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S4E34: Inside the Review Room – How Admissions Officers Read Applications
In this episode of the Admittedly Podcast, host Thomas Khalil delves into the intricate process of how admissions officers evaluate applications. He shares insights on the key components of an applica...
S4E34: Inside the Review Room – How Admissions Officers Read Applications
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Interactive Transcript
Speaker A
Hello and welcome to the Admittedly Podcast. My name is Thomas Khalil. I'm the former director of MBA admissions and financial aid for my alma mater, 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 foreign.
Speaker B
Hello and welcome to the Admittedly Podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Kalil. And today we're going to talk about something that I get a lot of comments and questions about on social media, admittedly co on Instagram and TikTok, and that's how is my file evaluated? What are they looking for? What order do they read things in? How are my different accomplishments being considered or not considered? And I want to take a few minutes to go through this with you today because I know it's something that is very stressful, right, because we're dealing with a process that is deeply important to you. In most cases, admissions officers are not spending more than, let's say, three to five minutes reviewing your file. And so how do they do that? How do they go through that? How do you make sure that they are seeing all the all of you? And there is no straight linear answer to this. It goes back to my very favorite response to most questions and admissions. And that is, it depends. There's no formula here. Readers are kind of left up to their own devices. And so I'm going to walk you through some scenarios, some different ways that they're looking at your file. They might be looking at different files. And I want you to, I hope, take away from this the fact that it is a little bit of managed chaos, but it's highly trained chaos. And readers are very deeply trained in how to extract what they need in a short amount of time from this application. Because we need to build a 3D picture of an applicant from a very two dimensional computer screen or piece of paper. So let's talk about this for a few minutes.
Speaker C
Right?
Speaker B
So what are the basic main component parts of this? Well, we have your transcript, we have your activity list, we have your essays, we have your recommendations. Now, the transcript is a little bit different because a transcript actually requires quite a bit of work. It needs to be processed, analyzed, looked at, and a score given to it. And so a lot of admissions offices will actually pull the transcript out into a separate review process, review that, score it, grade it, however you want to refer to it, and then that gets entered back into the application for the readers to analyze. You'll have seen in the news that some schools are actually using AI to help understand these transcripts. As of right now, they're not using AI to actually read and score essays and other component parts of the application. There's a little bit of a scandal where some schools were actually using AI to read in parallel with real readers. And I think they're trying to understand the boundaries and the limits of AI. But at the moment, the transcript takes quite a while to parse, and that's why they break it out from actually reading the applications, the essays, and things like that. So when the file comes to a reader, they have background and, you know, scoring however you want to refer to it on the transcript. And then they have a couple other parts that they look at.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker B
So they look at the school report. And the school report is very important because the school report report tells you from the school what the grading system is like, how many APs are available, anything we should know about the school and how to evaluate this student's academics and or extracurriculars. Pretty standard document. If you go and Google your school's report, it should come up. If it doesn't, you can actually go and politely ask your counselor, and they should absolutely be able to, to give that to you. Then what we have is we have the counselor's report. They're going to talk about you. They're going to kind of give a big picture view of you. We have the two teacher recommendations, which, if you're, you know, doing this correctly, and you're here, you're, you're following me, so I'm going to assume that you are doing it correctly. You've selected two teachers that reinforce your intellectual and academic interests and give a fuller sense of you than just the grade.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker B
If you get an A in a class and, you know, we know that you worked hard and you're a good student, so if that's all the teacher has to say about you, you're not going to get very far with that recommendation. If the recommender can humanize you, if they can talk about times where you succeeded, times where you struggled, how you interact with other students in the class, how you go above and beyond, maybe they know you from an extracurricular context because maybe they're overseeing the school paper or one of your coaches or they, you know, work with you on the musical. These are all different persp that they can provide on you and your character. And of course, you've put together your document outlining how you know them, why you know them, highlights of your relationship together, activities, what you want to study in school. Schools you're looking at so that these teachers are very well prepared to write this recommendation. Then we have the activity list, right? And so we're making very thoughtful decisions about those 10 activities that go in there. Where they are ranked, you know, are they in order of importance to you? Do they reflect what you're talking about in your essays? There is the section on awards, and we want to make sure those are academic awards that tells the admissions officer something about you. And then of course, we move on to essays, right? So we have your common app personal statement. We have your, you know, the, the extenuating circumstances essay if you need that, the additional information essay if you need that. And then you have the supplement essays. So these are all really important parts of it. But really the question that comes up is, okay, well, what does that mean? And what order do they read it in? And the reality is it really depends on the reader, right? So the reader might look at you and say, oh, you're from this kind of high school or this kind of demographic or this state or this background or this country, and they're going to. They might jump to a very specific thing, right? They might say, all right, you know, they got a good grade on the transcript. Let's quickly look at their test scores. Okay, test scores line up fine. So you're in the running right now. So then they might say, all right, let me look quickly at intended major great activity list. Okay, jump over to the common app personal statement. And they look at your personal statement and they say, okay, what are they talking about here? Are they just writing a story and then jamming a few things in at the end, right? Story, story, story. Oh, I'm reliable and trustworthy and hard working and really, really interested in biology. Or did you take the opportunity to be thoughtful and strategic about your essay and weave a narrative that lets them understand who you are, that gives them examples of things that you have done, accomplished, shows the reader who you are, takes them on this journey, helps them understand, oh, that's why they want to be a biochemist. That makes a lot of sense. And this is what they've done to explore that. Very interesting. If you're referencing specific activities, they may flip back to the activity list to just kind of check, right? Because if you're leaning on the common app personal statement, if you're leaning on an activity that you've ranked number seven, for example, that might be something that they want to look into and say, well, wait a minute. Wait, why are they doing that? If this activity is so formative to them, why isn't it higher up? Maybe you've explained that or showed that and maybe you haven't. So that's a really important thing. Remember that this is not a just straight ahead linear progression. These admissions officers can and will bounce back and forth between things. So if you're talking about your love of mathematics, they're going to look, they might look at your activity list and then maybe look at your recommendation from your math teacher to see, okay, is this person just a grinder? Do they do the work, grind out the tests and do well? Or is this somebody who's inspired by math, who's going above and beyond, who's challenging themselves? How have they challenged themselves? How have they used math creatively? If you are coming from, let's say, a disadvantaged background, they're going to look and say, okay, let's put you in context. I want to see what you've done despite the challenges you've had to overcome. So what do your activities look like? Oh, well, it says here that, you know, you have to, you're both your parents work or you live in a single parent household, they're working all the time. So you have a lot of responsibilities at home. You have to hurry home with your siblings after school and take care of them and cook dinner and do the shopping. Or maybe you need to work to contribute all of these things, help them form a picture of you. And if you think about it right, it's not, they're not just going to march through and be like, check, check, check, check. Now certainly universities have rubrics. They have, you know, they have scales, rubrics and ways that they evaluate to try and standardize things a little bit. But how you come up with those numbers as a reader a lot of times is up to you. And you could really, really bounce around. And so what you're trying to do is triangulate on the individual student, keeping in mind that for different students, different things will weigh differently.
Speaker C
Right?
Speaker B
And so if, for example, you are a first gen student and maybe coming from a low income background, the fact that you aren't doing two sports and captain of the cheer team and editor of the school newspaper because you have to work or take care of family, that puts you into context. And what the readers are able to do by jumping around into this is form a picture of you so that when they take you to committee, they have this narrative. All right, I have my first gen rancher from Wyoming and you know, she makes and trains horses. That helps contribute to the family income. Not a whole lot of extracurricular activities, mainly because her school doesn't have them, but because she does need to go and work on the, on the, you know, the family ranch after school every day. We're not talking Yellowstone ranch here. We're talking like a working horse training facility. And these are things that they're going to evaluate you from a different perspective than somebody who's going to Harvard Westlake or Phillips Andover and comes from privilege and is third generation at this particular university. They're going to hold you to a different standard because they're going to expect that, you know, you're surrounded by students and teachers who are familiar with the process looking out for you. Generally, your parents have gone through higher education, and so none of this is new or surprising to you. And so they will expect you to have done the work. And if you don't do the work, then they're going to say, okay, I wonder why they didn't do that. Is it something that we don't know about? Is it something they had to overcome? And here's the most important part of this application process you have to disclose. I get a lot of students where I read their applications and they're clearly trying to hide something, right? They're embarrassed about something. They don't, they don't want to reveal something. And look, as an admissions officer, we are trained to spot anomalies. We know when something does not add up. The problem is we don't have the time to figure it out for you. So we're ripping through an application and we have three minutes, four minutes to get this picture of you. If you don't do the work, it's very rare that we're going to be able to do the work for you. So if you were ill, if your parent was ill, if you had to take care of a sibling, if there was a divorce, some kind of trauma, trauma, you had to move multiple times. There is actually a very specific essay. There is a checklist for family responsibilities, and there's a specific essay just for that. So take advantage of it. Realize that they are going to read all these component parts and sew together a narrative of who you are. And if you are missing pieces there, that narrative cannot stand up or stand out. And you will fall into the group of students that's like, oh, great, you know, wish they would have told me more, right? And so we also have to be careful, though, of oversharing just because there is space for additional Essay.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker B
Especially like the additional information essay. Doesn't mean you have to use it. Do not use the additional information essay as a place to just dump more things.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker B
If you feel like you haven't fully explained your activities, you can submit a resume. That resume should never be more than two pages, but it's. It is another data point for the reader. So as a reader's kind of. Kind of jumping back and forth, they're like reading the essay. Okay, how does that tie the activities? Is that reinforced by the recommendations? Okay, that makes sense. What did the counselor say? They said that sophomore year, they weren't allowed to take. They were only allowed to take one ap. Let me check the school report. You can move very quickly through that as a trained and experienced admissions officer. And so don't go into this. A lot of students just getting themselves really bent out of shape and thinking, okay, like, I have to anticipate this. I have to know what they're doing. I have to get ahead of it. No, tell your story. Tell your story in the way that matters to you. So that when the person brings us to committee, when the admissions officer brings us to committee, and we're keeping in mind that unlike some things in life, admissions is a zero sum game. So if I have the Northeast as a region and my colleague who has a Midwest comes to committee and says, listen, I need this person. This is an amazing person. This is my, you know, rancher. You know, this is why I think that they're so great for the school, the fit everything else by giving them that student, by me voting to. To say, okay, yes, I think we should admit that student means there's necessarily one less seat available in the class that I'm pushing for my great students from my region to get right. It's not a competition per se, but there's an awareness that there is a fixed amount, finite amount of seats. And so every seat that goes somewhere else is a seat that I can't get from my students. And so you need to give your reader the ammunition they need.
Speaker C
Right.
Speaker B
To defend you, to fight on your behalf in committee and say, no, no, this is the person that I want. And so if you take a safe approach, if you don't give them anything that they can grab onto. And I've talked about this before, right. How do admissions officers talk about you? They're not talking about your name and your stats. It's about, you know, my first gen rancher from Wyoming. Yeah. No academics, totally fine, sat within range or a little bit low. But you know, great work ethic, amazing essay about working with horses and training horses and how hard that is, about how much they've learned and how they're going to bring that to what they want to study here at university. All of these things come in together, right? Just like, just like the recommendations. Very important. That's why I talk a lot about trying to spend time with your teachers. Don't leave it till the last minute. Don't have to introduce yourself when you are asking a teacher for a recommendation, right? You want an ideal situation, they pull you aside and they say, hey, Thomas, I know you're applying to colleges next year. I would love, love to be one of your recommenders. And then you can have the conversation with them around whether or not that fits with intended major school you're applying to, etc. So the thing I want you to take away from this is that what happens behind closed doors in the admissions office, there is a system, there is a rhythm to it, but there's also a great deal of unpredictability. You don't know who's reading your file, you don't know how they're reading your file. And so don't try and game that, right? Because also you're not just applying to one school, you're applying, applying to 10, 15, 20 schools. And so you have to, you have to put forth an effort that is going to work on different levels with different readers, with different pressures and timelines and imperatives who are looking for different things. So that's a takeaway from this follow along. I'm going to be talking a lot more about this as we move through the season for juniors and other underclassmen. I think the important thing here is to remember to start this process early, make sure your teachers know you. For juniors that are starting right now, it's critically important that you put forth effort this year. You know, as an aside, I hear a lot from students. Oh, so. And so was just not a good calc teacher. Everybody knows that. Well, I mean, yes, I get that there are, you know, good teachers, great teachers and bad teachers, but much like life, right, you are going to, if you work, you're going to have customers or managers or bosses or whatever it is who are difficult and unreasonable and you don't like and don't like you, quite frankly. And learning how to work with that, learning how to succeed despite these headwinds is critically important. So if you have a teacher who's known to be difficult, if you have a teacher who you're not getting along with at first. Invest the effort, invest the time. Don't go kiss up to them, but put the effort in. Let them see. Hey, you know what? Okay, I misjudged Thomas. He's actually working really hard. He's asking thoughtful questions. If I have office hours, he's coming to them. Or he asked if he could, you know, have coffee with me and talk through a concept he's having particular difficulty with. These are the things that you build relationships. A lot of times when I drill down on students, I find that when they say, oh, teacher's unreasonable and not willing to help, they're not willing to do this. It's because they just had no interaction or relationship with this teacher the whole year and then came to them with a last minute ask, right? Oh, I bombed that quiz because I was traveling to look at schools or do something else. Can you just give me some extra points? And the teacher looks and says, well, this is like, there's no relationship here. I don't really know you. And it's not a situation that's going to remedy itself favorably right in your favor. So juniors, sophomores, plan ahead. Learn how to work with your teachers. Learn how to build those relationships. Make sure that the counselors are going to know you. Make sure that you're active and seen and visible. If you're doing mostly activities outside of school, make sure that once you get assigned your counselor, they know about that. Make sure your teachers know about that. If you have hardships at home, if you're struggling with something, you don't have to. But being able to confide in a teacher is very, very powerful. And I don't want you to think about this overly strategically, but I do want you to realize that having a teacher back up what you're saying in the additional information essay or the hardship essay. Look, my parents got divorced. It was deeply traumat for my siblings and I. Overnight, we had to change houses. We barely were able to stay in the same school. There was financial dislocation. These are real traumas that people endure. Or a loved one passes away or gets sick and you have to spend time with them. Saying that in the additional information essay is very powerful and obviously needs to be done. But also, having that backstopped by a teacher or your school counselor is incredibly important and incredibly powerful if you can. So the takeaways from here, there's no rhyme or reason to the order or way in which they're going to read the application. This is why when I talk about strategy, everything needs to work together to build this three dimensional view of who you are. Follow along on Instagram and TikTok. Admittedly co, we've got a lot of content. I'm in the DMs, I'm in the comments. I want to hear from you. What do you think? Does this make sense? Do you have questions about it? I love the feedback. I love the chance to interact with followers, with students, with parents. So thank you very much. Appreciate you listening. And let's head into this application season strong for juniors, sophomores, freshmen. Let's plan ahead so that we are in the best possible position when you reach senior year. Thank you.
Speaker A
Thank you for joining us today. 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. Admittedly Podcast I look forward to continuing our journey together.