hi everyone my name is Valerie and I am going to be a senior at Yale this year yeah it's crazy to think about because the last time I made a video was before I had even gotten to college which is when I was like a wee little high school senior making a video about my stats and everything which even at the time was really cringy but I figured that it would probably be an encouragement to some people who maybe had similar standings or a similar background to me but yeah anyways this video is going to
be pretty much exactly the same video it's another how I've gotten to Yale video but much more credible I guess because instead of me just sitting here and telling you guys what I think was really strong about my application we actually get to see what the admissions officers said about me while reading my application so this includes things about my essay and things about my background things about my teacher recommendations counselor recommendations or any other comments that they had while reviewing my application so yeah I think that the first thing that I wanted to preface
by saying was nowhere on my admissions file did they have comments about my test scores or my grades or AP scores or anything like that it was just my GPA out of 100 unweighted as a little comment on the page um just a number that was it and then the rest were all qualitative descriptions about what they were thinking about my application and my essays so I think that this is like a pretty universal truth that the evaluation of an application is very lightly weighed on test scores like yes to some degree you have to
meet a certain benchmark but the application is holistic because you can't just filter people on test scores like there's so many people who are applying with perfect near perfect scores and they need to find a way to differentiate them from each other and also to check to make sure that they actually are a fit for the campus so as I looked at my admissions file it was really clear to me that my evaluation was based on things other than my score I also wanted to mention that at the end of my video I can talk
about some of the things that I had learned about the behind the scenes of the admissions committee the reason why this is going to be at the end of the video is because I just don't think it's that important or like or that it's any kind of practical knowledge if you're a high school senior applying to these kinds of schools even though it's it's kind of insightful to know like how your application gets through and like who it has to get through in order to be a student at Yale again it's like not practical knowledge
because there's nothing you can do on your end except make your application and write your essays so yeah I'll just talk about that at the end but yeah if you're interested in that make sure to stick around for it so in my admissions file there were three main sections first one was the interview report form the second one was the first admissions officer's comments about my application and then the third was the second admissions officer's comments about my application so I think what I'm going to do is for each section I'll just talk about the
main takeaways and the main learning points um in that section and then after discussing it for a little bit at the end I will post a screenshot of everything that I wrote down from reviewing my admissions file and the reason why um I had to write it down was because we actually weren't allowed to have our phones or take pictures of our admissions file we were only allowed to write things so I literally sat there and wrote down everything verbatim just so that I could type it up on a Google doc and kind of replicate
everything that I saw on my admissions file so the first thing that I looked at was my interview Report Form my interviewer was a senior at Yale which was really nice for me because they were he was closer in age to me and I think that for me it's easier to have comfortable in casual conversations with someone who is similar in age um overall I had a really good interview he rated me a four and he commented strong on the cusp of a four and a five so the highest score that you can get on
your interview is a five I think that my main takeaways from this are that the interview is basically a vibe check they just want to see if you are a likable person if you're someone who is personable who can carry a good conversation like if you know you're humble if you're positive if you're warm if you're thoughtful like anything that you can kind of get from someone in a first impression is basically what they're looking for in the interview so they understand that they can't learn a bunch about you in such a short amount of
time so that's why I think that I'd like to describe an interview as a vibe check you don't have to be excessively professional or like try to be someone that you're not um just they're looking for someone who's very sincere and genuine in their interview and trust me like they can tell when you're not I do have some stories to tell about that um I think that the second thing that he was looking for was um how I would contribute to the campus so in my interview I remember him talking about what I do in
my daily life in my day-to-day life what communities I'm a part of um at home in school and things like that and how I think that I would contribute to the Yale community um so it was clearly very important that I would be able to fit into the community at Yale and I would be able to be an active participant and a contributor to the the school another thing which is the part that I didn't do well was they're looking for a clear expression of your passions when I was applying I was actually applying as
a neuro science major and I was pre-med so in talking about my passions um that's that's what the conversation was about and understandably he didn't get the sense that I was really passionate or interested in it um which I think if I read this during that time I would have found surprising but now that I'm here not pre-med anymore and not a neuroscience major it makes a lot of sense that he could get the vibe that I wasn't genuinely interested in it even though at the time I I thought I was um so there's really
no way to fake your passions talk about what you're passionate about in in a genuine sincere way and and they'll get it um he said that at the very end that I would have liked to hear a bit more about what it is about the subject that excites her and that is what would have gotten me a higher score um it's a interview was really strong on the customer before and five due to her warm thoughtful and driven nature and even higher score would have required even greater energy and depth of thought when discussing her
passions so clearly that is an important aspect of the interview is do you come off as someone who's passionate and curious about the subject that you say you are interested in and another thing that he thought was notable was the fact that I was very open in my interview I think that it's good practice in conversation to practice vulnerability but like wisely you don't want to emotionally dump all of your problems on the interviewer it's not their job to comfort you or to have sympathy or empathy for you in the interview you need to have
a clear goal and direction of the story that you are trying to tell about who you are and in my case it just happened to be that I wanted to tell the story about my family background and how that shaped me as a person so for me that required a lot more vulnerability and openness on my end and we were able to have a really good conversation not just about that but like a lot of other things because like the eyes had been broken already and he didn't have to try so hard to get me
to talk and last thing is a lot more encouraging hopefully is that the interview cannot hurt you like at all it can only help you um when the admissions committee is reviewing your application they I don't think they're allowed to dock off points for a bad interview but I think that a positive interview report can help your impression on them but for example my friend Cecilia was also able to look at her admissions file and she didn't do so well in her interview and she laughs about it now and it's really funny but yeah basically
um the interviewer said that she didn't have any clear passions and was only applying to y'all for the name and a lot of other not so great things but guess what I'm here at school with Cecilia Cecilia still got in overall like interviews can't hurt you so just try to just have a very warm conversation with this person yeah so now I'm going to put um the full interview report here on the screen so you can pause and just read everything that my interviewer said about me okay the next thing that I am going to
talk about is the first reader's comments about my essay so the first thing that the first reader mentioned was that I had nice short answers oh everything was abbreviated and I just wrote everything verbatim um so I'll try to explain them as I go so reader once said that I had nice short answers um and unlike a lot of other applications QuestBridge has a lot of other extra essays and there are also a lot of short answer like 35 word responses that we had to come up with so I think that that's what the first
reader was commenting on that my voice was coming through so again like with with sincerity like genuineness like your your personality your voice coming through your essays is really important to the admissions officers um another thing that this person noted was um from my first essay they learned about my maturity and my personal growth and adversity the second essay they learned about the way that I appreciate diversity in my community um when they commented on my teacher recommendations so the first teacher recommendation was from my Healthcare science teacher the reason why I selected my healthcare
science teacher as the teacher I wanted to submit my recommendation was because I had taken a three-year course with this teacher and was also involved in the club that this teacher advised for at my high school so I was quite close to this teacher and I spent a lot of time with this teacher in the classroom and outside the classroom so I felt like this teacher knew me really well to be able to write a good recommendation for me this teacher said that I had a strong work ethic that I was a classroom leader an
excellent critical thinker humble and teachable one of the most balanced ever doesn't complain or give up and has left her mark much stronger than a wreck that the admissions officer had read for another classmate from the same teacher so yeah this teacher said a lot of good things about me thankfully but the parentheses here the the comment in the parentheses was I think really shocking to me because you know this was like confirmation that the admissions officers are comparing you in the pool of applicants within your high school and within your region and this particular
admissions officer had seen another application from my school who also had a recommendation from the same teacher and based on this comment it seemed like the recommendation that I had received from this teacher was stronger than the same teacher's recommendation for another student so I thought that was interesting that the admissions officer was able to see what the same teacher said about two different students so I think what I learned from this is to some degree you are being compared to other students in your school which is a thought that might bring a lot of
anxiety but um yeah I I think this is why it's important for you to choose teachers that you are actually close with and who actually know you and who can vouch for you because if you just choose a teacher in your high school who everyone is like oh yeah this teacher like writes really good recommendations and they're really popular teachers who write recommendations for a lot of people yes it might be true that they might be able to write you a good recommendation but in the pool of other applicants and all the other students that
they're writing recommendations for they might not be able to say as much about you as they would for another student who might also be in the same pool um my second teacher wreck was from my 10th grade literature teacher and she also had a lot of nice things to say yeah the reader noted all of these things down and my counselor recommendation um was mid I don't really know my counselor I honestly don't know why they asked for counselor recommendations as like a requirement because I don't know how many people actually know their counselor but
anyways my counselor had good things to say about me but nothing specific because she didn't know me but yeah I think that my takeaways from the teacher recs is it's important for you to actually know this person and for this person to actually know you um yeah and I love that the first reader also wrote down like overall Impressions about my application one thing that I want to highlight is the sentence that says one who clearly will be missed in her school community and could really add to ours again we see the same point from
the interview that they're looking for someone who will add to the community and one of the best ways to show that you are someone who will add to the community is by being engaged in your own home community and your school community um the first reviewer also mentioned that the QuestBridge questions were done nicely with good Yale research and a nice sparking discussion of neuro so I think that they're just talking about my "Why Yale" essay and my why major in Neuroscience essay again another overlapping point with the interview they're looking for someone who is
able to articulate why they're passionate about what they say they're interested in and why they're fascinated with that subject area um yeah so they also have ratings at the end so EC is extracurricular is a five the person that I was reviewing my admissions file with was explaining some of these abbreviations and also the metrics so I think a five is the highest score that you can get T1 teacher recommendation one I got a seven I think that was the highest score T2 also a seven um CR counselor rec was a six so a little
bit lower which makes sense though because I didn't really know my counselor that well and overall rating was a two plus I think that that's the highest score that you can get and I'm not sure why that's the metric system but it is what it is okay moving on to reader 2 reader 2 wasn't a huge fan at least from what I see they didn't have much to say about me they also had lower teacher recommendation ratings and a lower overall ratings by a little bit the few comments that they did have highlighted my family
background but they did say that I looked "more than viable" whatever that means but it seemed like this person cared a lot more about logistical requirements and not my scores so this person basically kind of said that my healthcare science teacher recommendation doesn't really count as a recommendation by their standards so they actually emailed me asking me to submit another teacher recommendation that would fulfill this teacher rec requirement but unfortunately I didn't see it guys and I only found out about this like in the spring of my senior year I was like going through emails
for something I must have searched yell or something in the Inbox and I found this email that was asking for a new teacher rec and obviously I had completely missed it and I didn't send in a new wreck but all is good because we're still here right but anyways yeah this person cared more about um the logistical aspects of my application and they didn't really comment anything about the application itself um so yeah I think even though um there was a huge discrepancy in how my application was received between these two people my application still
made it through so I wouldn't worry too much about having like the perfect application because there is still a lot of ways that your application is considered holistically so now that I've gone through my entire admissions file I also wanted to just spend a few minutes talking about the key takeaways and learning points from my admissions file so the first thing that I learned is that interpersonal skills matter the most and it's important that your inner personal skills translate over paper so through your own essays through your teacher recommendations and even if your interpersonal skills
translate well in a real interview um like I mentioned in the interview portion it's important for you to be a likable person um and someone who has leadership and communication skills um but obviously that's not the end-all be-all but I think the most important thing is character they're looking for humility good work ethic positivity and like essentially how you affect the people around you and whether or not people recognize you for that the other thing that they're looking for is passion they're looking for whether or not you are genuinely curious and passionate and interested in
what you claim you are interested in and even more importantly than this though is you have to be able to articulate this well like it doesn't matter if like in your heart like you know that you're passionate about this and this is all you want to do in life but if you can't explain that to someone else and convince them that this is true like it really doesn't matter um and I think an anecdote I have for this is I'm actually an advisor for a matriculate which is this organization that provides college application advising to
low-income, high-achieving high school students so it's been a privilege being able to work with students and review their applications with them and help them with their essays and things like that when I was advising one of my High School Fellows one of the passion essays that they were writing about was their passion for the Spanish language and her first iteration of the essay was talking about how she was so passionate that she started a club the first Spanish club at her school which I thought was really cute however it was like kind of a bland
essay in that yeah like wow you're so passionate that you started a club for it but like what else like how do I know that you're really interested in it and not just doing it because you wanted to put on your application that you found at a club right so I advised her to try to convince me to be interested in Spanish as well like her in her essay like she should come across as so interested in this subject that it makes me start to be fascinated and think wow like this is actually a really
cool subject like I want to learn more and so I think that when you frame the essay that way of like almost like a persuasive essay not exactly but like try to get the person reading your essay to also be interested in what you're interested in so yeah how can you communicate your passions in a way that makes the reader suddenly curious and very interested in what you're interested in and that is the best way to show someone that you're interested in something is to get them to be interested in it because now they can
relate and they can understand why you're interested in it um another thing is like I mentioned and as you can see both of your reviewers might not be exactly on the same page about your application but it doesn't affect it as much as you would think yeah Yale is competitive but accepted applications don't have to be perfect applications and looking at my application and also these comments um it's it's very clear that I've made a lot of mistakes on my application as well and I see a lot of areas for improvement especially now that I'm
a few years removed from the process like I mentioned the mistake of missing an email that asks for another recommendation my scores that may not have been competitive in the entire pool um and the way that I didn't come across as passionate in my interview but overall despite those mistakes I was accepted not because of my perfect application but because I came off as like a genuine person and I came off as someone who cared um and then the next thing that I wanted to mention is that you don't need to have a bunch of
awards or accolades to be someone um competitive I think that I had like yes a few achievements and awards but like none like some of the people that I knew who were applying and some of the people that I know here at yo now um actually I feel like a lot of the awards and achievements that I had earned were in my senior year of high school but because of the timing of the application process and the fact that I did QuestBridge which means I was I submitted my application in like September none of the
awards and accolades that I earned and was proud of actually made it on my application however I think that a lot of the awards that I did end up earning in my senior year were awards that um that I earned because of like my personal qualities and these were things that were already mentioned in my teacher recommendations so like having these awards on my application probably wouldn't have strengthened my application anymore because these were things that were mentioned in my teacher recs so again like I cannot emphasize enough how important these teacher recs are because
this is the only um window that the application reviewers have to seeing who you are through the lens of someone else who's actually with you yeah so if your teacher recs are strong and your character you have good character you don't need awards and accolades to prove this because it will come across in your teacher recs okay so as I promised um at the beginning of the video I will also share a little bit about what the dean of admission said about the the application review process so basically at the time that I had received
this guest lecture um he said that there were normally about 50,000 applications like total to Yale and out of these 50,000 um 2,000 are accepted overall which is really crazy competitive um so the process is that your application gets read by two readers who cover a certain geographic region and then once they they are selecting a few from their own personal pool within their region to go on and pass off to the committee pool so out of 50,000 total applications about eight to ten thousand so only about a fifth pass on to the committee pool
and then this committee is made up of five people and for five weeks this committee is sitting and meeting together from 8 a.m. to 5 p.m and literally just reading applications and discussing them together um and in order for an application to make it through this pool and be accept be an accepted application the application needs four out of five votes from the committee um so yeah it's it's it's a pretty crazy process there is um a lot of competition which on one hand may give you a lot of anxiety because it seems almost impossible
to get through but like on the flip side it's also kind of encouraging because you realize how much of a lottery the application process really is like there's way more qualified students who are applying than they have enough seats for so in no way does your application say anything about you as a student you as a person whether or not you're worthy of going to these schools whether or not you're smart like this is not at all what the application process is is for or measuring um yeah and I think that some comments that I
remember from the the lecture that um the dean gave was he said that sometimes these applications um especially in the essays give off the impression of a 40 year old lawyer instead of a 17 year old like teenager um and I think that they're actually looking for for like age-appropriate essays so don't try to come off as like super professional and super posh and super like mature um again like this comes down to being genuine right um they they can tell they they've met 17 year olds in real life they know what most 17 18
year olds are like you don't have to try to put up a front in your essays or try to seem over intelligent or whatever you think that they're looking for like just be genuine and let your true voice come across they're looking for like again like my first reviewer like it was important to my first reviewer that my voice came through in my essays and another thing that he had mentioned which I'm sure you guys have heard from other videos and things like that is they get really tired of reading the same essay tropes over
and over again so especially when they're sitting in the room from eight to five like reading applications like back to back like when they get something that's new and refreshing instantly like that's like bonus points so do yourself a favor and don't write anything that has already been done um try to think outside the box be really creative with your essays don't reuse tropes and story lines and use cliche quotes and things like that like just yeah try try to be new and original in your essays as well so yeah I think that's all that
I have for today um there's a lot more that I can share with you guys but I know people only have so long of an attention an attention span for a Youtube video um but yeah I hope that this was helpful that this was encouraging in some ways and insightful in a lot of other ways too as always like if you have questions feel free to comment them down below and I'll try my best to answer them and also if you guys would be interested in hearing about my other friends and their admissions file be
sure to comment that below as well and and support this video um so that I can know that you guys would like to see that but anyways yeah I hope you guys have a great day and I'll see you next time!
