notably for the schools that weren’t already using them, uh, going to algorithms., many in your top 30 and 50 schools have been using algorithms for some time.

Uh, but now many schools are using upwards of three and four algorithms before making a decision on your application. So this is leading to lower acceptance rates, which means you need to be applying to more schools than what you might have thought about applying to. And currently,, you should be exploring if you are in this process and don’t already have a school list, you should be going through and exploring 30 to 40 schools.

Why 30 to 40 schools? Because you need to have a variety of options to break your school list out. We’ll talk about that here in a few minutes, but I wanna talk for a second about what types of schools you should be looking at., I, I think it’s important that we break away from the popularity of a school and, you know, the, the, just the history of a school.

I, I really want you to be paying attention to the resources of a school and frankly,, the rankings of its programs, not necessarily the overall ranking of a school, but the ranking of the major that you are perhaps in pursuit of or considering., I think that’s a even better idea, or excuse me, a better way that you should pursue,, where you want to go to school, not just playing the name and rank game with your friends.

Right., unfortunately for any parents in the room, uh, one of the common trends that I attempt to dissuade students from doing is applying to all the top 25 schools. So a student can brag where they got into, right, or brag about where they got into., but the reality here is that you do see diminishing return,, once you start seeing kids apply to about more than 15 schools.

And for the most part here at CollegeAdvisor, we truly recommend about 12 schools in total. And the reason that we do that is the average student applying to eight schools. When you then take into consideration this 90% increase over the last couple of years in total applications, it’s important that you be providing yourself a little bit of a buffer.

Um, that buffer will not only protect you, but it’s gonna increase your chances of both admission aid, scholarship, uh, so it’s definitely worth your time to, you know, be put in those extra applications,, out the door. Now that being said, it’s important that you start to organize your schools, uh, in a couple different categories.

And the first part here is identifying, you know, reach, target and safety schools. And I think unfortunately, what gets lost in translation, if I can say that, is people really don’t understand how to differentiate between a reach target or safety school. You know, many times it’s just by personal opinion of the reputation of a school.

You know, recently, uh, I guess not recently, as I guess a year ago, uh, I had a, a, a student that I was interacting with tell me that William and Mary was not a good school and it was not a reach school. Funny because William and Mary’s acceptance rate is lower than 30%. Any school whose acceptance rate is 30% or less, you should treat as a reach school, no matter your thoughts or opinions of it.

A target school is a school that has an acceptance rate of roughly 55% or better, and a safety school has an acceptance rate of 85% or better. That is how you should be identifying what these schools actually are, and we would encourage you to have a balance if applying to 12 total schools of roughly five reach schools, four target schools, and three safety schools.

The reason we suggest this is that one of the greater issues that we see in probably the most common issue, When building a school list is students that are only applying to reach schools, in some cases, one target school or two target schools. With those reach schools, and very frequently due to lower acceptance rates of those institutions, you see those students get denied to every single school that they apply to.

That is why we advocate for students to have that diverse list. One of the things that I think is important to draw your attention to is some of the differences that could make what is initially a target school or even a safety school transition to a different category for you., what I’m mainly referring to here is enrollment caps that are being placed on universities today and mo most cases, a lot of public schools are doing this based upon their state legislature.

Uh, the example I like to use is my, my first employer in the Admissions Guild, which is the University of Georgia, an incredible public institution., the current application acceptance rate is right at 40% at UGA. Now if you were paying attention earlier, I said a reach school has an acceptance rate at 30% or less, and the target school has an acceptance rate of 55% or higher.

So UGA is neither a reach school, nor is it a target school. But if you are an out-of-state applicant, it should always be treated as a reach school. And the reason for that is the state legislature of Georgia limits the out-of-state enrollment at UGA to be no more than 20% of the entire university population.

And the way that things kind of work out right now is if you’re applying as an out of state applicant to UGA, you have a less than 16% chance of admission making it a reach school. So understanding the intricate practices that these different schools have, or I should say not just practices, but certain policies that are placed upon certain schools will dramatically affect how you develop your school.

And therefore creating a more accurate list of schools for you to apply to. Now, we should also address the fact that there are some,, enrollment caps being placed upon schools now, uh, based upon,, being a public or a private school, we’ve already addressed public, but also in the private space. Some private schools, once again, because of popularity are, are starting to have to put enrollment caps on certain counties, uh, certain geo markets, if you will, because they have so many applicants they cannot continue to admit from that one area.

Um, so it’s important try to find that information out and that can be a little bit difficult, uh, cuz some of these schools aren’t really forthcoming with this information., which you’ll find if you listen to or take part in any of our webinars. One of the things that we tend to talk about from time to time, or at least that I talk about, is your dust from time to time seem to be a lack of transparency by schools today.

It’s important you get as much information as possible so you can take effective. Action now when we start talking about school diversity in terms of public versus private, the number one reason most students tell me, or families tell me that they wanna apply to public schools because they’re under the impression that it’s cheaper.

That may be the case at an in-state public option initially, but you see private schools are more likely to give you scholarships than public schools because they are in direct control of their finances. Where, once again, a public school is but open to a state legislature in that degree. Many cases a private school can end up being cheaper than an in-state public option.

Very frequently At Vanderbilt, we had students that after attending scholarship, went from a about a 72 to $74,000 total cost of attendance per year down to an 18 or you know, even $17,000 cost of attendance. So never turn away the idea of applying to private schools. Just on initial price point. You’ll be very surprised in many cases what the actual cost of attendance might be for you, uh, down the road.

If you can, you know, be comfortable paying the $50 to $110 application fee depend upon the school to see what app opportunities might present themselves. It’s very worth your time to do that in many cases as well. I think it’s also important to still look outta state, even public or private, because a lot of schools are trying to increase their enrollment and for those schools that are trying to increase their enrollment, they will reward you for it.

Many states today that are public schools, Because they’re in this process of, you know, of growth, they will award you that, you know, in-state tuition that out-of-state normally might be $50,000 a year as an example of the University of Alabama. But because you might have a certain GPA or because they’re trying to grow their, their numbers of, you know, students from the area that you live in, they might grant you instate tuition much becomes much cheaper for you.

So these are the ways that you need to be strategic in creating a diverse school that’s in organizing your school list so that you’re gonna increase your chance of admission. No, I, I think the bigger issue here that a lot of find a lot of people never find themselves understanding is under, is really determining the best option in term, in your application type.

Obviously the three primary means to apply to a school today are early decision, early action applications and regular decision applications., the reason we wanna be talking about organizing these is. They all have different dates and deadlines, and as you can see chronologically, early decision is historically due.

November 1st. Early action is historically due the 15th of November, and then regular decision at most schools is due January 1st or 15th. Uh, the University of California, it’s all regular decision and it’s due the month of November in general. So,, understanding how to be diversifying your list is not just, uh, in terms of application type is not just from the perspective of getting your application submitted on time, it’s to also increase your chance of admission.

So a lot of people,, understand that early decision at a school that offers it is your best chance of admission, and that is true. The reason that early decision,, that is the best way to apply to a school,, is because you are signing a binding contract. A school that offers early decision is willing to take a student that may be outside, or I should say below their normal academic ranges because you’re willing to commit to paying that full price even if they don’t give you scholarship in financial aid. Now that does not mean you’re less likely to get scholarship in financial aid, but you’re committing to that even if you don’t get it. So because you’re willing to sign that contract, a school is much more likely to take you. However early decision is offered at a minor round of schools across the country today, most of your applications are gonna be following the early action or regular decision process.

Unfortunately, one of the longest standing rumors that I have to work on a daily basis to break is this idea that when comparing early action to regular decision, that early action is automatically more competitive than regular decisions that are more likely to be accepted. The rumors I’ve heard to support this or that the schools prefer it, the schools think that you’re more serious and more interested cuz you’re getting your application in earlier.

Well, guess what? You can submit your regular decision application August the first when applications go live, and you can do that for early action as well. So that does not do anything for you in terms of telling the school that you’re more serious just because you chose early action of a regular decision at some schools early action will be strategically in your favor at other schools. Regular decision will be strategically in your favor and you should understand the differences of each. And we’re gonna talk about that here in a second, but it’s important to also note that there has been a shift in deadlines in the last two years.

Many schools, due to the increase in applications they’ve seen since the Covid pandemic have had to shift their early decision and early action deadlines into the month of October, because before doing so, they were short on time and were not able to get applications out in a time, or I should say, application decisions out in a timely manner.

Now, as we talk about the application strategy, this is going back to what I just paused on in discussing early action versus regular decision. And I wanna emphasize the importance of rumors. Rumors are probably the most common thing that I see. Students getting caught up in it when it comes to the application space.

And it’s a very easy way to get yourself denied to a school without knowing it., and the reason for that is if you were to take the time to research a school based upon its common data set, you will see if you were to run an analysis of perhaps three to four years, that at certain schools a student of your profile type might be better early action over the last three or four years, but at another school, your profile applicant profile perhaps would be better during the regular decision process.

Things that you should be looking at and comparing are things like your racial identification, your gender identification, your GPA, your test score, uh, your intended major, and of course if you’re applying to a school that perhaps is outta state, your residency status, are you an in-state applicant or an out-of-state applicant to that school?

All of these things can be utilized to determine what your best pathway of application is at a particular school. Ideally you follow what that historical data trend is telling you, cuz it’s more than likely gonna lead to a increased chance of admission at that institution. Now the reason you see me talking in the notes here about looking at the micro versus the macro, what most people will do that are somewhat informed about this process is they will go look at the school website and they’ll see that, hey, last year early action was a higher acceptance rate and regular decision was a lower acceptance rate.

That is very true at a lot of schools and at most schools, but that’s for everybody. We’re reviewing you in the context of the department that you’re applying for. So that’s why we wanna go back and look at the data based upon the details that are, I just went over right, make this specific to your intended major.

How did students, again of your own situation fare the best? Don’t be taking the, the overall data to guide you because you might be a smaller, you know, pool of the applicants. Your profile might be in a smaller pool of the applications total. and you’re gonna be much more accurate with your decision on how to apply by focusing on that data.

Uh, the problem here is,, some of this is gonna be potentially changed shortly. Uh, there is an upcoming decision by the United States Supreme Court, uh, that is due at the end of June. That could up in the use of,, affirmative action in the college admissions decision process., so that could change a little bit, the type of data that you should be using in the review process to determine how you should apply.

Um, but we don’t have any more information on that at this time, as we, as I said, are waiting on the Supreme Court to render their decision, as we move forward, I think it’s important that you understand the emphasis on getting started. Now, for you juniors that are with us this evening, I believe Anesha said that 60% of our attendees this evening, uh, are juniors.

If you are not already writing your essays, you are behind. The reality here is if you apply to 12 schools today, on average, you will have to submit between 45 and 50 essays. The average school requires four essays. It can be as many as 10 per school. And without sounding rude, if you’re thinking about copying and pacing your essays, that’s a horrible idea.

You wanna be making each essay unique to each school that it’s going to. So if you don’t have a school that’s in place, you quickly need to get your, your schools selected and, and be determining your application strategy with how you should target. Because obviously you need to understand how to prioritize your schools.

And so that is what’s gonna then allow you to start confirming what your essays are and start working on those and spreading those out over the next six months before your applications are due. Now, it’s funny that I say six months because a certain application process is due much earlier than that.

Um, the first deadline that will be reached is anybody that is considering a BSMD application. Uh, for those of you that may not know what BSMD applications are, uh, these are also referred to as. Direct medical programs or direct med. It’s a Bachelor’s of Science and medical doctorate where you go to the same undergrad and medical school in one location.

Um, many of these applications are due at the end of August or beginning of September., and so where a lot of applications for early decision and early action have been shifted to October direct med BSMD programs, again, end of August, beginning of September. So there’s a expedited process that you need to be, uh, going through right now to make that decision if you’re gonna target that.

The other part that’s important to note about a BSMD application is that most of those programs are a three stage application. You have a, a first round application. If you make it through that first round, typically you’re sent a series of additional essays that you have to complete, and then if you make it through that round, there’s an interview phase as well.

Okay. Then we can start talking about early decisions and early. We’re at the earliest stages, these will be due in October now, university of Georgia is another good example. Uh, they sit right around October the 14th as their typical deadline, uh, for early action. That’s, you know, pretty early in comparison to most schools.

They’ve done that well before covid. Uh, many schools now are, are mimicking that same date., some schools are even doing it earlier than that. So those, obviously, if you are not doing BSMD, you should be focusing on any early decision and early action applications before prioritizing your regular decision applications.

But before you determine how to do that, excuse me, before you determine that order, you first need to understand how you need to target each school. As we went over in the last two previous slides, once you have your list prioritized in terms of which schools you need to begin working on, you should begin going through those essays and develop developing them.

Uh, one of the very first questions I get as soon as I start telling people that they should be an essay development at this stage is a junior. Is confusion because a lot of people are told that schools do not release their essays until the summertime, that’s if they’re changing their essays. Most schools use the same essays three years at a time.

So you can be calling and confirming, making sure that those essays are being used next year and you can already be writing those essays. And without sounding rude, it does sound a lot better to me to spread 45 to 50 essays out over six months than stuffing it into the eight week period of your summer break.

That typically, in my opinion, is where I hear the worst stories from kids that are burned out and overwhelmed cuz they have such a short period of time. One other thing to touch on here is prioritizing schools that have earlier scholarship deadlines. Uh, most schools their scholarship deadline is the early part of December.

December 1st to December 15th, however, some schools have scholarship deadlines in November. Uh, so most schools you cannot apply to scholarship until after you’ve submit your admissions application. And it’s important that you understand that ahead of time so you can prioritize that school’s admissions application.

And get that submitted where it still leaves you enough time to go through any additional scholarship essays that you might have to submit to be considered in that applicant pool as well. Finally, I, I think it’s important that you maintain yourself by utilizing some tools for your success, one of the, sadly, frequent problems I hear of is AL submissions.

A lot of families make the mistake of actually typing their essays within the Common Application, right?, if you’ve ever looked at the Common Application, that space is very small that you, you can’t actually see your full field, your full paragraph as you write it, and it’s very difficult to, to find your, you know, spelling and, and grammar mistakes.

Um, so it’s important that you work outside the application, make sure that everything is in place before transferring it over, into the application itself. There are a variety of ways that you can be doing this, uh, but it is in your best interest to do that. And, and I do mean what I say. Accidental submission is a real thing.

If you submit your essays before they’re final, your final edits have taken place, there is no recourse. Schools do not let you upload a new essay, that’s what you’re gonna be reviewed on. So it’s definitely in your best interest to work outside of that. Uh, another piece here is it’s important that you track your work because not only are you responsible to yourself, you are responsible, excuse me, you are responsible to both your parents or guardians to be able to tell them where you stand.

And, and parents, for those of you or guardians, for those of you that are here this evening, you need to be keeping an eye on your student, I, I know a lot of individuals today want to give full responsibility to their child, and I mean, no disrespect in saying this, but, it’s still a little early to do that with the biggest decision of their life, arguably.

So to that end, everybody in your household should be aware of where an applicant’s process stands. And the best way to do that is to be using some degree of a system that is able to kind of track where each application is for each school, or each essay is for each school activity descriptions. And the best way to do that is to use a system that has labels and other types of reminders so you can log right in and see where you stand.

Um, if, if you do this on your own, it can be a little challenging because your best option at that point is something like Google Docs, where you might have 15 different versions of one essay in, in that one document, it becomes very confusing to see what the most recent draft actually is, or worse yet, I’ve actually had families tell me that they were just emailing Word Docs back and forth,, after editing and sent back.

And, and that’s pretty easy to have. Uh, the most up-to-date draft get lost in translation as well. So I would suggest, developing your own system or one thing that could help you is we have our own system here at CollegeAdvisor. CollegeAdvisor. When we support a family, we develop your own private portal that we walk you through at each step of the way in the application process.

But we also use it to track all of your work until it is time for you to submit it. So I’m briefly gonna share my screen with you, uh, and let you see what this looks like.

Okay. Anesha, is everyone able to see this at this point in time? Yes. You are good to go. Wonderful. So, as we work with families here at CollegeAdvisor, you can see here that this is an example. Student Sophia is not real. Wanna emphasize that I’m not showing anyone’s private information. Uh, but we would create a portal for a family.

And as we’re going through this process with you, all of your work will be self-contained under your applications tab. So if we take a peek at this example, applications, You can see that not only have we been able to advise a student at, let’s say Princeton and Southern Car, uh, Southern California, that their best course of action for their application is early action.

But surprisingly, you can see that we’ve organized their regular decision applications as well. And what’s surprising about that to what many may see here is that this applicant is being told that Harvard and Duke, even Stanford, that their best chance of admission is to the regular decision process. So this kind of system is gonna keep everything in order and allow you to streamline which order you’re gonna work through in this process.

It’s also gonna be able to track your status at each school to determine where you stand at a given time. The other piece here is that we’re able to contain all of your essays in one location instead of you having 15 or 16 different Google Docs. What can happen here is while we do use Google Drive to back up our system, everything is clearly independently listed with your essay prompt.

The system will generate these prompts for you. Confirming them, saving you the time from having to go out and confirm what essays are being used, that all of your work will be developed. Right here where it says upload file, it’s all contained there. That’s where all of your editing and revision would take place.

Parents and guardians can come in and you have direct access to all of that work. You can log in through your portal or guardian account and see all that work at any given time that you want to. And then we physically label and track every single essay in terms of where it stands in the process from the early stages where you’re working on it to any time that we’ve reviewed it and need to help a student at editing, we would mark as review ready.

Sometimes students will like to work on these essays on their own, and if they run into a roadblock and need some additional assistance, they can simply mark an essay as stuck and that prompts your advisor to, uh, reach out to you, to schedule a time to go through, uh, and help get you back on track. And then when we believe that something is ready to be submitted to a school, we mark things completed, and that’s an indication that we believe that it’s gonna be your best chance of admission with that particular essay type.

So this is how we personally designed our website and our portal here at CollegeAdvisor, uh, to lead to a, a easier transition of not only the application process, but also getting everything into your actual application. Because we’re doing your application materials here, it allows us to make sure everything is as it needs to be, and it prevents accidental submission from taking place.

And then what we do is we help you transition it over, uh, and put it in your application before betting it one last time and submitting it with you. So if this is something that interests you, if this is something that you think you would be benefited by having, uh, and, and gaining, you know, guidance on what can make you more strategic at one school over another, maybe getting some help with essay development, interview preparation, then at the end of this call, I would encourage you to sign up for one of our free, you know, sessions where you can sit and meet with one of our advising team members, one of our sales, uh, specialists, to kind of go through what our advising team can do for you and, and walk you through what type of options would be the best fit for you.

At the schools that you are considering., that link will be at the end of this information session this evening. Uh, but now I think we are gonna transition over into the Q&A portion of our time together. Thanks so much, bro, yeah, you got ahead of my, my sales pitch later, but I, I know , you, you, you do the sales, so you’ll probably do it better than me.

Um, but yeah, thank you so much for all that is the end of our presentation component. We are gonna transition into the Q&A. Remember that you can download the slides from the link on the handouts tab. And I also dropped the website, at the top of the chat where the link, where the recording of tonight’s session will be available tomorrow morning.

Uh, we’re gonna move on to the live Q&A. I will read through your questions that you’ve submitted through the Q&A tab, pay ’em into the public chat, and then give Ferrell an opportunity to answer. If you are able to submit questions to the Q&A tab, you might have to log out and log back in via the link that you received in your email and not through the webinar landing page.

Just as a quick reminder, please send your questions through the Q&A tab. Please do not send them to us in the chat or through direct dm. It starts to clutter up our pages, so the first question that I wanted to ask that came through that I thought was an interesting one was, cuz you were talking a little bit earlier about enrollment caps.

A lot of people had some questions in the midst of you talking about that. So how do you find out what the school’s enrollment, enrollment caps are? And then another student also asked, where do you get the benchmarks on each state’s in-state and out-of-state, admissions. So the issue here is that most schools aren’t gonna tell you that, right.

The problem becomes is that they don’t want that, uh, marketing or marketing information. They don’t want that information getting out many cases to the general public because. Something that they’re concerned about cuz it can affect their recruitment., you know, something that affects the school’s ranking is the number of applications they receive.

Um, and so that, you know, affects their decision rate as well. Uh, so some schools will be more forthcoming about it than others. It’s a very, tricky conversation to have and a lot of admissions offices train remissions officers on how to navigate that question, like a politician, if I may say so without being disrespectful.

Um, so again, some schools are more forthcoming than others and you just have to accept that you’re not gonna get some answers from some schools and others that you will, so I’m gonna ask this question off the top cuz I feel like it might, it might be a longer answer, but one student asks, how does what you shared, how does everything you share differ for transfer students?

So the fact is that transfer students, it’s a vastly different process. And the number one issue for, uh, transfer students is that your admissions decision is totally based upon space in the institution, you may have an excellent application, but if they don’t have a gap in, let’s say you’re a political science major, most schools you’re gonna transition over for that same major.

Um, if they don’t have enough room in their political science department, they’re not, they’re not taking a transfer student that year. So, at that point, it’s not as much about what you’ve accomplished, it can be just your decision can be based upon space. That being said, transfer students is a completely different process because not only are they looking at your high school experience, they’re now also taking into account your collegiate experience as well.

So you have doubled the material in terms of a resume per se, academically and socially that you need to be submitting and presenting to these institutions., a lot more information that you need to have kind of lined up and prepared to submit. Okay., so you were talking about the difference between EA and ED.

So one student asks which application strategy is the best for getting financial aid? Uh, it, it, there isn’t one. So EA/E D, You are. Well, yeah, you, you are just as likely to get financial assistance, financial aid in any of those. Just because you apply one over the other doesn’t make you more likely or or less likely to get something.

Now what we should address here, and this will open up a load of questions as well,, is understanding the admissions practices of school. So an unfortunate growing trend in college missions today are schools that practice need aware, admissions, uh, need aware admissions process can use your financial need against you in the review process.

And that is because most schools today aren’t in the best financial position that they may have been in recent years. And so they don’t have unlimited amounts of, you know, funding to provide every student with every single dollar that they qualify for in terms of financial aid., so that is something that you should also be using when you’re putting your, uh, application list together.

And I should have addressed it earlier., but that’s the answer for that. And it is possible to figure out what schools are need blind need to, where do schools probably talk about that? Yeah, they will all tell you that for sure. Yeah. So, and again, the two phrases to give in mind are, need blind or need wear,, as you go, looking through that, uh, just to keep us aligned with our jargon and vocab, one student asks, are there still any colleges that will give you a choice to go full-time or part-time, or are colleges mostly at full-time right now if you’re acceptable?

Well, I, I personally don’t know of a school that won’t let you go part-time. Uh, some, some schools, you know, to be part-time, you have to hit obviously a certain amount of hours to be full-time. You have to another part of hours. Every school is different. I personally don’t know a school that won’t let you be part-time, uh, initially is a freshman.

Most schools are gonna, you know, your first semester, they’re gonna want you to be full-time as a, as a freshman in most cases. But then after that it, it’s common. You can kind of reduce it back. So always confirm with the school. I don’t wanna be speaking in generically, that’s the number one thing I recommend against.

Uh, you should always be checking for each school’s policy. And then, I mean, I guess the follow, the follow up to that question was how might that affect, uh, financial aid if you’re going part-time? Uh, the answer to that question is some schools, will not provide financial aid to part-time students.

Um, some schools will, it’s once again, if it’s a situational basis. So I would encourage you for your schools of interest to reach out to the schools and ask them directly that question to see if there’s any policy difference there. So this is a, I guess an inside baseball question. I know it will depend very much on the school, but,, once students at what things, what are the things that colleges look at most commonly nowadays in their algorithms for classifying applications before you?

So the, I mean, the bigger thing is it comes down to a lot of keywords in many cases., you know, uh, one of the examples I like to tell families is, you know, when it comes to you, like your activity section per se, Is what, what reach did you have with something? Did you, did you take part in an activity or an event or a competition or a sport?

And if you did, did it have, you know, school-wide reach, did it have citywide reach, county, state level, national, international to higher the kind of the reach or performance of something?, that’s a trigger, right? So if I see, if that algorithm sees something like national level experience, like boom, that, that’s a trigger right there.

So again, every school is different. It’s something to keep in mind., and this is something I’ll be very blunt with you on. They will never tell you their algorithms, but they’ll never talk about their keywords or anything like that cuz that’s how they make their cuts. So, Yeah. I also say I feel like the algorithm probably changes from year to year.

I know that absolutely. You, you know what they’re looking for. I, I’ve heard some admission folks talk about like, if you wanna see the class, we’re gonna take a look at the class We just graduated ., you know, because they’re like, we just lost half of our tuba players with the senior class. And so that might be what we’re looking for.

Um, so again, it’ll change you to year because demographics for every class that’s admitted will change you to year. I, I think that is solid advice. And, and I think Anesha, you, you once again struck on the fact that data is your best friend in this process. And I think so many years, and I don’t wanna sound like a, an old person here and actually had a student tell me I was old the other day and I’m only 35.

Uh, but I, I, I do have, and I mean disrespectfully, I do have a lot of families that come to me still thinking that SAT, ACT and GPA are, are what gets you into college today. And respectfully, what I try to remind every family of is that only determines if the school is gonna look at your application.

Right?, it, it’s these other pieces that make the difference. And the way that you can really set yourself up for success is to. You’ll be using this data to guide you. Yeah. We, we had a student who asked a question of like, so if I wanna go to a school and I like, can I still get in if I don’t have a good gpa?

I think when you, you know, if you wanna speak to that a little bit more about like, the balance between GPA/SAT scores and essays and, and the whole profile overall of like how those are weighed. Yeah, so I mean, it’s, it’s, again, every school’s relative, so, you know, one GPA range, one school that’s gonna have a different GPA range than, than a different school is, right?

Every school’s looking to a agree for a different type of candidate. And to that end, it, it’s a balance, right? Like a lot of times students will come to me and they’ll say their, their GPA is low and I’m, and you know, it’s like, well what’s, what’s your definition of a low gpa? Right? And like, you, you’ll be surprised at how many students have different answers to that question, right?

It’s, it’s honestly kind of scary. Uh, but, so I, I think one thing is understand what your definition of a low GPA is versus what a school thinks a low GPA might be., and then you have to be honest with yourself too, like, are you. are you within the, the acceptable ranges of what that school’s saying? If, and I’m, I’m gonna be insanely low balling here on this one, but like, let’s say that your GPA is like a 1.5, which I don’t think even possible, uh, but let’s say you a 1.5 GPA and the middle 50% of a school is like a 3.4 to a 3.9, I just wouldn’t apply to that school.

Right?, but in that regard, you know, always be having that conversation because schools will balance the rigor of your curriculum, your, your core schedule, things like that. In that decision making process as. And another data point I think to keep in mind as you think about GPA is where do you rank in reference to all the other seniors in your class?

Because they’re, they’re going to evaluate you not in context to the entire pool of people, but within like your high school. So they, you might have a, a 3.4 or four 3.0, but the highest GPA in your school is 3.0. So for your school, you are doing very well, or compared to the other seniors in your class, you’re doing fair fairly well.

So it’s one what the school is looking for and then knowing that they’re gonna evaluate you within the context of your specific high school as well,, wanting to, okay. Another question, I guess that’s a, a specific population ap, apologies if I’m glitching. My website keeps going here, but do you have recommendations specific to home homeschooled applicants specifically around this GPA question?

Yeah, so the, the big thing and, this is very, very important. Schools are very, very, very finicky on homeschool applicants. If you are not in a homeschool program, uh, that is affiliated with an educational curricula, it it is, it’s a problem for a lot of schools, right? So you need to make sure that you are going through a program that is, uh, you know, affiliated and approved, uh, with an education association.

Um, and to that degree,, you should, you know, be contacting the school and, and getting their thoughts on it, if, if your school is not, like a lot of families today do random homeschooling, and that’s okay. I’m not, I’m not second guessing it. Uh, but a lot of families stay will do, when I say random homeschooling, they will piece together their, their child’s education based upon different resources they can have access to locally and things like that.

And that’s fine., but some schools are gonna make you go through an additional application, uh, part of the process. So you might have to go take some additional testing, uh, to prove that your GPA, is real and that your performance can back up that gpa you might have to submit additional writing, uh, solutions.

Um, so there might be some extra pieces the school makes you go through, uh, or I shouldn’t say go through, but requires you to submit and to, to further this, uh, conversation. A lot of schools now have dedicated homeschool admissions officers., that was a growing trend and, and we had a dedicated admissions officer for homeschool students at Vanderbilt.

Um, in a lot of schools today, I wouldn’t say, I wouldn’t say majority of schools, but, uh, a significant portion of schools now have dedicated, uh, homeschool admissions officers because the, the rise in homeschool students, that is interesting to hear, and that wisdom is what more you can get by connecting with CollegeAdvisor.com.

Uh, for those in the room who aren’t already working with us, we know how overwhelming the process can be. So, as Ferrell mentioned earlier, we have a team of over 300 former admissions officers and admissions experts that are ready to help you through one-on-one advising sessions. You can take the next.

Next step by use our code that is on the screen to schedule that 45 to 60 minute free strategy session with admission specialist on our team. Uh, during that meeting, we’ll talk about extracurriculars, we’ll talk about application strategy, talk about college list, and set up some tools for you to stand out in the competitive admissions world.

Don’t laugh at my transition far. I told you I’m not. I thought person. I’m not the salesperson here. I’ve tried, I’ve tried to build it all in without it being too, too tricky. Okay, we’ll get back to the Q&A to pivot to a different topic around essays. So you, you talked a bit about that a little bit and talked about how, you know, how many essays students have to look forward to

Um, what should essays be based off of, or how can students start to prepare for the essays given that the prompts aren’t out quite yet? First of all, check the school’s website, a lot of schools, will list their essay topics. Two, like I said, two to three years at a time. So Vanderbilt, we, we list our essays and say, Hey, these are our essay topics for the next three years.

If you’re a sophomore right now and you go to a school’s website and they have them listed and they’re saying, Hey, these are gonna be used through 2026, you can start writing that essay if you wanted to. Now, I’m not saying to do that as a sophomore, I think that’s a little insane. Uh, but you could, right?

If that school’s information is out there, if for the schools that aren’t listing ’em on their website, check their blog, still can’t find it, uh, go create an account, Common Application. Uh, see what those topics are and then call and confirm with the school, Hey, are you reusing these essays next year?, that’s part of the process.

I mean, now sometimes they’re gonna say, Hey, yes, sometimes they’re gonna say no. Sometimes they’re gonna say, we don’t know, and then some schools are gonna say, Hey, we’re gonna keep two these two, but we’re gonna change this one. Get which information you can and start taking action steps. The worst mistake you can make is to sit here and do nothing.

Trust me when I tell you that writing essays over the remaining six months that you have, even if you can only write one or two right now, versus writing the full 45 to 50 or so that you could expect for 12 total schools over the summertime, it’s a dramatic difference in not only how happy you are, but.

Frankly, the outcome of your admissions decision. There’s data to support it. I would, I would also say, just to start with the Common App essay, but especially if you’re a sophomore or junior, you will have a lot of essays to, to go through, but the Common App essay is the least likely to change the, the, the prompts.

They will say the most consistent, so definitely do the research that Ferrell talked about, but before you stretch yourself out with all the supplemental essays, at least start with the Common App essay, which is very likely to stay the same, I hope that’s fair. A fair addendum. Your response, Ferrell.

I agree. okay, and then to that end, another student asked, how do you decide the topic for the essay? And if you could give, I guess, context on how the prompts are provided and how much flexibility students have with, uh, navigating the prompts. So if you’re referring to the school supplemental essays, you, you don’t decide, you answer what they’re telling you to write about.

Um, and, and so to that end there, there’s really no decision making on your part. You just. Operationalize an essay outline based upon the topic they’re giving you and you execute that essay,, sounds very militaristic, sorry. And then, uh, your, for your Common Application personal statement, you can choose, you should choose, in my opinion, and it’s just my opinion, you should choose the essay topic that you feel most confident in writing and developing.

Right?, if you see a topic that if you, of the primary five or six, uh, options they give you, if you are not seeing a topic that really kind of sparks your interest, it’s something that you don’t think you can be, you know, have, have solid, you know, backing to, then you, you might wanna consider the opportunity to create your own topic.

Uh, traditionally in the last 15 years, common app has allowed you to create your own topic, that is more than likely gonna continue into the future, but it, it’s definitely something that, uh, you are allowed to do. And in some cases, for a lot of students, I might encourage it purposely that they create their own topic.

Because sometimes, and I’ll say this without starting, uh, a wave of questions, sometimes the Common Application topics don’t necessarily allow a student to open up more and be reflective on themselves. And, and the reality that I try to remind students of is that the personal statement is, is genuinely our best opportunity to hear directly from you about what you want us to hear about you.

Right? And so if there’s a topic where you don’t, if there’s a topic from the comment app that you don’t feel like you’re having an opportunity to do that, then perhaps choosing the option to create your own topic so you can be greater focused and self-reflective on yourself to allow us to get to know you to a higher degree, better outcome.

My only advice with choosing your own topic is making sure you’re still choosing a topic, and that it’s not just me, anding, uh, it’s not just a meandering kind of essay, just. Make sure you’re still still on some on one thing, a student asked earlier, and I gave some context to it, but I’m gonna ask you again.

Um, do you, you have recommendations for how they can do research for schools, academic programs, and another student asked like, where can we find rankings for different types of academic programs? Since you were, it seems like you were talking earlier about that being a, an important part of, of research.

Yeah, I, you know, I’m a massive fan of US News and World Report. US News and World Report been around, you know, since the seventies. Uh, it is, you know, by far the, the look to, you know, number one, you know, institution, uh, for establishing rankings., there are other organizations out there, uh, that exist and, and those are fine.

Uh, but if you want consistency in, in how the evaluation is done on the year to year basis, different programs, I always recommend starting with US News and World Report, listen, I, I think some other things to keep in mind is there’s a lot, unfortunately there’s a lot of gorilla marketing now in college emissions.

where, you know, there are websites created to kind of promote, uh, one or two, you know, programs over another., and, and that’s okay. But that the websites that are doing that, what they’re doing is they’re paying essentially to promote themselves to their org. Other organizations, they’re acting as if it’s not them.

That’s a real thing., so be aware of that. Be aware of, you know, if you’re going, and I’m not trying to down talk any organization here when I say organization meet website, but when, when you’re going to certain websites,, you know, that allow you to leave a review or you know, what that experience summer experience was like, you, you also don’t know who’s on the other end of that post, right?

So you, in my opinion, what you find on the internet,, if it’s not coming from a reputable organization, you need to treat what you’re seeing from somebody on the other end of the internet with a grain of salt. Uh, not be making you your full, putting your full weight behind your decision on, we know, one or two personalized reviews on a, on some random website.

I just wanna, we, I’m getting a couple more questions about the essay, so I just wanna clarify. So, When you are applying to college, you get, you have the Common Application, which is a set set of about one outta seven topics that you pick. You can select whatever essay you like, or whichever essay you are most comfortable with writing about.

Every college will see that. And then each specific college that you’re applying to will have a variety of supplemental essay topics. You don’t get any choice in those, or sometimes you get a limited choice within those, so what college you, what essay you pick shouldn’t drive the s the colleges you apply to or what colleges apply to shouldn’t drive the specific personal statement topic that you pick.

So I think once people actually see the application, some of this might make sense, but those two aren’t kind of dependent on each other outside of the supplemental, the school specific essays. So, sorry, I apologies, a takeaway and do a mini-lecture, but I just wanted to give some clarity. It’s important, to, to that.

Um, so one student said I’m applying as an international student and don’t have too many extracurricular activities., will that be a issue? How will you know, how will that affect the application? No, it, it’s not necessarily an issue. I mean, you should always be, you know, trying to leverage your free time as well.

You know, what you can do in your free time is important. It’s also relative to your major of interest. Like,, you know, if, the example I have to use here is, you know, if, if you’re trying to do, you know, something like, you know, coding or if you’re trying to do something engineering related,, you know, there’s a lot that you can do remotely for those programs, right?

Like, students teach themselves to code students,, learn how to, you know, build robots and things like that. You, you can do that all remotely from home in many cases., that doesn’t require you to be a member of an organization. Uh, keep in mind that different cultures have different kind of standards in their educational day.

Um, and a lot of times certain cultures and communities, they don’t have the time. You know, the students don’t have the time to go take part in a bunch of extracurricular activities in the evenings after school ends for the day., so, you know, we, we do review you in the context of kinda like the community and the culture that you’re applying from.

Um, and just as an example, like. We at Vanderbilt, we did not, as the primary international admissions officer, we did not expect a lot of our international applicants to have 8, 9, 10, 11 activities like we typically see from most applicants in many cases in the United States. So it’s, we understand, you know, where you’re coming from, we understand, you know, what’s available to you in many cases, and then it maybe, it, it’s more beneficial for you to do some stuff on your own.

And the other piece here is how you can utilize any time away from school. Uh, so some, you know, communities, cultures, they go to school year round., others, you, you have the summer break., if you do, you know, live in an area that goes to school year round, then perhaps what are you using your summer break to do?

Right? That’s another way that you can be establishing, you know, greater experience by, by leveraging that free time. And one thing I’ll add is that you can also. Include family obligations to under your extracurricular activities. So if you were the eldest and you’re responsible for making sure your next three siblings get home from school and that you watch them, you have to make sure they do their homework or you’re caring for an elderly, uh, you know, family member or something like that.

Those are extracurricular activities like, uh, to Ferrell’s point, they wanna know how you’re spending your time outside of school and if that’s how you’re spending it, don’t be afraid to talk about those things. Not just in your essays, but also, figuring out, talking through with a counselor how to represent them in the most thoughtful way on your,, application that’s relative to your personal story.

And then that’s exactly why, or I should say that is exactly the type of information we’re trying to get out of you. Cuz remember we are building admissions officer’s job is to help consistently rebuild a community year after year after year. So that, that’s context to your own personal story and kind of lets me know the, you know, the person you’re gonna be within our community if we choose to admit you.

Right. That that’s valid information that I’m looking for. So certainly feel free to share that type of information. And, and I guess a little bit more specific to this of just like, can you speak to how do extracurriculars get weighed in the, admissions process? Wait, say that again? How, what was that again?

How do extracurricular activities get weighed in the admissions process? Uh, in, in a lot of schools, most schools, it’s the second most important part of the application., and that is because your activity section, even though the essay is the most important part, the activities in many cases qualify you for what you’re applying for.

Now, again, I’m not trying to create panic when I say this,, but when you see, when you see a student that is applying for a specific major, but then they have no historical connection to that major, may it be through extracurricular activities, may it be through their own self-led experiences that do in their own free time.

It leaves an admissions department kind of scratching their head and going, what are, are they, are they serious about this or are they not? And, , it becomes, it becomes a a, a concern because when you see students changing majors so frequently, you need to remember that an admissions office’s job is to maintain a balanced enrollment for the institution.

Well, when I don’t see a student with significant experience to make me believe that they’re serious about what they’re applying for, I may put them in the middle of the pack and, and put somebody else up a little bit higher. They might have three or four activities that are relative to the field of interest that they’re applying to.

So they definitely have significant impact to say the least. The other part, and I’ll say this how you report, and I’m, and we are not gonna take any questions on this tonight cuz it’s too, it’s, we’re too short on time for this, but how you report these activity experiences is just as important as having the experience itself.

Um, once again, this is where the keywords come to play in the activity section. You are gonna be, you know, getting ringed higher or getting more points in the review process based upon certain keywords that these schools are looking for. The keyword, they’re variable by school and before to ask the schools will never tell you what they are.

Uh, so it’s important that you’d be getting some guidance on that from individuals that now, I, I feel like you’ll like this question. How critical are private college counselors in the process versus your typical high school guidance counselor? Well, listen, it’s a, it’s a fair question, but 42% of all applicants to US colleges right now are, are utilizing a private counselor outside their high school counselor.

Um, here at CollegeAdvisor, we are actually the counseling service for a few different schools. We are also, in many times we are the private counselor for a family and we’re working in, in direct, you know, correlation with that student’s high school counselor., that is not a problem whatsoever. It, it’s, it’s something that any private counseling service should be very confident and comfortable doing.

Um, and so the difference in working with a private counselor versus a, a school counselor is relative to that particular situation. Most schools today, it’s if you at a, as a national average, it’s one college counselor per 400 plus students. That’s, that’s an insane situ ratio, right?, many cases because of the counselor’s workload at the high school, counselors can’t at, at high school, sometimes in, I shouldn’t say sometimes in a lot of cases, are unable to sit down and literally walk you through developing each and every essay, putting you through interview prep, doing mock interviews with you, helping you identify certain activities year after year that might be the better fit to establish your applicant profile for your intended field of interest.

They simply don’t have the time to do that for all of their students. That is of no way, dis no way, shape, or form meant to disrespect high school counselors. Some of my best friends are high school counselors. It comes down to their caseload that they’re dealing with. And when one counselor has a hundred plus seniors to his or her name, and they have juniors, they have sophomores, they have freshmen.

The outcome difference is there. There should be a difference of expectation when you look at it from that perspective. Yeah, how important. Sorry. Next question, how important are teacher recommendations? Uh, I, I would argue that they are the silent killer of applications., and not to be, you know, dark here, but the most, I honestly, I have seen letters of recommendation be what gets the students on the fence, over the fence.

And I’ve seen it get a, a top performing applicant denied., the, when, when I’m reviewing your application, uh, I, I put a lot of value and a lot of weight on what a teacher’s telling me. And if your teacher’s been, you know, in doing this for 15, 20 years and, and, and they’re being pretty negative about you, that’s concerning to me that that’s telling me we’ve got a potential community issue here, right?

Oh, if that teachers tell me in their 15 or 20 year career, you are the greatest, you know, student they’ve ever worked with, that’s also very significant to me. What I will tell you though is that letters of recommendation are what get more students tripped up than I can probably identify. Uh, and that is because most students today don’t actually.

Have a relationship with the individual that’s writing it. Many students today are picking teacher based upon the popularity of that teacher, or they’re picking that teacher because they think that teacher knows them. Well, you need to know,, the most common letter of recommendation is not a letter.

The most common letter of recommendation is a sentence, student will do well at your institution. That makes up more than 30% of the applications that I have read. I actually started counting it. Okay? Uh, so to that end, I’m weird like that. Uh, to that end, what I will tell you is that you should also be in control of what’s being said about you.

If you’re blindly, I shouldn’t say blindly, that’s rude. But if you’re going up to a, an individual and asking for their support via a lever of recommendation, and you’re saying, Hey, would you write this for me? Oh, you would. Thank you. I’ll send you the email through comment app and da da da. If you’re not giving them a, a series of talking points that you would like them to make you address, like one or two of those in their letter of recommendation, you’re making a huge mistake cuz you’re leaving it up to them.

You need to make sure that they’re kind of backing you up and what you’re saying about yourself and your essays. in your activity descriptions. So you need to remember that your letters of recommendations serve as frankly, if you will, your alibis to how you’re promoting and presenting yourself within your essays and your activity descriptions.

All of it is relative. And for the record, if you have a teacher recommendation and a student’s letter, a student’s essays and a student saying that they’re in pursuit of biomedical engineering and the teacher’s saying that the students in, in pursuit of political science, we have a problem, right? So everything should be lined up, right?

You need to be checking the box and making sure that you’re in control of what’s being presented for you. And I think for students who are younger, 10th, 11th grade, this is a good reminder that you should be working to build a positive relationship with your teachers,, so that you can be memorable. So you can’t step out, not saying to like, you know, be cheesy and buy everybody a gift, but like build help, be relationships.

Be someone who shows up in class and you know, communicate, uh, participate, all of those things so that folks have good things to say about you in those letters, because teachers, similar to guidance, counselors have a lot of letters that they wanna write. And you don’t wanna get the generic, you want, you do wanna get something that’s personal specific to you in that they know who you are as well.

Um, weighted versus weighted who it’s, I’m assuming we’re weighted versus, sorry. Weighted versus unweighted, yeah. So as long as you’re, and this is not applicable to all schools, but most schools, as long as your high school reports the weighted GPA on the transcript that is submitted to the colleges, when you apply, most schools will evaluate you on the weighted GPA minus non-core courses.

So they’re looking at math, science, social science, English, and foreign language. That’s what they’re looking for. Okay. And they’ll keep the weight in most cases, some schools will pull the weight out, but most schools. . Uh, and some folks were asking about California in particular. So UCs will only look at 10th and 11th grade, so they do recalculate your entire GPA and take out weight.

Um, uh, there was a question here on does it help for extracurriculars on, on your resume to lead to the national level? Is it okay if it’s regional, local? Wait, what was the first part before regional, local extracurriculars,, is it important for them to go national level? The, the higher the reach, the better it all it’s gonna be for you.

So yeah, I mean if you can, if you can do something that has national level reach, that’s pretty impressive cuz that’s a pretty rare amount of students that are doing that in an applicant in each applicant cycle. So the higher the reach participation competition, the better off it’s gonna be for you. All right, we’ll leave it there.

I guess for, the higher the reach for, I think everything that you do, uh, the more competitive, the more, your application will be able to stand out. So thank you so much Ferrell. Uh, thanks so much for folks for submitting questions. All of the questions, uh, apologies we couldn’t get to all of them.

Some of them were a little too specific., but appreciate y’all in your thoughtfulness., and, uh, we’ll definitely encourage you all to join us again. So folks are asking questions about essays. I just did a essay workshop a couple weeks ago, so please definitely check out the webinar website. And again, the website is in the top of the chat.

If you want to check out, this webinar, webinar or revisit, any other webinars from the past month. We also hope that you will join us for our webinars later this month and into the next month. We are gonna end March with a session on How Social Media and Personal Branding Will Impact College Admissions.

I think that’s a new workshop for us, an exciting one. I’m looking forward to that one, and we also hope that we’ll see you soon. But until next time, take care and have a great evening everybody.

Bye. Thanks so much.