How to Stand Out in the Admissions Review
After a very long admissions season with some very surprising and disappointing results for many students, there was one primary question on our minds as we headed to the Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA) conference in Philadelphia last week: Beyond strong grades and a challenging curriculum, what are you looking for when admitting a student to your college?
More students than ever before have all A’s when applying to college. Many colleges admit that they received so many qualified applications that they could fill their freshman class multiple times over. So how do they decide who to admit?
One message that came across consistently from every college we spoke with was that a student’s character matters! This concept is not isolated to the colleges we spoke to at our conference. In two recent national surveys, 447 college admission officers were asked to indicate the level of importance given to various factors when making admission decisions. Seventy percent of admission officers said a student's character attributes were either "considerably" or "moderately" important in the selection process at their respective institutions. (To learn more about other factors considered, check out the North Shore College Consulting blog, What Colleges are Really Looking for in the Admissions Process.)
How do admissions officers define character? Character is a multi-faceted term that is defined differently by different people and each admissions office may be looking for something distinct. In Character Compass, author, Scott Seider, offers several different aspects of character:
Civic Character includes qualities that make up a good citizen with skills such as tolerance, respect, and community-mindedness.
Performance Character includes the qualities necessary to achieve one’s future endeavors such as perseverance, ingenuity, and grit
Intellectual Character includes skills needed by a strong learner such as curiosity, wonder, intellectual engagement, open-mindedness, creativity, intellectual rigor, and humility.
Moral Character includes qualities such as trustworthiness, kindness, and compassion.
Now that you have a better understanding of what character can encompass, you are probably wondering how this is identified in the admissions review. Most admissions offices will review an application holistically. A holistic review goes beyond just the numbers (grades and test scores) and looks at the whole applicant including non-academic factors. Extracurricular activities, letters of recommendation, essays, interviews, and even social media accounts all can play a role. The type of activities you are involved in and your specific contribution to those activities, how a counselor and/or teacher views you, and how you come across through an essay or interview all will guide the admissions office in evaluating your character. While each college will have its own rubric for assessing this, the bottom line is they want to know that you will be a good roommate, an engaged and helpful class member, a successful student, a contributing club member, and someone who will make a difference on campus during the college years and beyond.
In his admissions blog, “What Will Your Sentence Be?,” Rick Clark, the Director of Undergraduate Admissions at Georgia Tech states that “due to the speed with which [college admissions officers] are reading [each college application], the volume of applications they are reviewing, and the compressed timeline for making decisions,” they will quickly summarize their impressions of each applicant into one or two sentences. This sentence is a summary of what stood out about each applicant, for better or for worse. Knowing that your entire application will be summarized into one or two sentences, it is important for you to control the narrative. While you cannot simply tell a college you have strong character, you do have some control over how you are perceived. How you treat your classmates and how engaged, curious, and hardworking you are in class will be noticed by those writing your letters of recommendation. How you describe your involvement in your activities or what you say in your essays can also get a message across about who you are. As you go through your high school years, you should always have an eye on whether what you do will help you communicate how you want to be perceived.
The most important takeaway from this discussion is to show colleges who you are. While you do want to make sure you are showcasing your character through your essays, your activities, and your letters of recommendation, you must remain authentic. You should not lie or embellish your impact. You don’t want to pick your activities in hopes of looking a certain way to colleges. You should not try to change who you are to match what you think a particular college is looking for. Instead, you want to examine the colleges carefully and find the colleges that fit into who you are.
Are you looking for expert guidance with the college admissions process? At North Shore College Consulting we are here to help you with every step of the college admissions process. Send us an email at info@nscollegeconsulting.net to find out how we can help you succeed.