Kevin McMullin

College admissions advice for students, parents, and counselors

Incongruity

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A student applying to college is trying to communicate:

I’m ready and excited for college.
I’ll make an impact inside and outside of the classroom.
I’m resilient enough to forge through difficulties.
I’ll take full advantage of the opportunities available to me.
I’ll enjoy learning from and interacting with the faculty.
I’m prepared for the independence of college.

How do you think those messages land if you also communicate:

But when I have a question for the admissions office, my parents always call for me.

The more involved parents are in the college admissions process, the less involved the student is. And that message is incongruous with everything a student is trying to communicate in their application.

Make good bets

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We tend to make better decisions if we separate the decision from the outcome.

Imagine you’re walking to school. You’re confronted by an aggressive dog, so you move to the other side of the street. A car speeds past you and splashes muddy water all over your clothing.

Did you make a bad decision moving to the other side of the street? No. The decision and the outcome are two separate entities. You acted based on the best available information and options at the time. The fact that things later went awry doesn’t change the quality of the past decision.

This works the other way, too. Imagine you’d instead decided to approach the dog and provoke it, causing it to run away. A few more steps down the sidewalk, you find $100 you wouldn’t have found if you’d crossed the street.

Did you make a good decision? Actually, no. You made a terrible decision based on the information and options. You just got lucky that things turned out well.

This happens all the time in all areas of your life. My wedding rehearsal dinner took place at a wonderful restaurant that had no air conditioning during one of the hottest summer days in Seattle’s recorded history. Did we make a bad decision booking that place months earlier? No. It was a great decision based on what we knew at the time, which did not include an accurate weather forecast months in the future.

For many families, the intense focus on admissions-related outcomes causes them to conflate those outcomes with the decisions that led them. But losing an election does not mean you made a bad decision to run. The fact that you didn’t enjoy performing in the school play doesn’t mean you made a bad decision to audition.

And while we’re at it, another student’s acceptance to your dream school does not necessarily mean they made a good decision with their choice of essay topic, or that you should follow suit. They might have been admitted in spite of that topic (only the admissions readers who were in the room know why that student was admitted). Don’t assume the decision created the outcome.

Decisions are like bets. Making a smart one increases the likelihood of a good outcome. But it almost never guarantees it.

So stack the deck in your favor. Do the work, be informed, and make your decision based on what’s in front of you at the time.

But if the outcome isn’t what you’d hoped for, don’t punish yourself or the decision. It might just mean that your smart bet met bad luck.

For more on this, poker champion and business consultant Annie Duke’s Thinking in Bets: Making Smarter Decisions When You Don’t Have All the Facts is an excellent read.

Losing sleep

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Overachieving, overscheduled students—here’s a scenario. Imagine your top colleges of choice announced their intention to give special admissions consideration to students who averaged 7-8 hours of sleep every night. Would you need to make changes in your life to maintain that advantage? If so, what would you do?

Would you cut out that sixth activity that just doesn’t mean that much to you?

Would you shut out the distractions while you study so you could really focus and get more done in less time?

Or would you have to entirely rethink the way you’re currently scheduled, maybe by scaling back your APs or your test prep or your activities?

Whatever your answer, maybe you should consider making that change now?

Losing sleep almost never makes us, our health, or our work results any better.

A free application webinar from Collegewise

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If you’ve yet to finish (or even if you’ve yet to start) your college applications, Collegewise counselors Davin Sweeney and Rahsaan Burroughs are putting their combined 25 years of experience as admissions officers to good use in the following free webinar.

Seniors, It’s Not Too Late: Submit Pitch Perfect Applications When Time’s Running Out
Thursday, November 8, 2018
5 p.m. – 6 p.m. (PST)
Click here for more information and to register.

I hope you’ll join us.

Be fair to yourself

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The most common misconception about the admissions process at highly selective colleges is that it’s a meritocracy, that the admissions officers choose the empirically best applicants based on a scientific evaluation of transcripts, test scores, activities, essays, and letters of recommendation. But that’s just not possible at a school that (1) receives applications from the most qualified students in the world and (2) can only admit fewer than 20% of their applicants. There are more perfect-on-paper applicants—including valedictorians with top-notch test scores and awe-inspiring activities—than they can possibly admit. It’s inherently unfair because there’s just no unassailably fair way to do it.

Frank Bruni’s recent New York Times piece explains this reasonably well. Bruni acknowledges that while the current lawsuit against Harvard has clearly identified that Asian Americans were in fact at a disadvantage, the process itself has never been about choosing the objectively best applicants.

“But even clearer [than the apparent discrimination] is something that I’ve long known, something that we need to recognize more bluntly, something that’s smothered under this illusion that getting into an exclusive school is a triumph of merit alone. Harvard, Duke, Pomona and the rest aren’t choosing the best students who apply. They’re choosing the students who, in the inevitably flawed estimation of strangers who barely know them, best fit the school’s vision of an ideal freshman class, best serve its immediate needs or best safeguard its financial future.”

I’m not sure I agree with the implication that the schools themselves have somehow worked to suppress those imperfections of their processes. One of our Collegewise counselors who worked at MIT used to explain to audiences at his information sessions exactly how the process was flawed. I’ve also seen many highly selective colleges do the same in their blog posts and even on the admissions sections of their websites. The truth is that it’s often that students and parents are reluctant or outright unwilling to accept the reality that the highest numbers don’t necessarily win.

But colleges are also under enormous pressure to drive up applications (you can thank the US News Rankings for that), and as a result they’ll almost never discourage anyone from applying. And I’ve yet to see an example of a school outright stating the advantage that wealthy donors, children of alumni, or other special interest groups carry. Colleges can certainly do more to give families the whole picture even if families don’t like what’s painted right in front of them.

Students and parents, when you make the goal of high school to be admitted to a highly selective college, when you define success in terms of which school says yes of those who are most likely to say no, when you place the highest premium on an outcome with the lowest probability of occurring, you’re setting yourself up for disappointment and for a high school career full of uncertainty and anxiety.

There’s nothing wrong with wanting to attend Harvard, Duke, Northwestern, or any other highly selective school. But please make that decision with your eyes wide open. To treat the process as if it is fair just isn’t fair to yourself.

It’s what you do in college that matters

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From Gallup’s “College Is Worth It, But Only If We Make the Most of It“:

“This new research tells us there is much more we can all be doing to improve the efficacy and ROI of college. Students can’t just rest on their laurels after getting into college, but they must realize the hard work has just begun. College won’t be the magic bullet they hope for, unless they take full advantage of it by finding great professors and mentors, working on long-term projects, finding internships that apply what they are learning, and being extremely involved in an extra-curricular activity. Parents need to look for these attributes in a college, rather than the prestige of the brand or the fancy buildings and dining halls on campus. And they can’t expect these things to just happen to their child; they need to help emphasize to their child that it’s what they do in college that matters.”

The predictable fear before submission

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One of the most predictable points of anxiety during the journey to college is the time right before a student submits their application(s).

There’s a finality to that impending submission. No more revising. No more hand-wringing. No more avoiding the ensuing evaluation. Once that application leaves, it’s literally and figuratively out of your hands, with nothing left to do but wait for a decision.

This fear causes students to second-guess their decisions, like their choice of essay topic or the way they’ve presented their activities. Even worse is the hand-wringing over decisions you can no longer change. Maybe you should have taken the SAT again or chosen a different summer activity or spent more time with your chemistry tutor to get that grade up? Left unchecked, all of this doubt leads some students to hold their applications hostage, too afraid to hit the “Submit” button until the deadline leaves them no other choice.

This is normal behavior. Every one of us has experienced the worry that accompanies doing something new, something that might not work, something with risk and exposure and consequences. But that still doesn’t make the fear useful. It’s not pushing us to make better decisions. It’s not improving the final product. And it’s not changing the eventual outcome for the better.

So if the anxiety isn’t useful, what can you do about it? You can anticipate it.

Expect that you’ll worry right before you submit. Give that feeling a name, like “pre-submission panic.” And when it arrives, you’ll know exactly what it is. You won’t have to interpret it and wonder if those worries are your mind’s way of telling you that you should be doing something different or better. It’s just the physical response that comes with doing something important and potentially life-changing.

The best part is that the acute fear goes away days or even hours after you submit. There will be a sense of overwhelming relief knowing that the work is complete and you’ve done your best. Don’t rush that relief. Give applications the time and attention they deserve. But when you’ve checked and proofed and rechecked again, remind yourself that you’ve worked hard and earned the relief that’s about to ensue. Then hit “Submit.”

The fear is a lot less powerful when you predict and expect it.

Risk-worthy?

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One of my Collegewise colleagues who worked in admissions at a highly selective college once described an occasion where he called an applicant to clarify something about a letter of recommendation that was part of her file. The letter had mentioned the student’s work in her junior year, but according to the transcript, she’d taken that particular course her sophomore year. He didn’t suspect that anything was amiss—he just wanted to make sure they were connecting the correct course with the correct teacher.

But as soon as he got the applicant on the phone and identified himself, she hung up. He later discovered the student had written the letter herself and forged the teacher’s name.

We both had the same reaction—was it worth it?

This student was a strong applicant. She had a shot at being admitted. But clearly some combination of the pressure, her desperation to be admitted, or her general anxiety had driven her to do something so risky that it completely torpedoed her application once it was discovered. None of her other credentials mattered at that point.

This is a particularly egregious example, but it’s not at all uncommon for students to counter responsible warnings about bending (or breaking) the truth with, “But how would they ever know?”

And to that question, I always give the same reply.

Are you sure you want to risk it to find out?