What Yale Looks For: Special Mythbusters Edition

[MUSIC PLAYING] Hello, and welcome back to another episode of Inside the Yale Admissions Office. I'm Hannah, and I'm a Yale Admissions Officer. And I'm Mark. I'm also a Yale Admissions Officer. And we are back for a fresh MythBusters episode. Yes, for listeners who are new to this podcast, MythBusters episodes are a series where we talk about persistent myths that seem to float around about the admissions process. I love this format. These are some of my favorite episodes to record. We did two of these a few years ago, covering kind of a wide range of the juiciest myths we've heard over the years. And we've also done a handful of MythBusters live virtual events while students have been putting together their applications. All right, and now we are intentionally recording this episode right in the middle of the application reading process. Oh, yeah. It's February, and I think anybody who works in admissions would describe this time of year as the thick of it. For sure. We received over 50,000 applications for a first year admission this year, and our staff of more than 30 readers is going through each one of them one at a time. So just in the past couple of months, Hannah and I have spent days in long admissions committee meetings. We have spent days and days just all by ourselves reading through applications in our own assigned areas. And each of us has now seen a few thousand applications come across our desks just this admission cycle. Yep, and we're not done yet. There's more to come if we are not. Yeah, so we have some pretty fresh insights right now about what people are choosing to put in their applications. Whereas our other MythBusters episodes featured myths that we had heard directly from students or parents or counselors. And those myths sort of usually took the form of hearing things like, oh, hey, is it true that or I once heard that? Right. We're going to do something different this episode. Instead of things that we've heard people talk about, we are going to talk about myths that Hannah and I are kind of picking up on as we read applications. Yeah, I feel like it's a pretty common experience that we will be reading an application and think, OK, I get the sense this applicant is trying to present themselves in this certain way, or they've even pursued a series of choices in high school because they think that that is what we are looking for when we're reading the application. But often they're on the wrong track. Now, as you'll hear us discuss, it's usually the case that what a student thinks that we're looking for makes perfect sense given either what they've heard or what they've assumed about how a selective admissions process like ours works. That intuition, though, can be wrong. So we thought rather than just recording an episode titled What is Yale Looking For, where we just sort of tried to describe all of these things from our point of view, we're going to use the MythBusters framework. And the idea here is to try to kind of show you where we're coming from while we recognize where some of our applicants seem to be coming from. And just so you know, we're going to be talking about some choices that we frequently see in applications. But I do want to say it's not the case that these choices are deal breakers or necessarily even wrong, right? Yes, I'm certain that every myth about what Yale is looking for has been held in earnest by many applicants who have been admitted. So everything we'll talk about today, not only do we understand where you're coming from, we have admitted students who have sort of approached the application process with this frame of mind. Regular listeners will know that we often talk about the application as a series of opportunities to put your best foot forward. And to help us admissions officers get an idea of who you are, what's important to you, and what you'd contribute to our campus community and what you'd take away from the experience. When people complete their applications with an incorrect or kind of incomplete view of what Yale's looking for, the result is that they just don't use the space in their application as well as they could to tell their story and to help themselves stand out in our process. Yeah, our goal is not to say that you're absolutely doomed if you take any of these approaches to your application. We don't want to imply that anyone who does is somehow less savvy than someone else. We're just hoping to point out a few common pitfalls that we see. Yes, we recognize that probably the most frustrating part of the college application process from the perspective of applicants and their parents and counselors is that there isn't a rubric that you can use to predict your outcomes. And colleges like Yale, we don't give you clear guidelines about what you should do. You are used to a different kind of paradigm. You're used to getting an assignment from your physics teacher that has clear instructions about what to do and how you'll be graded. And then you hear us talk about things like whole person review and contextual evaluation, and it can drive you kind of crazy. We get that. We've talked about the reasons why our admissions process is like this. Mostly it's because we think 17-year-olds and the world that they live in and our university are all fairly complicated, dynamic, and interesting. So much so that trying to make the selection process as simple as a physics assignment would miss a lot of important things. We also know that, hey, the stakes around college admissions are pretty high. So if we were to come out and say, to get into Yale, do these five specific things, lots of people would just go and do those five specific things. And as a result, there wouldn't be a whole lot of diversity in our student body. Mark and I have been working in admissions for a long time. So we have a pretty good sense of what Yale is looking for, obviously, but there's no good reason that you necessarily should know what we're looking for, unless you've read a lot about it on our website or you've listened to this podcast. So our approach here is going to sound a little bit like, you know, I totally get why you would think that Yale is looking for this thing. Actually, what's more important to us is this thing, and here's why. And like the myths that we've busted in our previous episodes, there is usually some kernel of truth embedded in each myth. All right, you ready to bust some myths, Hannah? Let's do it. OK, the first set of myths that I want to get to are what I call kind of paradigm myths. And paradigm is just kind of a fancy word for framework, meaning sort of like how you are organizing your thoughts. So these are the kind of myths that suggest that the person applying has the wrong kind of framework for what we value and how we assess it. Our second set of myths are going to be more specific to choices that people make in their application. Myth number one, Yale is looking for applicants who have a very clear plan for professional success after college. Busted. Busted. All right, I like to call this the business loan paradigm. OK. So if you want to go start a business and you need a loan from a bank, you're going to put together a business plan where you try to convince that bank that your business is going to generate a profit and you'll be able to return their loan with interest. And I think that students who have this paradigm think that we are looking for students who are going to use their education to go be very successful and maybe make a lot of money and maybe that will reflect well on Yale. Right, or they think that having these super concrete goals is really going to show us that they're so serious about their studies. Yep. But that is not how we think about our liberal arts undergraduate academic program. Sure, we think about investing in students, but we think about them as people, as complex individuals who will be in leadership positions in all kinds of different fields, some of which don't even exist right now. Yeah, and we also, in this job, have to be pretty careful about reminding ourselves that we don't have the ability to predict what a student is going to do in the future. We don't know if you're going to be a great doctor or an amazing entrepreneur or a scientist. We're focused on, are you going to be a great undergraduate student for four years specifically at Yale? Right, so if you spend your application space trying to convince us that you are on this vector towards professional success, we might read that and say, hey, great, good for you. You could do that at lots of different universities. Nothing about that, in particular, your success plan actually makes it seem like you're a good fit for our experience specifically. Yeah, think about the next four years, not necessarily what comes after that when you're putting together your application. All right, our next myth. Yale looks for data and hard numbers, so you should emphasize quantitative results, like how many service hours you've put in, or how many supplies you donated, or how many points you've earned for the math team. No, busted. I think some students make the mistake of thinking that they have to put together their application like they would put together a resume or a cover letter when they're applying for a job, where it is a great idea to show tangible results. And you're supposed to show your quantifiable achievements in other work setting. It's very tempting to want to show off your results with numbers. And hey, sometimes the things in your application that can be quantified are genuinely impressive. But remember, the numbers on their own, they don't tell us a whole lot about the big questions that Hannah mentioned earlier. We're trying to ask ourselves, who are you? What's important to you? What would you contribute to a campus community, and what would you take away? As I like to say, not everything that counts can be counted, and not everything that can be counted counts. I think one of the big dangers with over-quantifying things in your application is that it can kind of raise questions about your motivation. So like, did you really put in 700 service hours tutoring ninth graders in math because it was really meaningful and important to you? Or did you just want to make sure you could hit that big number on your application, right? If you really care about this so much, then do you need to be kind of tracking it down to the hour? Instead of counting things up, think about doing some honest reflection to get towards some insights about why you've committed a lot of time to something or what you've gained from a big commitment, that's going to make a much bigger impression than just having a big number that you stick onto it. Our next myth, Yale is looking for more. More of everything. You should document every achievement, submit every supplement type, take every AP or dual enrollment course that your school offers. You should learn to play every instrument, do every academic competition, right? More is more, right? No, busted. All right, I like to call this the war of attrition paradigm. I think the thinking here that students have is that you want to blow your admissions officer away by just the sheer volume of your activities and accomplishments. And I think that students approach this imagining that they're going to outlast the competition by just having more things in their application than anybody else. Yeah, remember, we admit people, not accomplishments. And frankly, overstuffing your application with everything you've ever done can make for pretty tiresome reading, because then we are trying to get through that layer of accomplishments to understand who the person is beneath them. Right, and it's not just for our sake as application readers. We think that just taking this approach to high school, where you just are trying to accumulate as many trophies as possible, it just doesn't establish that you are someone who's a great fit for Yale. It kind of just establishes that you're someone who likes to win a lot of things, right? Right, right. And we're not saying don't tell us your accomplishments. Certainly go ahead and use the space that's in the application to share what you've done. And it's OK if that's a lot or if it feels kind of scattered. We just want to make sure that you are not racking up all these trophies just because you think it's going to look good on that application. Right, the kernel of truth in this myth is that obviously, Yale does admit some really exceptionally accomplished students because Yale is a really great resource rich place for people who have very well-developed talents and abilities. They can take them further at Yale. And it's also true that Yale is a place where we like to say that we embrace and, right? So you can do lots of disparate things. And we do like to see students who've had an impressive range of academic and extracurricular experiences. But you should not go through high school with this goal of just putting together what will eventually be kind of an overstuffed application because you're trying to outrun your competition. Think about your high school experience as a chance to grow as a person who has a good sense of who they are and who can communicate that in an application, not just somebody who's done a lot of stuff and won a bunch of awards in the process. We are not admitting you to Yale to come to Yale and then win a bunch of awards at Yale. We want our students to have that growth experience and really engage deeply in their college experience. So the best indication that you're going to be able to do that is have you done that in high school. Our next myth. You should show in your application how different you are from the other people around you or from most teenagers. No. Busted. Busted. OK. There are several names that I came up with for this myth. OK. Maybe you'd call it the snowflake myth that you are this one singular snowflake. Or maybe you're the ugly duckling, right? Like you're different than the folks around you. Or maybe slightly more positive connotation, you're the diamond in the rough. I also thought about maybe calling this the divergent myth for readers of the young adult series. If you don't fit into the categories of everybody else. Right. Right. So the idea here is that you think Yale is for exceptional people. So you want to show us how exceptional and different that you are. And you are different. You are exceptional. But that's not necessarily a quality in itself that we are looking for in the application. And you may choose to frame things in a way that demonstrate that you've managed some significant hardships, more on that in our next myth. And at the most basic level, we get that you want to show that you stand out. But starting from a place in your application about what makes you different from others is not a good strategy when applying to Yale. We think that's the case for a couple of reasons. The first is that Yale happens to be a place that prides itself on community. And if you want to build community, you're going to need to find things that you have in common with other people, even amongst a lot of differences. Yeah. And another sort of tricky thing here is if you are trying really hard to make yourself sound special, it becomes pretty easy to come off as arrogant or even just ignorant about the people around you as if you aren't curious about learning about what you might have in common with other people, you're so convinced that there is no common ground. The space in your application, as we've said, it's really limited. If you're using any of that to put down others or try to make yourself look better in contrast to somebody else, you are wasting space. That's true even if the other person or the other people around you are truly terrible. Right. They aren't applying, right? You are. And your thoughts about them, they're not going to help you look very good. We understand that a lot of our applicants are coming from a situation where they don't necessarily feel a sense of belonging in their home or at school. And a college generally, or even Yale specifically, can seem like a way to get out of that place and away from those people. But explaining how much you don't belong in your current environment just doesn't do much to help advance your case if you're trying to convince us of why you're going to be a great fit at Yale. We find that the best applicants take an asset-based approach to the communities around them, even in situations where they don't have a lot in common with those people. And even in situations where the people around them have been a source of hardship. So instead of looking to a place like Yale and saying, hey, I am not like the people I've grown up with, I'm like you guys. And let me in so I can escape from these folks. Think instead about saying, hey, I am pretty different from a lot of the people that I've grown up with, but they've taught me this. And I appreciate that now that's a part of who I am. That gives us a sense of how that experience has shaped you and how that might make you contribute something special to our community. Final big picture paradigm myth, Hannah. Yale is looking for students who've experienced and overcome really significant hardships. Let's bust these myths. We've talked about them before. I think there's really kind of three related myths that fall under this umbrella. The first one is just that you need to have a hardship to demonstrate that you have character and strength. The second version of this is that simply having a hardship or a challenge is what can make a student stand out. And then the third is if you've had a significant hardship, you should really lean into it in your application. You should give lots of graphic details and make clear that something in your experience was really, truly awful. Right. So I think we've talked about on a previous episode that the origin of these myths probably has to do with the fact that the media tends to run these very popular stories about some amazing admitted students who have overcome big obstacles. And that's great. It can make for great news stories. But that doesn't mean that you need to present that in order to have a successful application. Yes, you do not need to milk your trauma in your college application process. Those first two myths I talked about are seemingly coming up more frequently, I think, in my reading. I'm seeing some students who have clearly just tried to construct a narrative about overcoming hardship for their application. But the hardship they describe is just kind of an ordinary part of being an adolescent. Right, right. So writing about a breakup or drama with friends or moving to a new place, or not making the team, those kinds of things that are fairly common experiences can maybe have a big impact on you. But when you use that kind of experience to tell a story about overcoming hardship, it can sort of feel like you're working really hard to paint yourself in a certain light that doesn't necessarily always work. Yeah, it might not be how you're going to demonstrate your strengths. And it could have this unintended consequence of causing us to wonder, if you really have the resilience that you'll need to succeed as a college student, if we see that you're making something pretty small, seem like it's a big, life-defining issue. I think the other myth I talked about is seeing students who just kind of simply write a whole lot of descriptive prose in their application describing a hardship. It might be big, it might be small, but they never get around to saying how they responded to it or what they learned. And they kind of leave us without any sort of so what about that experience. Right, if you do choose to write about some kind of hardship, the most important thing is that you are being reflective and helping us understand how you got through it, how you've grown from that experience. Not just like this really bad thing happened to me, and therefore I am deserving. Absolutely, OK, so let's wrap this up. For some students, it is true that their response to a genuine hardship and the insights they've gained through that experience can really bring important parts of their personality and character into focus for us. Fortunately, this is not the case for most students, simply because their life hasn't been defined by hardships or their response to it. And we want to say that they shouldn't think that they need to frame their candidacy in that sort of narrative. OK, we also have collected a few myths that have to do with specific parts of the application. So let's start with three that are connected to the activities section. What Yale is looking for is that your extracurricular activities and intended majors should show that you have a spike in one area. You should be totally passionate about something and convince us that you're going to do that one thing really well in college. No, busted. Busted, OK. Yeah, we've talked about this before. Yes, we have. We're bringing it up in this episode, too, because we keep seeing it. Yes, yes, this is a persistent one. I think that the thinking behind this sounds a little bit like this, and I get it. The thinking is admissions officers, they have to boil down an application to a simple and compelling narrative. You will stand out in that process if you can clearly define yourself as a student who does one particular thing and does that well. And sure, there is a kernel of truth in there. We do have to work with incomplete information. And there's a lot of interesting psych and neuroscience research about how our brains do simplify and categorize large chunks of information. And there are some students who are really totally passionate about one big thing. And that one big thing helps establish that they would be a really good fit for Yale, and that helps their candidacy. Yeah, and if that's you, then absolutely, spend plenty of time telling us about that thing. But I think what we see more frequently and what is a lot less successful is students who are actively trying to center their application on one big spike without it genuinely being their one thing. And sometimes this starts long before senior year, where students are choosing extracurricular activities or pursuing research experiences in the service of this narrative that they're trying to construct for their college application, which we have talked about before. It's not a great way to go through high school. And sometimes it just happens at the application stage, where students use the space to kind of emphasize one interest or activity or thread over and over again. So there are a few reasons why this doesn't help a student. The first, it can lead to missed opportunities to reveal more interesting facets about yourself that you have space in the application to give. Second, it could lead you to bend a lot of space describing the thing, that's your spike, and not enough space on the person who's behind the interest. Next, I think it can give off the impression that you aren't interested in experiencing all the other cool stuff that a place like Yale could offer. This is sort of similar to the first myth that we busted. You should be open to being surprised and having new experiences. And if you're just focused on one thing, you're making it hard for us to imagine you in those other spaces. And the last thing I think is just that it can be easy for admissions officers to separate out a student who is exceptionally passionate about something from the students who are really just trying to play this game. Essentially, we can see this from a mile away. If this is not your thing, don't try to fit yourself into this box. - All right, this is a good one. This myth is that Yale is looking for students who have founded successful service organizations, nonprofits, and NGOs, and I have to found something like this in order to stand out. - No. - Busted. - Busted. - All right, Hannah, I've wanted to bust this for more than 15 years. - Now is your chance, it's finally happening. - It has amazed me in my years of reading applications how many of the same organizations have been founded and refounded year after year after year. These things typically show up as the first item on a student's activities list. And like the second myth we talked about, they usually have a lot of quantified things, right? Like how many books were donated or how many students were tutored or how much money was raised. - Yeah, and those are all good things. Like yes, donate books, tutor people, do volunteer work. There's nothing wrong with dedicating a lot of time and energy to a service project. And if you're drawn to service and to creating something and addressing an issue that you care about, good for you. - Yes, okay, but here's the issue. Students who are applying to Yale, they're all busy teenagers, right? They have full-time class loads in high school. They have significant family responsibilities. They do other stuff outside of school. And there's also the fact that about six months after they're writing their application, they're planning to uproot their life and focus on a bunch of new things. So if you take those as sort of the premises, you realize there just aren't a whole lot of big issues in the world that are really gonna benefit significantly from a few hours a week from a high school student. So you're gonna have a hard time convincing us that your organization that you founded in your spare time is making some sort of extraordinary impact out there. - Yeah, what is more convincing and more successful and what I think we would encourage you to do is to focus on small and local issues and organizations in your immediate area that can really benefit from the time, energy, ideas, and commitments of a teenager, especially if that organization is run by adults who are doing it as their full-time job. That kind of impact and contribution is just as meaningful, if not more, than saying that you founded your own organization that does XYZ. - Yes, our point here is really to not sort of single out service specifically. It's to say that there is nothing special in our process about creating something rather than just participating in something that already exists. And if you, as a high school student, want to do good in the world and make an impact, we think your first impulse shouldn't be to create something brand new from the ground up. It should be to look around and say, how can I help in an area where people are already active in this space? I think one of the reasons that we see so many students who found their own service organizations is, sadly, that the ones that were founded by the students a year ahead of them, they never survive after a student goes to college, right? That's a cycle that I don't think does a lot of good for the people who are the beneficiaries of these organizations, and we want to say it doesn't help these students as college applicants a whole lot, either. - Do you feel good getting that off your chest? (both laughing) All right, one last myth for us today, and that is that Yale is looking for students who can name lots of faculty members, courses, specific things they'll do on our campus when they get here with completing their Yale supplemental questions. - No, no, no, no, busted. Okay, folks, listen back to the episodes that we did, first starting with essays, the little stuff, and then the annual application update episodes that we do, that'll give you kind of a clear sense of what we're looking for in the responses to the Yale specific questions that we create for the application. A lot of responses to our why Yale question that mentioned Yale professors and courses are just obviously the product of some very hurried Googling. Maybe you do genuinely really want to work with that professor or work in that lab, but rather than trying to show us what you know about that person, instead show us why it's important to you and what you're doing now that has kind of led you to look into that professor or that work that's happening on campus. The other thing that we find is that a lot of responses to our short essay ends with a paragraph where a student tells us that they will join a particular organization or work in a particular research lab. And the issue there is that it just falls into the classic trap of telling instead of showing, right? And it makes sense that you're trying to be specific, you're trying to show that you can paint a picture of yourself on our college campus. This is a good impulse and it's certainly better than not doing any research about what Yale is all about. But you're gonna show that you understand the Yale experience more by showing that you're open to as we said, being surprised, having unexpected experiences. Then if you try to spell out exactly what your experience is gonna look like back to our first myth, telling us that you have everything planned out is really not what Yale is looking for. - All right, that was a lot of myths to bust in a single episode. Just a reminder, we're not here to complain about students doing things wrong in their applications. And in fact, if you're listening to this episode and you're like, oh no, I did that in my application, I'm cooked, don't worry, these aren't deal breakers. They're just things that we tend to see a lot of, so you're not alone. And they often lead to kind of missed opportunities. - Yes, and the fact that we can recognize that these approaches are coming from an honest kind of misunderstanding of what you think Yale is looking for means that when we are in our admissions committee, we can also meet you where you are, right? We aren't gonna say, nope, reject, the student doesn't get it. We're gonna say, you know what, I think I know where they're coming from. - Right, we're always just trying to help you put your best foot forward. And to make the most compelling case for yourself, and to do that, I think it helps to have a clearer sense of what we're looking for and what we're not looking for. - I hope that we've done that here. For more on this topic, check out a page that's on our website that's literally called What Yale Looks For, it's a good place to start. You can also listen to a few other episodes, including one that's called What Stands Out, our other Mythbusters episodes, of course, and then also one that we call The Choices Game. Well, thanks to former admissions officer Andrew Brick Johnson who composes our music. You should check him out at andrewbrickjohnson.com. - If you have comments or an idea for an episode, drop us a line at [email protected]. And finally, remember that the views expressed in this podcast are ours, and don't necessarily represent those of Yale University. Thanks for listening.