I’m so excited to share snippets of a conversation I had with a dear friend who is an application reader for one of the top honors programs in the nation.
There are many state schools that offer premiere full ride merit scholarships, along with international travel grants, group travel-study trips over spring break, study abroad programs overseas, and more. Some of these honors programs have as low as a 2% acceptance rate, with classes being as small as 30. She says that the majority of her class turned down Ivies in favor of the honors program fellowship: not only for the financial benefits but for the personalized support and tight-knit community.
I got the inside look at what goes on in the admissions scene. In the process of evaluating potential candidates, every application is assigned two readers, who independently rank the candidates from 0-10. The total score determines the next stage: 20’s and 19’s move on to the next round, 18’s and sometimes 17’s get a second read. She estimates that 15% of the applicants move on to the next round, which involve faculty readers and administrators.
Finally, a select number of candidates are invited to interview in person at the school, and from there, the final class is selected.
Though she is speaking from her perspective as a fellow as well as an admissions reader for her particular school, a lot of her advice still stands for merit scholarships at state schools. Here are my biggest takeaways from our conversation:
Q: What is your biggest tip to someone who is applying to this program?
A: I think I was surprised by how much voice and authenticity and passion actually shine through in your essays.
Q: How do you feel that warmth or passion through essays?
A: I think it's through specificity. It's having a unique point of view, but I think in terms of how you communicate it, it‘s definitely in specificity. It's being unafraid to use your voice. I think it is a risk to break the mold and maybe use more humor or more of a casual tone that shows your personality, but I think [it is worth it] if it is executed.
Q: How do you determine the number to give?
A: The 9’s and 10’s are people generally who do excel across the board. Like they are incredible writers. Some people will have a more straightforward way of writing. Some people will have a more stylistic creative way of writing. But either way, those people almost always tend to be extremely effective communicators in whatever way they're approaching it. Some people might be really, really amazing candidates, but they don't know how to express themselves and they suffer in the essay portion. But I do think on average, you would overwhelmingly find that the candidates who have the most amazing accomplishments, who do the best in school, who excel the most in their activities, are also the candidates that have the best essays. They're good storytellers, or they understand themselves. They understand how to communicate. No one has to know one hundred percent who they are as a young person, or at any age. But someone who can figure it out, who has a strong sense of self—you know where they want to go.
An 8 or a 9 is the ideal candidate. So someone who is truly impressive. It doesn't mean you have to be the best at everything. You once said that it’s better to be the point of the pencil than the eraser. It's better to be sharp than well rounded—better to excel in one or a few areas than it is to be just well rounded in a lot of things. A 7 or 8 would be advanced or excellent, so they clearly excel in school. An excellent student, but maybe not the most impressive person.
Q: When you say impressive…?
A: Impressive is hard to counter. I’ve seen candidates who are just, like, wow. How are you a stunning writer and taken X amount of APs and you get straight A's and you have a perfect SAT, but you're also doing research at your local college on the side and you're also an award winning violin player or a championship winning sports player. There are people who really do it all to the highest degree, and it's impressive.
Q: Is that word impressive on the rubric?
A: It is on the rubric.
Q: Interesting. What about ideal? What does that mean on the rubric?
A: Ideal is the archetype of someone who’ll succeed in this program. Something unique about the program is that we’re looking for a really well-rounded diverse class of people who are impressive in many different ways and come from many different backgrounds in terms of identity, geography, income, major, what you want to do in life, what your activities are and what your perspective is. Ideal is definitely someone who has clear passions and unabashedly, aggressively pursues them. It may not be someone who knows exactly what they want to do, but it's someone who really knows themselves and is chasing those passions. I do think we're also looking for a specific type of candidate that tends to feed into the major scholarships: Rhodes, Marshall—students who may pursue higher education at the grad level and beyond.
Q: What made you an ideal candidate?
A: We’ll never know because we don’t see our own admissions file, but before we start reading they do give us our own applications back.
Q: To calibrate?
A: To calibrate, but also to reorient yourself back into being a senior in high school and understand what it’s like in those shoes. To remind us we’re judging 17 year olds and not who we are today. We were told, you know, you're gonna look back at this and you're gonna cringe at what you wrote. So if you cringe a little bit at what a student has written, it’s natural. We’re looking at potential. Someone who is excellent for the position that they're in at that moment. For me, it was probably a combination of clear passion and unique perspective.
Q: But it’s still important to have a cohesive narrative in your application.
A: We look at these applications a lot longer than at least the statistics say. We discuss each application for an average of six to eight minutes, maybe up to 10 minutes. But because people are looking through applications so quickly, you don't want to be confusing. You want to have a clear story, which is not to say you can't be interested in multiple things, but you have to find a way to connect it together. You just don't want to leave your reader wondering why this person chose to pursue this and has never expressed an interest in it before, or why this person has spent so much time in a certain area and is seemingly gonna drop it and never do it again.
Q: Who's interviewing?
A: There are six panels of five interviewers each, gathered around certain interests in humanities and sciences. You’re assigned one panel based on your interests. Generally there’ll be one distinguished alumni, one trustee, one school administrator like a dean or provost, a faculty member, and someone who is on the scholarship team.
Q: Any tips for the interview portion?
A: A panel interview, especially at that age, is very intimidating. In my panel in particular, one of my interviewers famously has made multiple students cry. So, tip: don't cry in your interview. Even though they try to tailor the panels to be people who are in your field, I think there's also something to the fact that you're putting hopefully six genuinely curious people in a room who are able to speak about anything as long as someone in the room is passionate about it. It’s about finding points of connection and being able to express your passions in a way that bring other people in, even if they don't come from that background.
Q: Did you feel good about it afterwards?
A: I definitely felt shaky about some things. If you have taken a foreign language, they will ask you a question from that language. The question was, in French, how would your friends describe you? Which is a hard question to answer in English! I said my friends would describe me as kind in the mom of the group, and that was the extent of my French.
Q: Any other surprise questions?
A: Everyone’s asked a surprise question, like an unexpected question about their resume. Mine was because I was a poll worker in high school, I was asked my opinion on the electoral college. My panel had a 70 year old so I very much hedged my answer. But yes, I think these places will always ask a question with a twist. They care less about what your political opinion is and more about how you express your opinion in thoughtful and informed ways.
Ultimately, this application reader’s bottom line is that AO’s are impressed by students with a strong sense of identity. She adds, “No one has to know one hundred percent who they are as a young person, or at any age. But someone who can figure it out, who has a strong sense of self, and you know where they want to go—that’s who we’re looking for.”
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