What to Track for College Admissions Success
Jack Beecher, here.
College admissions is often seen as a black box.
You submit your test scores, grades, essays, and activities, hoping the college admissions officers like what they see.
This leads to confusion. How can we know what really matters in admissions?
This confusion then leads to inaction. It's hard to motivate yourself to check for grammar errors for the 5th time if you don’t even know if it will help your admissions chances.
So how do we sidestep this black box and gain clarity into admissions?
For a moment, let’s take a step back.
What is one of the biggest motivators in life? Money.
Why is it so important to people? Because it’s easily tracked. It’s a metric that’s visible in your bank account. You can compare it against other people. You can see when you're improving.
Money is a prime example of a VISIBLE metric.
Since it’s visible, people constantly seek to improve it. As Peter Drucker explains,
“What gets measured, gets managed”
On the other hand, something like peace of mind is an INVISIBLE metric. No one measures it, and thus, no one manages it.
If you ask people what’s more important, peace of mind or money. Most people will probably agree on peace of mind. However, since money is a VISIBLE metric and peace of mind is INVISIBLE, people spend far more time optimizing for money than peace of mind.
Now, let’s apply this idea of visible and invisible metrics to college admissions.
Visible Metrics in Admissions
Standardized Testing:
A score between the median and the upper quartile of your dream college
GPA:
A GPA between the median and the upper quartile of your dream college
# of AP Classes:
8-10 if applying to the top 20 universities, if not more
Invisible Metrics in Admissions
Quality of Essays
Uniqueness of Activities
Personal Characteristics
Notice how it’s far easier to succeed on the first chunk of metrics. There are exact numbers to chase. You know you’re good to go in admissions when you have a 4.0 GPA and 34 ACT. Thus, you are more motivated to reach those thresholds.
Uniqueness of activities on the other hand isn’t trackable. No matter how good your activities are, you won’t know if they’re good enough. Therefore, it’s hard to be motivated when the result is unclear.
How do we fix this? We must find visible metrics that are proxies to our invisible metrics.
For quality of essays:
See what score your essay gets on Grammarly, seek to improve it
Ask friends and family to rate your essays on a scale of 1-100, then fix it and ask them to rate it again
Scan through the pages and note all the spots you find a little bit unclear, seek to lower that number
For uniqueness of activities:
Have you hit 1 showstopper activity?
Do you have 2-3 activities you’ve been doing for a couple years?
Do you have 1-2 activities where you’re a leader?
Do you have 2-3 activities that relate to your story or the major you're applying for?
For personal characteristics:
How many jokes do you have in your application?
What score are your teachers giving you in their teacher recommendations?
The point I’m trying to make is to not perfectly follow my above recommendations for metrics.
It is instead, to look at your application with a close eye.
Are you spending enough time on the factors without trackable metrics? If not, how can you turn the invisible visible to motivate yourself to spend more time on them?
Good luck in admissions,
Jack Beecher
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