5. College Admissions: Do You Have the Courage to Succeed?

[Music] Hello and welcome to the Admittedly Podcast. My name is Thomas Khalil. I'm the former director of MBA admissions and financial aid for Milen Mauer, the Wharton School at the University of Pennsylvania. In this podcast, I don't promise easy answers or quick fixes, but I will use my decades of experience to help you achieve your education goals. Now let's get started. [Music] Hello and welcome to this episode of the Admittedly Podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Khalil. Today we're going to be talking about something different, something unique, something that not many people really give good consideration to when they're thinking about life planning and university admissions. That's courage. It's a time of the year where juniors are starting to panic and I'm getting a lot of questions from parents. What should we do? What should we have done? How do I make my child stand out? We hear this from parents and students all levels, freshmen, sophomores, juniors. One of the things I think that gets lost in this conversation is everybody's really focused on what should I do? What should I do? We know somebody who did X, Y, and Z and they got into Stanford. We know somebody who also did X, Y, and Z and they got rejected everywhere. The first thing that I want to say is, comparisons are not helpful. Comparisons are not your friend. It's very easy to look externally at somebody and make judgments. If Susan was the student council president and the captain of the lacrosse team and volunteered at the homeless shelter, then if I do that, I should get into the same schools that she did. There's a lot wrong with that. Everybody is different. Not only is everybody different in what they do, but different in how they do it. Then most importantly, very different in how they present that to the admissions committee. What I want you to do is take a step back and I know it's very hard. I'm a parent. I see it happening at my children's school all the time, but I know parents talk. They compare notes in some countries. It's a bit of a blood sport. To be honest, the mothers get together and compare years of data and drive their students, drive their children to do exactly what everybody else is doing. I think this is really, really an understandable reaction, but one that does not give us the results we want. Either from creating interesting, independent, thoughtful human beings, which I hope is our goal as a parent, but also for the students. Each child has their own, each student has their own interest. They have their own personality. They've been developing it for many years. And really the key here is we want to find those things, that thing or those combination of things that really allow them to shine, that allow them to be themselves, that allow them to put their best foot forward in this process and in their life. Now, many parents are going to say, well, that's great, but my child doesn't really know what interests them. And many students that I work with as well will tell me, well, you know, look, I like YouTube. I like sports. I like building things. I like reading. I'm not really sure what makes me special or unique. And I understand that, you know, as a parent myself, again, I understand sometimes it's very difficult to find out what it is that your child likes to incentivize them to be brave and to really dig in and engage with things. Even if it's something that they like, so let's let's back up a little bit and let's talk about this concept of courage and what it means in this context, both in building a whole human and also preparing for the admissions process. So one of the things that they teach at the Wharton School and negotiations, one of the things that you will read in any negotiations book or here in any seminar is that you will not be successful in a negotiation. If you can't see the issue from the other side, because what matters to you may not matter to the other side. They may have a set of concerns that is vitally important to them that you don't realize discount or don't see as important to yourself. And so what I really want to do is take a step back here and for most of us were thinking about how do I make my child or how do I make myself the best candidate possible for admission to this school. And I think the important thing here is to ask ourselves, well, what is the other side looking for? What are the universities looking for when they are reviewing my application or my child's application? So this gets to an interesting concept, right? And the concept of the best schools don't pick a class of the quote unquote best applicants, right? It's very first of all hard to quantify what does the best mean. And if you're a school, let's say like Columbia that might get 50,000 undergraduate applications in a year for 1000 seats, right? How do you decide? Okay, who fills those 1000 seats because you have 500 seats on the liberal art side 500 on the engineering and STEM side. So when we look at those 50,000 applications, a majority of them have excellent GPAs from good schools. Many of the students have taken the exact same courses because there's only so many courses that you can take. They've done a lot of the same activities, right? They've played sports, they've been involved in clubs, they've done a lot of the things that you are supposed to do. But the problem from the school's perspective is that if they have 10,000 students who were all class president and two varsity or three varsity sport captains and did some volunteer work and were active over the summer, well, they don't even have room for those 10,000. They don't have room for 5,000 of those students, right? Even if they have perfect SAT scores and grade APs or perfect IB scores, whatever that may be, there's just not room. And so what they're looking for, right? They're looking for that mixture of intellectual curiosity, they're looking for initiative and they're looking for courage. And by courage, I mean, did the student have the courage to go their own way, to follow their own path? And this is very, very difficult. It's difficult for parents to support, especially when they get their own peer pressure from other parents saying, "Oh, you can't let your son or daughter or child do this or that because nobody else has done that. Nobody else does that. And you want them to go to University of Chicago. Everybody from our school to University of Chicago did XYZ over the past few years. And look, it's very easy to look backwards at data and extrapolate your own conclusions. But what you really need to do is look from the other side, right? And you need to think about, as a student, what is it that I enjoy doing? And how can I express my personality within that? Because what the schools are looking for is really what is it? And it sounds cliche, but really what is it that when you wake up in the morning, you can't wait to do, right? Is it art? Is it music? Is it sports? Is it volunteering? Is it work? Maybe you don't look forward to working, but maybe you have to work to support your family or help yourself afford the luxuries, small luxuries in life or pay for your car and your gas and school trips and things like that. So really what they're looking for is what makes you unique and uniqueness comes from this word courage. Okay. It's not enough to simply do what everyone else is doing around you. All right, they want to see, listen, I am really, really interested in this and passionate about this and I am going to devote every waking second that I have to this. Now, you might think, for example, when you're a freshman that you really, really want to be a doctor, maybe one of your parents is a doctor, maybe one of your grandparents is a doctor, but you decide that you want to be a doctor, maybe you've watched too much grace anatomy, whatever it is. But you've decided this is your calling in life. And so you join the biology club, you join the chemistry club, you do some summer research opportunities, you get to your junior year and you say, oh, this really isn't what I want to do. I really don't want to be a doctor. What I've realized is that I'm much more into the research side of things and I want to be more of a research science scientist around medicine. It's okay, it's okay to make that change. It's okay to have the the courage to admit that you have grown, to admit that you have changed your goals, and to realize that this is the original path I thought I wanted has diverged. And I'm going to have the courage to follow that. Now, we need to explain that in the application. We'll talk more about that later as we get to application season. But really, the idea here is even having the courage to say, "I don't like medicine at all. I don't like the biological sciences at all." In fact, what I've learned, if anything, is that I'm more of an engineer or I'm more of a poet. And owning that change, right, don't stay on a track just because you're already on that track and just because you're scared to step off that. You have to bring your best self to this application process and you have to bring for lack of better term, your authentic self. So if you're trying to sell the schools on this idea that you love medicine and biology, but really your heart hasn't been in it for two years, you are absolutely going to lose to that student who wakes up and rushes to the lab and that's there until their parents drag them out, kicking and screaming at 11 o'clock at night, so that they can go home, eat a quick, very late dinner, finish up their homework, and start again the next day. So what do I do to stand out? This is all kind of great and academic and very high level, but really need to talk about what are things that we can do? We can focus on a few areas. We can focus on our extracurricular activities. We can focus on our academics and we can focus on our summer. And I'm going to dive very deeply into extracurricular activities in another and summers in another episode. But what I want to make sure that you understand is that if we just follow what's easy and in front of us and expected, we're going to have a problem, right? Because by and large, most students are choosing from a fixed menu. There's a fixed menu of extracurricular activities. There's a fixed menu of academic opportunities. And we can only make so many combinations out of those, right? So we're all chefs with the same amount of ingredients. And what you see are chefs that are able to look at those ingredients differently and create new ingredients from them that tend to be the most successful. Now does that mean that you need to go and start your own club? Not necessarily. The issue here is that universities will see a lot of students starting clubs. And that's great. Some students start very meaningful clubs and they make a very meaningful difference. And I think about a student that I advised a few years ago, who started a club to recycle sporting goods, sporting equipment, and donate them to lower income communities. You might not have the opportunity to purchase all the equipment they needed to be active in athletics. But what this person realized as they looked around was that they had a lot of friends who came from a privileged background whose parents bought them all the equipment they needed. And they might outgrow it. They might change direction decide they didn't like that sport. And they had garages full of athletic equipment. And so this person started a club to reclaim these get these donations, clean them up, repurpose them, reach out to schools in the area and donate them. And it turned out to be really, really a big event, a big thing. And when the student graduated, there were dozens of students in their school working on this every year. There were dozens of recipient schools involved. And they had launched chapters in six other schools in Southern California. And it was growing across the country. Both related and through word of mouth and other students who read about it in the news and said, Oh, that's really neat. We could definitely do that here as well. So there's always an opportunity to create change. But what you don't want to do is just start a club, make yourself the president, make your best friend the vice president, have two or three meetings, and then put that in your activity section on the application. Because the schools will see through that very quickly, you know, gone are the days of just putting in that you do it X number of days a year and X number of hours a week. They really want to see how are you influencing outcomes? Right. How are you changing things? The same thing with work. If you have an after school job, we're not really schools are not looking necessarily at, they don't expect you to be moving mountains, being a master of the universe. What they're looking for is consistency over time, right? Do you have the courage to step up and create, take initiative, create opportunity for yourself do the best possible job that you can? So because each student is judged on their own merits, each student is judged within their own context. And so courage for one person looks very different than courage for another person. And it's very important to find for you what that means. How much risk can you tolerate? Does courage mean standing up to your parents and saying, listen, I don't want to play basketball anymore? You know, I'd rather take that time and be in the school play because this is something I care about or is it making time to pursue a hobby or a passion that some people might think is not relevant? Maybe it's your drawing. Maybe it's really getting deep and understanding YouTube. Maybe it's launching your own podcast. Maybe it's, you know, being a restaurant critic and starting to build a following online, whatever it is, really what we want to see as a university, as a admissions office, is that you have stepped forward, taken a bit of a risk, put yourself out there and really can say, this is something that is a core part of me. This is something I'm immensely proud of. This is something I've learned from, maybe in a positive sense. Even a negative sense. Maybe I thought I wanted this and I've learned that I actually don't, but in learning that I don't, I've learned more about what I do want. So Steve Jobs had a very, a very famous graduation speech at Stanford and he talked about his journey. He talked about the lucky coincidences and accidents, taking a calligraphy course, for example, that brought him to where he was at that moment standing in front of Stanford graduating classes, one of the creative visionaries of our time. And what he said was really, listen, you can't really understand where you are unless you look backwards. And as you look backwards, it will all fall into place and start to make sense. And that is absolutely a very, very astute commentary on where we are. But I think it's okay as well to look forward, not in an over planning way. But think about where do I want to be? What do I want to accomplish? This can be a big, crazy, audacious goal. It can be a more tactical goal. I need to make X amount of money to help my family and help pay for my schooling. Whatever it is, I encourage you to think forward. Think ahead to where you want to be, where you see yourself. And then work backwards from there and say, okay, what are the steps that I would have taken to get myself there and then have the courage to follow that path? Don't just go with the flow. Don't just do what everybody else is doing. Don't do it all. The other parents are telling you has to be done because that's how you end up in this great, big middle of the distribution, this great, big, massive students who are wonderful humans, who have done interesting things, who have worked really hard in school, but haven't distinguished themselves. Have not been able to make the case that I belong at your university. And this is the unique thing that I bring. This is the core value. This is the experience. This is the curiosity that I have demonstrated consistently over time and I will bring to your university and contribute and make this university and my class a better place. So again, I encourage you to have courage, to find your path, to be honest with yourself as you think about that path and to move forward with conviction, but also give yourself the grace to make mistakes, learn from those mistakes and then discuss them in the application in a way that shows how you grew and became the person you are at that moment applying to school. Thank you and I look forward to speaking with you more about admissions in our next episode. Thank you for joining us today. Please take a moment to subscribe to the Admittedly Podcast and download this episode. I welcome you to share your thoughts and questions with me. You can find us on social media at Admittedly Podcast. I look forward to continuing our journey together. (upbeat music)