Building Your Personal Brand for College Admissions

Webinar Transcription

2024-04-04 – Building Your Personal Brand for College Admissions

Sydney: Hello. Hello, everyone. Welcome to tonight’s webinar, “Building Your Personal Brand for College Admissions.” My name is Sydney Mantell. I use she, they pronouns, and I will be your moderator today. I’m also a senior advisor with CollegeAdvisor.com, and as a proud first generation college student and graduate of University of North Carolina at Chapel Hill, I love giving back to the next generations of students with CollegeAdvisor.

Sydney: I also have a master’s degree from the Nicholas School of the Environment at Duke University, and I currently work in science communications with the National Oceanic and Atmospheric Administration, or NOAA. So just to quickly orient everyone with the webinar timing, we’ll start off with the presentation and then answer your questions in a live Q& A.

Sydney: On the webinar’s sidebar on the handout tab, you can go ahead and download our slides if you would like, and you can already start submitting questions in the Q& A tab. All right, so let’s meet our presenter, Maria.

Maria: Hi everyone, my name is Maria Acosta Robayo, and I graduated from Harvard class of 2020. Where I studied sociology and global health policy and where I was pre med. I’m currently a college yeah, I’m a senior CollegeAdvisor as well as a government consultant in DC. And I’m really excited to talk to you all about personal branding for college admissions.

Sydney: Great. And just to kick things off, we’re going to do a quick poll to see what grade everyone is in. If you would like, go ahead and answer our poll question. If you are a parent or teacher, you can go ahead and select the other option.

Sydney: And Maria, while we’re answering while people are answering that question, I just wanted to ask you what your major was in college. And if you were deciding between multiple majors or if you had one right off the bat.

Maria: Yeah. So my major was sociology. Definitely changed a lot. I was pre med all four years of college. And so I thought I would be going to medical school. But when I came in, I had the, I thought that everyone who is doing any medical track or nursing track or anything related to medicine would major in like a science. And so I started out molecular and cellular biology. Okay. And then realized I was going to have to take a lot of the science slash STEM requirements for law school pre reqs for medical school anyways. And so I decided I was going to study something that I was really interested in while I was in college and then do my electives for medical school. And so what I thought was really interesting was sociology. So I did that as my major did global health policy as my minor, and then just use my electives to do my pre med rec. So did change quite a bit from a very STEM major to a very social science major.

Sydney: That’s great, and I’m sure there were lots of intersections between your humanities classes and your STEM classes. So I’m gonna go ahead and close the poll. I think we’ve reached critical mass, and it looks like we have about 60 percent of the people joining us in 11th grade, so that’s great. You’re at the perfect time to join this webinar. We have a couple of people in 10th grade and 9th grade. And then a few people either in the other category or in 12th grade. So a good mix of students tonight.

Maria: Amazing. That’s super helpful to know as we dive a little bit more into personal branding and what that might look for you as you’re in different grades. So overall personal branding is just an external expression of who you are as a student and as a person and what you’re passionate about, who you aspire to be. And a bit of more open book opportunity to share with college with CollegeAdvisors, as well as admissions officers, more about who you are again, they will only have a limited amount of time, limited amount of information.

Maria: And so when you’re thinking about your personal brand, you’re really thinking about some of the most salient identities, salient activities that you do to help give these admissions officers a better picture of who you are in a very short period of time and through a very short quantity of resources. So it is one of the most important parts of your application because it just permeates throughout a lot of the other content that you’re going to submit. It’s a core part of what your essays will be about, right? Your essays are about who you are, some of the obstacles you might have overcome, your passions, your achievements, your goals. And so a lot of that will your personal brand will be some underpinning or some foundation for you to build out those essays. It’ll also permeate through your activities list, right? As you talk about where you spend your time outside of school, that’s going to also show a little bit more of your personal brand.

Maria: And then the other places like your recommendation letters, as you talk to different teachers for recommendation letters, there’s also opportunities to tell them more about who you are and to give them either a verbal or a written blurb about the things that you would really want them to talk about. And so all of those things will become a lot easier if you have a sense for what your personal brand is. So why is it important? So it’s an opportunity to set yourself apart from other students that may have similar quantitative scores and experiences. And it gives personality and depth to your application.

Maria: Again, it goes from just being numbers on a piece of paper. It goes from being quantitative data points to more of a story and a qualitative story that admissions officers can engage with. And Again, that looks different in different aspects of the application. So again, with your recommendation letters, maybe it can be more about who you are as a person and as a student to the teachers who have been teaching you for the past couple of years. It could look like, again, if you have an optional Recommendation letter like I had one. It was my coach who wrote something about me and so gave admissions officers yet another dimension by which to think about me apart from just I played competitive tennis growing up and so they didn’t just see me as a data point of, oh, tennis player.

Maria: Now they had a recommendation letter from my coach who could tell them a little bit more about who I was on and off the court. When it comes to essays again, It’s not just your quantitative scores that are important. Your essays will give more of a qualitative understanding of who you are, what shaped you to be the person you are today. And so all of those things will be important to be able to thread the same like seam throughout a lot of those essays and make sure that things aren’t contradicting each other and that things play into I got a similar personal brand. So I’ll just give a quick example here. When I was applying for college and I didn’t have CollegeAdvisor when I was a student, I didn’t know about personal brand, but in hindsight, like I did have kind of a story I wanted to tell about myself to the admissions officer.

Maria: And part of that story was. I am a first gen immigrant, so that’s like a backstory and kind of context setting, and I really love to dabble and to try lots of new things, and that means I played competitive tennis, which was like my big sport, but I also played lots of different sports that shaped who I was when I was applying as a high schooler. I also loved trying new instruments, so I have played violin, viola, piano, and again, it wasn’t something that I did super Deeply like I did sports, but it was again part of the narrative of i’m somebody who is curious and likes to try new things I did a dual enrollment program where I was able to get my associate’s degree in high school and so that showed the sense of my curiosity wasn’t just like a Oh, i’ll pick something up and like just see how it goes. It was a commitment to finish a degree before high school and date and allowed me to try different classes in like the community college in my neighborhood. And again, there was this thread of, I am someone who is curious. I’m someone who is, likes to push myself, someone who loves to be new environments.

Maria: And so that was a personal brand that I made for myself again, without even knowing those words, personal brand, but that is where my mind was at when I was trying to. figure out, so what do I write in my essays? I talked about running in some, I talked about tennis in some, I talked about what it looked like for, I grew up again first gen, or at least in college, I was a first gen and I moved here from Colombia, and I talked a little bit about what it was like to go and clean houses with my mom during the summers, and the different people that I met, and the different things they taught me.

Maria: Some taught me music, some taught me one was a doctor and taught me more about medicine and that sparked my love for medicine. And so again, use that thread of. These like very sporadic events in my life and brought them into this thread of I am both a product and someone who I’m a product of lots of different experiences.

Maria: And therefore that has also made me someone who values different experiences as part of, again, my personal brand. So that’s just an example. There’s lots of different personal brands that different folks use for their application, but this is the one that most resonated with me. So how did I get there?

Maria: And this kind of ties in more directly to what are some ways that you can build your personal brand? I thought about some key overarching values, characteristics, passions that I wanted to highlight. So again, using my example, I wanted to talk about some overarching values about seeing it. Opportunities and chances to try new things as something really valuable that I wanted to bring both from my childhood to college and give myself this kind of exploratory brand of someone who loves, again, to try new things, to bring new people in, to try things that I like, to build new communities.

Maria: And that was something that I found really valuable being able to bring people in to try new things. Characteristics again, I was writing myself as an explorer, someone who liked new and diverse experiences and then passions, right? There was music, there were sports, there was medicine.

Maria: There was even in the way that I talked about, like how I use my time in college, I was pre med and loved, the natural sciences, but I also loved the social sciences. And so that kind of carried throughout. Then identify some examples across school, extracurricular and professional and personal experiences that can help provide some evidence for those overarching elements, like the values, characteristics, and passions.

Maria: So as I just mentioned, I didn’t talk just about what my values were. I gave examples in both the field of Sports in academics in music. And so if you’re able to pinpoint some of those either key events or key details, it’s going to give you a lot more evidence for if you say you were like someone who likes to explore again, I just gave some examples of why that is true for me.

Maria: Make sure that as you’re thinking about your overarching values, characteristics, and passions that you’re also jotting down some examples of how you’ve demonstrated that in the past. And then if you’re not yet a senior and I think most seniors now would be Knowing what, like starting to hear back from schools, potentially committing.

Maria: And so I’m guessing the majority of folks, and as the program earlier are either rising seniors or younger try to get involved or apply for more senior positions in clubs or activities that will highlight your brand. And what I mean by that is especially if you are having a brand that is you’re a pre med person, like you’re an athlete, you’re community service oriented, maybe you’re a mix of all of those.

Maria: Something that gives again a lot of evidence for that is how deeply you’re involved in those activities and so If you are someone who’s not currently a senior it could be a good idea to start thinking about how can you dive? A little bit further into your current personal brand. How can you? Just give maybe a little bit more roots for you to be able to say that later on in your essays or in your interviews or again in even as you’re writing your activities list if you’re able to say you were You A leader of this club, right?

Maria: It’s going to give a lot more evidence for the fact that this is part of your personal brand than if you just say, I Just tried out for this club this year, right time and seniority and in Experience in that club is going to be really helpful as a piece of evidence

Sydney: All right, so really quickly, I just wanna jump in and advertise CollegeAdvisor and NHSS’ Virtual College and Career Summit. It’s coming up in a few weeks on Saturday, May 4th from 9:00 AM to 3:00 PM Eastern. And as I said, it’s co-hosted with U.S. News and N-S-H-S-S. And the purpose of this event is for high school students to engage with college admissions representatives, industry leaders, and other fellow students and parents.

Sydney: We will have a variety of industry experts sharing their insights into various portions of the college admissions process. And I have an exhibit hall, which where students can connect with dozens of colleges and industry representatives. We’ll also have some of our CollegeAdvisor, former admissions officers there to answer any of your questions.

Sydney: So it’s a great opportunity to explore, network, and learn. And you can go ahead and scan that QR code to register now, but. As I said, these slides are in the handout tab, and you can come back to this link at another time. And just, keep thinking of your questions. As I said before, you can put them in the Q& A tab now, and Maria will answer them later on tonight.

Sydney: Back to you, Maria. Great, thank you.

Maria: So coming back to, I’ve shared a little bit about what a personal brand is. I’ve shared some examples of how I built my personal brand and why it’s important. But bringing it back to your experience as a student, how can a well developed personal brand help you stand out in the college admissions process?

Maria: First, I’ll help you to just be able to take a step back. Think about what you enjoy, care, and care about and are interested in. And I think that’s just important overall because it’s going to guide potentially what your school list is, where you want to apply, what programs you’re interested in.

Maria: It’s going to give you a much better idea of why you’re applying to certain schools. And I think all of that is some overhead, like both mind and heart work that a lot of students don’t take the time to do. And usually it’s because there are so many things to do, like logistical things to do, right?

Maria: Standardized testing. You have your classes in high school, and now you have to think about extra cur like, documenting extracurriculars and figuring out if you’re gonna be even more involved on in things. There’s just a lot of Things to balance and so to think about taking a step back and doing that mental and heart work of you know Thinking about what you enjoy care about and are interested in can just sometimes feel futile But in reality, it’s super helpful for you to be able to get that foundation of knowing what you want What you care about what you don’t really care about So then you can one again choose better schools to apply to that are more relevant and better fits for you And then two, already have done some of the mental work of what you might write about in essays and what you might highlight in your in your admissions packet.

Maria: And that’s Pretty much a personal brand, like thinking about what you do care about, what you don’t care about, what your focus is on, not just in college, but how has that grown and been shown in, in, in your past. And college opportunities are college applications are opportunities to be reflective and to think about who you are and what you want to explore in college.

Maria: Again, thinking through this personal brand is going to help you to have a more cohesive story about who you are and what you want to do after high school. It’s going to be helpful again in your essays, in your application, but also in potential interviews. These are all things that you’ll probably have to talk to an interviewer about.

Maria: And so knowing some of that ahead of time is going to be really helpful. And then, like I said, once you have that for yourself, it’s going to be so much easier to share it with others in a more clear and convincing way than if you’re trying to tell others about it without really not knowing it for yourself.

Maria: So again, as I previously mentioned, being able to share your brand with admissions officers will also help them just distinguish you from other students, and that’s going to be key when, there’s Potentially hundreds, thousands of students applying to your school or to the school that you’re also applying to.

Maria: And you’re trying to figure out, like, how can I stand out? Some of that is out of your control, right? Like your cohort is your cohort who’s applying with you is out of your control. If there’s a ton of students with the same personal brand as you, that’s going to be a cohort where it might be a little bit more difficult.

Maria: But you, because you don’t know any of those factors, the best thing you can do is stay true to what your personal brand is. Because having the evidence. Like true evidence about why that’s your personal brand is going to help you stand out a lot more than if you try to decipher What is the personal brand that I can conjure up for myself to stand out?

Maria: So where in your application can you highlight your passions and your personal brand and i’ve alluded to a lot of these in previous slides, but there’s your activities list and that one has just An opportunity to list a greater quantity of activities, but with more quantitative data. So you’ll have a very small word count, if not just character count to talk about your activity.

Maria: But really, there, the point is to get, I think it’s like 10 or no, it’s 10 activities, and then you have opportunities to talk about How many hours you spent? How many hours in a day? How many hours in a week? Or how many hours in a day? How many days per week? How many weeks per year? Did you do it during breaks?

Maria: It’s just a great opportunity to put a ton of information all in one place. And then the essays is where you have more context and more word count to elaborate on the activities that you think have been really formative for you. Then there’s coursework. You can also show off your personal brand through the types and combination of classes that you take.

Maria: And then the letters of recommendation, who you get them from. So I, as I mentioned, I got some from my coach, I got some from my teachers and what you ask recommenders to share about you. And this is a point that I’ll really elaborate because a lot of students think letters of recommendation are just something that you have to do to submit your application, but in reality, they’re really important parts where someone outside of yourself can vouch for you and talk about who you are.

Maria: So making sure you’re getting the right people. So for me, I really cared about having at least one STEM teacher. So I had my calculus teacher do mine. And then I also had and this was before I knew I was going to study sociology, but I had a great relationship with my AP human geography teacher.

Maria: And I really wanted him to write. I loved his writing and I also knew he knew me very well as a student. And so I was like, okay, this is a perfect combination of someone who writes really well and also knows me well. So I was excited. I never again, got to read what he wrote, but I’m assuming again, seeing his past writing and then.

Maria: Knowing and actually taking the time to tell him like, Hey, these are the things that I would really love for you to highlight. Obviously you can’t write a letter for them to send in, but I did say Hey, I’d love for you to talk about my academic strengths in the class, but also like you have been a sponsor for a club that I was in leadership for, can you talk a little bit about my leadership skills?

Maria: Can you talk a little bit about the way that I came up with new ideas to Grow the organization and like all these different things that, just my Spanish or my French teacher couldn’t have said because I was neither as close nor had she had the experience of seeing me be a leader outside of the classroom.

Maria: And so again, the point of this slide is to tell you a little bit about opportunities to highlight your passions and your personal brand in your application, but it’s also a reminder of how important letters of recommendation are and how important it is to make sure that you think about who, earlier on, and especially if you’re a rising senior and current junior right now, before you go off to summer break.

Maria: Make a list of who you want to reach out to and what I did is I reached out to my teachers end of Junior year and said hey, I know this is really early But I’d love for you to write a letter of recognition for me next year I know that the year kicks off pretty quickly and there’s gonna be lots of students asking you so I’d love to maybe schedule time To either to talk to you about it before or to just give you a heads up that I would love for you to write My letter and that’s gonna one feel You Make you feel a lot more peace about someone has said yes, and it’s not like you’re going to be scrambling to find somebody in the fall, but it also just shows respect and could also just be, again, like a plus one point for you with the teacher knowing that you’re someone who thinks ahead and who is respectful of her time or his time.

Maria: So yeah, just a plug again for letters of rec and then some final tips on how you can best build your personal brand. And again, these are just some of like repeats of what I’ve said before, but take time to think about what you value, what you enjoy and what you’re passionate about without the pressure of what sounds good to an an admissions officer, admissions officers love it when you care about things deeply and are very involved but there’s no prescribed field or topic that is looked on more favorably than another.

Maria: So again, it’s more about how much you can show that you love what you do versus just like the. nature of what you actually do. And so think about it as like passion over field. And bottom line is just be yourself, do what you love, but do so deeply and intentionally. And then take all the pieces of the puzzle.

Maria: So your activities, your passions, your characteristics, and think about the clearest way to communicate them. And this kind of gets to some of the things that I talk with students about when they’re Making their essays. It’s not just the content. So again, not just activities, the passions and characteristics, but also the structure of how you communicate them.

Maria: You could have really amazing things that you’re involved with. You could have great characteristics that you want to share. But if you’re not able to do them in a way that is clear and concise and gets across to the admissions officer, then that lack of communication is going to be a big hurdle for you.

Maria: And so think, start thinking now about how things relate to one another, how you can maybe thread similar through lines through different activities. And that’s honestly something that maybe if you’re an internal processor, maybe you just need a journal about, think about. If you’re an external processor, maybe that’s something that would be helpful for you to talk with friends, talk with your parents, talk with, I don’t know, teachers, advisors, and to have some of those things just talked about through our talk through in conversation so that you could get to a greater point of clarity for how to communicate those things.

Maria: And I think something that kind of ties the bow on this is start early. If you’re here, it’s probably because you are thinking earlier about how to build your personal brand. But like I said, there’s a lot of things you can do if you have the time and space to think about them. And the summer’s coming up.

Maria: Use that time to think about, again, your personal brand, especially for your essays. And I think that’s everything. From my end, I’ll pass it back to you.

Sydney: Great. So yeah, with that is the end of the presentation portion of the webinar. And I really hope that all of you found this information helpful.

Sydney: And just again, as another reminder, you can download the slides from the handout tab and refer back to them at any time. So we’re going to go ahead and move on to the live Q&A session. So I will read through the questions that you’ve been submitting. There’s a lot of good ones already, so we probably won’t get through all of them.

Sydney: And I’ll paste them into the public chat and publish them so that everyone will be able to see them. And then yeah, I’ll give Maria a chance to answer. And if You are having issues submitting questions and your Q& A tab isn’t working for some reason. Just make sure that you join the webinar through the custom link in your email and not from the CollegeAdvisor webinar page.

Sydney: So with that, I’m going to start off with a pretty simple question. It just goes back to the basics. Kendra asks, How different is the Common App application from independent applications from other individual schools?

Maria: Yeah, so that’s a great question. Most schools use the Common App, but there’s a couple others like the UCs that have their own Common App, or their own version of the Common App.

Maria: There’s definitely different schools that will just have their own online application. I’ll say, usually for those schools, they’re a little bit less intensive applications than the common app or the UCs, usually because there’s like less essays. But I would say there is a similar thread of there will be a lot of questions about your like demographics, like your location, your geography your, the classes that you’ve taken, the activities that you’ve done, potential for submitting letters of recommendation, and then oftentimes there will be like an essay or written portion.

Maria: So I would say that Asking you about like your academic and extracurriculars. Potential essays and letters of rec is usually the package of things asked in any application.

Sydney: Great. Thank you for that. And let’s see. One question is from Barbara. It’s a little bit longer, so I’m going to read the whole thing and then maybe repeat just the question part of it. But so Barbara’s been talking to their friends about college applications, and their friends think that it’s better to really focus on one main interest or activity to show their passion and dedication but, some people like you, Maria, were involved in a lot of different things.

Sydney: So how did you manage to highlight your various interests while still coming across as focused and purposeful in your applications? Do you have any advice on striking that balance?

Maria: Yeah, so that’s a really good question and one that I feel like, again, there’s lots of folks have different approaches for how to apply and somebody’s approach might not be the best for another person.

Maria: I definitely know folks who are like, music is my passion. I am going to play piano and this is going to be my personal brand. I am a pianist. I’m a musician and I’m studying neuroscience and learn more about the brain and like that. It just becomes like this package of this is what I’m interested in.

Maria: That’s probably works great for that person if they have the actual like Years of playing they probably should have competitions. They need to have the evidence And so I think before thinking about what brand should I choose? It’s more like what brand have you chosen over the past years of your life?

Maria: Like it’s often not a well, let me craft this now Oftentimes it’s let me refine it. Let me figure out like how to improve it But it’s more of a reflection of what have you done in the past? And if it’s true that you’ve done multiple things like that was true for me I couldn’t really just choose one thing and say that’s my thing because I didn’t have Tons of years of experience in one thing other than when I played like playing tennis but even then like it was often mixed with I did cross country at the same time or I played A different sport.

Maria: And so those were all things I wanted to highlight and it was going to be really hard for me to just choose one thing and make that my thing. But again, for someone who dove super deeply into one thing, like that probably took most of their hours, it wouldn’t make sense for their personal brand to be like, I’m a dabbler who likes lots of different things.

Maria: And to explore if most of your hours were devoted to playing a particular sport or being in drama or. Being a musician. So I would encourage you to again, just think less about what would work well for somebody else or, needing to dive deep into one place, but more thinking about what have you done in the past?

Maria: And how to, again, like the question I think also revolved around how do you do that effectively? I think really try to flag what are points of evidence. If you’re saying that you’re someone who explored and did lots of things, how can you show that is true? Make sure that you’re documenting like, Okay, if you’re saying you’re someone who loves to play sports and tried lots of different sports, I made sure to think about okay, I played for an academy.

Maria: That’s like a big milestone in like showing I wasn’t just trying a sport at the local park, like I really committed to playing the sport. I also was part of my school team for a different sport. Again, that meant I wasn’t just running on the weekends with my friends, I was doing cross country for my school.

Maria: So again, Charnov, find little points of like, how did you formally play that sport or formally do that activity? Another place that you can do that is in like community service. So lots of folks choose that as part of their personal brand. Or again, for me it was part of the, I love to dabble.

Maria: And the way that I use community service was saying like, maybe I wasn’t like in a specific community service for or organization for a super long time. But I did two hours of community service almost every day at my local hospital. I like, saw this gap in an area that I wanted to work in and didn’t see people who are working in that.

Maria: So I started like my own kind of organization to work on that. And so again, things that like. What I did at the hospital had nothing to do with the organization that like I helped start for like again in the community service realm. But having those two things and also adding being part of donation drives and like doing things at school showed that my commitment to community service was deep and there was a lot of evidence for that.

Maria: While also being able to name look at all the different organizations that I was a part of or helped start as a way to both hold intention. I’m someone deeply committed to community service, but also someone who loves to like dabble and try new things and spread my time in different activities.

Maria: So I think, hopefully that is hopeful. I tried to give both kind of like a overarching overarching answer while also maybe more tangible examples of like how I tried to do that.

Sydney: Yeah, I love that response. And I think college, one of the great things about it is that you can explore multiple different subject areas.

Sydney: So I didn’t say this earlier, but I was a biology major, but I also minored in education and computer science. The computer science was something that I did not expect to study in college. That came while I was in my undergrad program. But I did know that I was really passionate about biology and about education.

Sydney: So one way that I showed that in high school was by volunteering at my local aquarium and talking to guests at exhibits. and educating them about the really cool marine animals. I definitely think there are lots of ways to combine your interests as well. All right. So another question you touched on this a little bit, but what do you think is best to do for someone’s personal brand during the summer before the start of your senior year?

Maria: Yeah. So for the summer, oftentimes I try to like oftentimes it was just like what the summer brought to me. Like it was like I, knew that I maybe didn’t have the financial resources to go and do something that maybe my friends were doing or to go off to like science camp or something but I knew like I needed to work and I also love to play tennis.

Maria: So I was teaching tennis over one summer. Then there was another summer where I didn’t have that same financial constraint and I was able to take classes on my local college. And so I did also use my summers as like ways of showing I tried different things. Different parts of my summer looked different.

Maria: There was times where I just played tennis and that was like. My joy and then there was other times I was like pretty much just only taking classes at my community college or like taking online classes so I would say think about okay, if you’re saying like your brand is the specific activity How can you dive deep is it maybe going to camp teaching others?

Maria: Actually, that is one where that is one example of like kind of Proof of your devotion to an activity is when you not, you like, you don’t just practice it, but you actually teach it to others because it shows that you want this to be something that others love as well. And you’re interested in building the community.

Maria: And I think that’s something that’s really cool to do during the summer. Yeah, it’s to be able to show your commitment to your personal brand by also expanding that activity in your community or in your state or whatever the jurisdiction you choose.

Sydney: And what about getting involved in research projects over the summer? How can students participate in research and is getting published, really worth the effort and time that you put into it?

Maria: Yeah, so I did not do research when I was in high school, although I know several friends who did do some research. For the most part, it’s more for your edification and being in either like a wet lab or in a clinical study or like getting a sense for Wetting your toes in like the research space for the most part I didn’t do research until I went to college and that’s really when I was like, okay I have some like a project that I want to try i’m going to be part of building this out but oftentimes like a lot of high school students don’t have the experience and it’s more so just like You learning what it’s like to do research more so than actual You Like publications, even folks who are like, I did research a lot in college and got One or two publications max and like that was something that even then four years can sometimes not be enough to publish Much less like just a summer

Sydney: Definitely. Yeah. Thank you for that. And let’s see another question. We have is Okay, so what about students who want to enter the medical field what kind of courses should they be taking some examples might be sociology anthropology Or psychology. But do you have any advice for classes that students might take over the summer?

Maria: Yeah if you’re a high school student actually, let me start from like closer to med school. If you’re in college, there are pre med requirements that you have to take. And so it’s less about what do you want to take? And more so okay, what do you have to take? And what does your school offer? And how, what’s the overlap between those two? When you’re in high school oftentimes it’s, You’re not like you’re not filling out an application for medical school You’re filling out an application for college and so you have to show your interest like there should be evidence But it doesn’t mean that you have to take a specific class So like I took chemistry and biology My school didn’t offer AP bio or AP chem and so it wasn’t something that I took But I had taken like I was interested in biology.

Maria: So I took the biology class that was there I was interested in anatomy and physiology. I took that class because it was available. And so thinking more about like maybe a way that could be a helpful shift in perspective is if you were an admissions officer and a student was telling you like, Hey, I’m pre med, I want to be a doctor.

Maria: What classes do you think would show evidence for that? If they didn’t take a single science class, you’d probably question do they know what they’re saying or what they mean when they say they want to become a doctor or that they want to go into the field of science. And so sometimes putting ourselves in that reverse role can help.

Maria: But just to name out a couple again, like biology, chemistry, physics anatomy, physiology, and like that natural science camp in like the, More social science camp. You could probably think sociology. I didn’t, I think I did take a sociology class, but it was through my community college, like dual enrollment.

Maria: And it was also during the summer. Yeah. During the summer. I took psychology during the summer. Also in that community college. And so things like that. I took a nutrition class. I think there I took a class in like medical anthropology, but. Actually, that was when I was actually in college, but if that’s available that’s awesome.

Maria: But again, I’m listing out a lot of classes that a lot of high schools don’t offer. And thinking about, okay, maybe you didn’t take the class. Maybe you do an online program over a summer. Maybe you like read books and like post about it or start conversations about it. Like maybe that becomes an activity that you do in the summer.

Maria: That you can write in your extracurriculars list. So just want to hold in tension the fact that there are some ideal classes that could show clear interests and those might not be available in your area. So what does it look like to work around those limitations?

Sydney: Yes, that is all great advice. I’m going to ask one of my own questions. What are some ways that students could incorporate their cultural background or heritage into their personal brand?

Maria: Yeah, so for me, that looked a lot like talking about the tension I felt coming from Columbia and like growing up in Miami and feeling like I felt like a child of two cultures and sometimes feeling like I couldn’t I didn’t fit in either one.

Maria: And then sometimes feeling like a bridge between the two and how I held that How I held that as I was growing up in America, and so I think it was less in the camp of my extracurriculars and more so in the camp of I want to be a doctor because I want to do Doctors Without Borders, I want to actually go and help do Like aid work and be a doctor, not just in the U S but in places where maybe there is lack of access to care.

Maria: And so that’s how my background and like my identity as a Latina, as someone who. grew up in like a low income neighborhood in Miami and also comes from an area in Columbia that was also not as developed and so um having those being able to talk about those things in my essays Was a way to bridge my background and my passions together you don’t always have to do that.

Maria: Sometimes you just talk about your background and the way that it’s like the values and the characteristics that’s helped build in you. But for me, I think it truly was that those life experiences gave way to what I wanted to do in the future as well. And so that was just an easy way for me to talk about both my career goals and my background in the same way.

Sydney: Thank you for that. So we’re going to really quickly just pivot for a second and talk about CollegeAdvisor. So as Maria and I have both mentioned, we are both senior advisors, CollegeAdvisor, and that we are part of a team of over 300 former admissions officers and admissions experts who are ready to help you and your family navigate the college admissions process and one on one advising sessions.

Sydney: We’ve already helped over 6,000 clients on their college admissions journeys, and after analyzing our data since 2021, we found that CollegeAdvisor students are 3.6 times more likely to get into Stanford. 4.1 times more likely to get into Vanderbilt and 2.7 times more likely to get into Harvard University.

Sydney: You can increase your odds and take the next step in your college admissions journey by signing up for a free 45 minute to 60 minute strategy session with an admission specialist. from our team. And you can go ahead and scan the QR code on the screen to sign up. During this meeting, we’ll review your current extracurricular activities and your application strategy, maybe talk about the personal brand that you’re already starting to develop, and talk about how they align with your college list.

Sydney: We’ll also outline the tools that you need to stand out in this very competitive admissions world. So scan that QR code to sign up for your strategy session and it’ll stay on the screen throughout the rest of the Q& A.

Sydney: So with that we’re going to ask another question about STEM courses and being a STEM student. So is it a good idea to try and take classes outside of STEM along with your math and science classes, even if you want to go pre med just to show that type of well roundedness?

Maria: Yeah, so I think if you’re thinking about being STEM, there is definitely, or if you’re thinking about any STEM major or STEM career it’s still important to show like, yes, you know what you’re talking about. Like you do take classes in that. There’s evidence for your passion for that. That doesn’t mean that that has to become like your bread and butter.

Maria: Again, if anything, it is sometimes a better sell of saying or better for a personal brand to say I. know my science. This is stuff that like I have done and I have the coursework for it, but I love to apply it in like some of these other scenarios and that can be. Also within the STEM field, like maybe you’re really interested in like science, but how it relates to technology and how it relates to engineering.

Maria: So maybe you think about bridging biomedical engineering, right? And that is like a different field that would make you stand out even more because there’s a ton of pre med people. There’s less pre-med. Biomedical engineering people as that’s a subset of the pre med path. And so maybe it’s again, for me, it was directly tied to my interest in like different cultures and sociology and travel.

Maria: And so for me, it was, I don’t just want to be a doctor. I would love to do like aid work in humanitarian aid with mixed with medicine. And so that’s why I studied global health and why I like kind of things that I highlighted in my personal brand was. My love for for community service and also for like science and my academic breaker.

Maria: And so that’s how I bridged the two. And I took a lot of classes to show I care about what science looks like in practice in different settings and different cultural settings and geographical locations.

Sydney: Great. What about social media? How can students use social media to positively enhance their personal brand for college admissions? Or does social media hurt your positive or your personal brand?

Maria: Yeah, so when I was applying like, obviously, like there was like Instagram and Facebook around, but there wasn’t as much of this sense of my like, using those tools to enhance your personal brand.

Maria: I don’t think it has become like a policy at all for admissions officers to look to use Instagram or to look at your social media to Oh, meant like your personal brand. There’s a lot of equity questions around that about who has access to social media, who has the time and Resources to devote to building a personal brand.

Maria: Like this is something that like private companies like outsource to marketing like agencies. And so it’s definitely not something that has become a norm whatsoever. However, if you, if it’s part of something that you’re really interested in, if you really care about like the effects of social media on society, if you really care about like a specific brand and like maybe you’re a brand ambassador, like being a brand ambassador.

Maria: a part of social media as an important part of your story, then that’s definitely something that you can include. But think about it as another extracurricular and not something that is over every, all of your other extracurriculars. It’s just a piece of what lots of other people can be doing for their extracurriculars.

Sydney: Yes, it is definitely a changing culture. And I think, yeah, your digital footprint is forever. So it works both ways. And should students tailor their personal brand differently for different colleges or universities, or should it just be the same no matter what program you’re applying to?

Maria: Yeah, I think that is like a little bit more of a flexible, there, there is a flexible approach in that you can’t like, fabricate completely new events in your life. There is a path that you have been taking for several years that becomes part of your personal brand, but maybe what you choose to highlight is slightly different in different schools.

Maria: If you’re doing your Common App, that Common App is still getting sent to multiple places. But a place where you can maybe tweak a little more is in your supplemental essays that are more school based. And for example, there’s a school that really values diversity of thought. Maybe, you weren’t in a lot of, let’s see advocacy things, or journalism, or places where it’s super obvious that you’re engaging in the sector of folks thinking.

Maria: communicating of different perspectives, but maybe you did, maybe you’re applying to another school and that’s not such a big emphasis in what the school is interested in or what not you can pick and choose okay, maybe you only had one experience, but that experience becomes so much bigger in the school that cares about communications than in a school that’s maybe just caring about more of the technology sorry, in my head I’m thinking MIT.

Maria: MIT is a prime example of, it’s an amazing school, but there is obviously a clear focus on technology. And maybe like you don’t have a ton of experiences in technology But this is if you’re applying to that school, that’s a place where you would definitely want to highlight your technology experiences and different schools again, if you are looking on the website another thing I recommend is like talking to students who go there and get a sense of what is the vibe?

Maria: What are like some of the strengths of folks in this school or what does the school care about? And that’s it That can be found again on the website, sometimes in tours, but I found that the place that comes out the most is in talking to students or alumni from that school. And a lot of admissions offices do have programs where prospective students can talk to current students or alum or like recent alumni to just get a sense of what does it look like to go to that school?

Maria: And that’s where you can hear a little bit more about what is the culture? What’s the vibe of the school?

Sydney: Yeah. MIT is a great example of a pretty specialized school where you don’t want to. tweak your personal brand a little bit to align with what they want. So you did already talk about the importance of having your letters of recommendation strengthen your personal brand, but do you have any advice for choosing a recommender?

Sydney: How did you really decide who you wanted to write your letters?

Maria: Yeah, so I knew I wanted a balance of someone who could speak to my strengths in STEM because I was pre med and also someone who knew me really well. And again, I chose my calculus teacher and I chose my human geo teacher for my calculus teacher.

Maria: Like she had been my teacher for two years. She knew my like strengths in quantitative fields. And so could talk a lot more about Kind of the potential that I had to be in a field that has a lot more quantitative classes and then my AP human geo teacher Like I said, I knew he was a great writer and also knew me really well And so there was this balance of knowing me well and knowing my strengths in and outside of the classroom and then I chose somebody who had seen who’d known me for years and who had seen like my leadership, but also just like my personality as like someone who’s persevering and like my stamina in both like a sport and outside of a sport, balancing like school and sports at the same time.

Maria: And so I chose my coach.

Sydney: Yeah. I think having a mix of people who know you outside of the classroom and inside of the classroom is a great piece of advice. So do college admissions officers recognize student involvement in religious establishment through like leadership and volunteering? And do they see that as an extra curricular activity?

Maria: Yeah, for sure. So I actually also, one of my key parts of my personal brand in both my essays and my application was my identity as a non denominational Christian. And I talked about that in the way that I talked about my reason for wanting to help folks, and that was, like, really rooted in my personal identity.

Maria: My desire, my faith in like knowing people’s or like wanting to highlight the dignity of every human, regardless of where they were geographically, what their own faith was, what their situation or circumstances were. And so that was part of like why I wanted to do humanitarian aid work. It was also part of why I wanted to do community service, even in a non religious setting was just like.

Maria: Came from wanting to help people and so that was again rooted in my faith, but showed up in both some church settings So I liked it Hopefully like some like small groups and like study groups like Bible study groups, but also at the same time, like volunteered in places that were not religious at all.

Maria: And it just, again, tied back to faith, but wasn’t like a specific religious organization. I think I did volunteer for a couple of religious organizations that just did I think it was like like regarding like building like wells. I think that was one of them. Another one was missionary work that was like purely like health so like folks would go and help build hospitals in air or build clinics in areas where there weren’t any and there was like christian underpinning to the organization and so maybe those are some of the ways in which like I think in this question asked I don’t see the question here on the chat anymore, but shows maybe more official ties to faith.

Maria: But that’s how I approached it and how I wrote about it in my application. And I think that’s true of any faith, by the way, like this was just my specific experience in the Christian faith, but I think that’s true regardless of what your faith is.

Sydney: Definitely. And yeah, like you were saying, the volunteering aspect is definitely something that can come across. What about, do you have any specific strategies for first generation college students when they build their brand? It’s relates to the cultural identity that we talked about earlier.

Maria: Yeah. So as I mentioned for first gen, I just had never heard the term personal brand before. So if you’re here in your first gen, like you already have the upper hand of knowing this is a thing that you can think about as you’re making or as you’re building your application.

Maria: I think something that was important. Again, I didn’t know personal brand but I knew I was like a term but I knew I didn’t want to play it off as like Like I didn’t want it to be a sob story about this is I am the first person ever to go to college Like pick me like it was more like a sense of hey these are the realities of some of the ways in which like Being a first gen, like I didn’t have the networks to like network into knowing how college, how the college process worked.

Maria: I didn’t know I didn’t have a coach. I didn’t have anybody who was walking me through this process. And so there was the way I tried to approach it was just give, especially in my essays. I think this is where this shown more was like, Hey, this is my family’s first time in America. There was a lot of things that like we had to learn.

Maria: As I was growing up and that has continued still and I’m oftentimes like a pioneer for my family of we didn’t know that these fought these like forms needed to be filed or like we didn’t know that these were social taboos and at the same time like We didn’t know that this was the college application system and we don’t we there’s a lot of things we might not know in The future but knowing that like our family Unit was gonna do this together I think part of my essay was like knowing My background as like a latina And the emphasis that there is around family and the family unit meant that as I was exploring these things like Yes, I was the first person to No English, or maybe be able to work with some of this technology.

Maria: I knew I had my family behind me to support me. And then I would say those are some of the narratives that you could play in as a first gen immigrant. But I again would encourage you to think about that was my specific way of bringing in my first gen immigrant experience. It was real, it was true, like it was the things I wanted to highlight and it was also a story of being real about the difficulties but not letting those difficulties define me and it wasn’t like a soft, like a, again a soft story, it was more so like a way of showing strength, not just about me but also for my family and for People like me.

Sydney: I love that. Being empowered and proud of your first generation identity is really important. Yeah, I love that and we only have a couple more minutes. So this might be our last question, but I’m just wondering if you have any advice for summarizing your activities and really summarizing your personal brand in such a short space in that activities section.

Sydney: Because like you were saying, there’s sometimes really small character limits or word limits. In that space. So how do you prioritize what you want to say in a tiny amount of words?

Maria: Yeah, I think just realizing that it’s going to take it’s going to take a lot of your time. I thought that, oh great, less word count means I can finish this quicker. But really it was more so I had to have a separate doc where I wrote like a paragraph, realized it was like five times over the limit and had to continue cutting down. And so sometimes it’s helpful to just figure out like, what is the most important thing I want to say if there’s five things write those five things down and then say are there Ways to merge some of these together so I found you know I want to talk about like leadership and also like passion like maybe there is a way in the same sentence to talk about like my passion allowed me to not just be a participant but also a leader of and like kind of bridge some of those things together because It was just going to be really hard to write all five things.

Maria: And so I would say that is a general principle or like advice that I would share. But what that looks like tactically for me was definitely having a document for writing my drafts. And being able to just say, okay, for now I’m just going to write what’s on my mind. In two days after my mind is clear, I’m going to go back and try to cut.

Maria: Because usually if you give yourself some time, you’ll find ways to cut. The other thing is just realizing sometimes you just have to cut entire content. There is no amount of cutting like, one word or choosing a synonym or sometimes that works and that helps to cut down character count.

Maria: Sometimes you actually just have to chop off like, Something that you thought it was so important. And those choices are hard. Like I remember in, I actually, even though tennis was a huge part of my life and I’ve shared about tennis quite a bit, I had to cut that from my personal statement, which was really hard for me.

Maria: Cause I was like, this is such a big part of my story. And yet I realized it just wasn’t fitting the through line of all the other things I wanted to share. And it was going to be over the word count. So I nixed it, wrote about it in my activity section, but again, that is not, I know the question was specific to the activity section, but it’s a principle that I would say it’s throughout is if you really can’t cut the words, like you might have to cut any an element that you think is really important.

Maria: And then when you look back on it, again, giving yourself some days to make sure like you’re editing well, sometimes if you look back at something, you’re like, I didn’t even remember what I cut or what I was so anxious about cutting. Yep, those are some of the advice I would give there, or pieces of advice.

Sydney: Yeah, that was great advice, and like you were just saying, making sure that you save enough time for the editing process is very important. The fact that all of you are here tonight and thinking about your personal brand early means that hopefully you will not wait until the last minute to finish your college application.

Sydney: With that’s the end of our webinar tonight. We had a good time telling you about building a college brand for college admissions. And I just want to thank you again, Maria. Yeah, thank you so much for your time and insight. And then lastly, I just want to share the rest of our webinars for the month of April.

Sydney: So this was the first one of the month, but we have plenty more coming up. We have some about college essays and different Q&A’s with admissions officers. And like I said, we do also have that VCCS virtual college and career summit happening on Saturday, May 4th, from 9 AM to 3 PM. So with that we are going to sign off and don’t forget that you can watch this recorded webinar at CollegeAdvisor.com slash webinars. All right. Thank you everyone.