back in high school I spent months trying to understand the college admissions process I would scour online forums I would watch videos I would email my guidance counselor I would even read books and the truth is a lot of the best information about college applications is scattered all across the internet it was very hard to find one source that broke down the process in enough detail well lucky for you that's why I'm making this video today we're gonna cover how to actually apply to college we're gonna break down six main stages creating your college list starting your actual application writing college essays getting letters of wreck applying for financial aid and then finally submitting your application so let's Dive Right In the first part of the college application process is building your college list and you generally want to do this the summer before your senior year or even the spring of your junior year so the US has over 4 000 colleges and the purpose of this stage is to find the few colleges that are the best fit for you so now you might be wondering gohar how many colleges should I actually we apply to you're going to get a variety of answers but I think the safe ballpark is anywhere between 6 to 12 schools and you want to split up your college list into three buckets you want safety schools match schools and reach schools now the reason you want these three buckets is because you want to make sure that you're applying to some schools that you know you have a good chance of getting into you don't want to be the one kid that applies to every single School in the top 20 and nothing else and gets rejected from everywhere trust me I have seen this happen a few times so safety schools are colleges where your academic credentials namely your GPA sat or ACT score fall well above the 75th percentile match schools are colleges where your academic credentials fall within the middle 50th percentile and reach schools or schools where your academic credentials fall below the 25th percentile now before you go ahead and call Harvard to safety because you have a 1600 on your sat I do want to add one caveat every single Ivy League school is a reach school no matter what grade grades you have for the ivy league and honestly every school in the top 20 your grades and academic credentials are just the threshold to being considered it's your extracurriculars letters of wreck essays and awards that'll actually get you into these schools the top 20 schools are reaches for everyone no matter your grade or accomplishments okay so now let's break down the numbers ideally you want around three safeties four to five matches and around two to three reaches now I'll be honest this is the standard breakdown that most Consultants or even your guidance counselor will give you but I'm gonna let you in on a little unfortunate secret many students especially those with top grades apply to way more than just two to three reaches in recent years there's been a phenomenon called shotgunning where many top students will apply to almost every single Ivy League school or a bunch of schools in the top 20. these students care much more about Prestige than about whether or not a certain school is the right fit for them and so that's why they'll just apply to every prestigious school they can think of now should you do this well it's up to you I'm not gonna sit here and tell you to not do it because I would be a hypocrite back in high school I was that kid who applied to a bunch of Ivy League schools and I'll be honest I wasn't just chasing the prestige top schools and especially Ivy League schools have great financial aid programs and I knew that I really wanted to benefit from one of them all right so now that we've broken down with the composition of your college list should look like let's go ahead and talk about the different factors that you should consider when deciding which colleges to apply to so there are a bunch of variables that come into play here and I'll go ahead and break each of them down briefly you have things like location extracurricular opportunities majors and minors offered cost climate and so much more I highly recommend that you pull out a sheet of paper and write down the criteria that you're looking for in the colleges that you're applying to and if you're too lazy to do that don't worry I have a worksheet in the description of this video so first and foremost you want to consider the size of the college large colleges will have more academic and extracurricular opportunities but these colleges might feel a bit impersonal and a bit too overwhelming for some students smaller colleges on the other hand might be limited in the amount of clubs or programs or Majors that they offer but you will get more of that tight-knit and cozy college experience what you want is totally up to you personally I didn't want to go to too small of a college so I was opting for something more medium-sized or larger now besides the physical size of the college and the number of students at the school you also want to consider class sides you want to see whether the college offers more lecture style classes with hundreds of students or more seminar style classes with just a few dozen with lecture style classes you'll have way less access to your professors and your learning will be a lot more self-directed on the other hand seminar style classes are a lot more intimate and Hands-On and they'll give you a lot more access to your professors now the reality is a lot of colleges have a mix of both of these but it does help to look into whether or not a certain School leans one way or the other a statistic I highly recommend you look up is these two student to faculty ratio okay so the second thing that you want to consider is location now there are a couple variables when it comes to location you want to consider Urban versus rural distance from home and climate Urban college campuses will give you more opportunities particularly when it comes to jobs or internships for example if you're interviewing for internships during the school year you might be able to do in-person interviews or even stop by the various offices a more Suburban or rural college campus will not give you this privilege but to be honest that's not too big of a deal because you could simply work a remote internship or do remote interviews so I think the main factor that you want to consider is that Urban college campuses tend to be more lively and fun in my opinion if you want lots of people around you if you want some sightseeing opportunities if you want nice restaurants or food options then an urban college campus will definitely give you that whereas a rural one might not however I do think rural college campuses are great for certain types of students for example if you enjoy nature or if you want something more peaceful and quiet then by all means opt for these more peaceful environments and when it comes to location you also want to consider distance from home if you live on the east coast but you go to college on the west coast chances are you will only see your family on the holidays whereas if you go to college within the same state you might see your family once a month or even once a week trust me there are quite a few freshmen that visit home pretty often and of course the most important variable that you want to consider when it comes to location is climate just a fair warning all the IVs are located in the Northeast so be ready for some frigid Winters back when I was in college I will never forget this one time I went out to get dinner with my friends and I honestly thought my face was gonna freeze and fall off December in Boston is not a good time now the next variable that you want to consider is the available programs you want to look deep into the different majors and minors certain colleges offer for example if you're really into cyber security or biotechnology not every school offers programs in those fields so dig deep do your research and make sure you're apply applying to schools that actually will teach you the things you want to learn and then another variable you want to consider is the flexibility of the curriculum some colleges have a required set of core classes that you will have to take no matter what whereas other colleges will give you the opportunity to sort of craft your own curriculum one example that comes to mind is Brown's open curriculum which is very flexible and lets students craft their own academic Journeys and then of course you also want to consider the reputation of the programs at the school if you want to go into Fields like Finance or Consulting the reputation of not only the program but also the school matters a lot whereas if you want to go into a field like Tech the reputation of your school doesn't matter as much tech companies will pay more attention to your actual skills and the projects you've completed alright the next variable you want to consider is campus culture now the culture of a college campus is heavily influenced by the diversity of the student body not only in terms of ethnicity or race but also in terms of academic interest in terms of political ideology and a handful of other variables so make sure you're going to a school whose culture aligns with your values now you also want to consider things like the social scene or Traditions one thing that I would do a lot in high school is I would just watch Vlogs about certain colleges just to get a sense of what the students were like and let me tell you right now if you are considering MIT we have a fantastic hacker culture essentially it's pretty much Tradition at MIT for students to pull off different hacks throughout the school year in years past students have put Captain America's shield on the Dome they've put an ambulance on the Dome they've put R2D2 on the Dome as you can tell MIT students love to put things on top of the Dome so yeah I recommend that you look into these sorts of cultures and traditions at different schools and see which ones Vibe with you and one last but very important element of Campus culture is residential life be sure to look into the dorms that are offered at the schools you're interested in and look into the sort of housing residential system they have Harvard for example has all students living pretty close to each other freshman year they all live in dorms that are adjacent to the Harvard Yard but in later years they go off into their own housing units alright we're almost done here I know we're going through a bunch of different variables right now but the next thing that you want to consider are the extracurricular opportunities offered at the school look into the sports that are offered looking to be different clubs and organizations look into any internship or Co-op or study abroad programs your college experience is not just going to be defined by the classes you take and the things you learn but also by the people that you meet and the circumstances that you meet them in if you're super into competitive programming maybe you want to see if the school has a competitive programming Club if you're really into Recreational Sports well that's an important thing to look into on the bright side I find that most colleges offer dozens if not hundreds of different clubs and extracurricular opportunities and if you don't find the exact opportunity that you want a lot of these schools will let you start it yourself okay and finally one of the most important variables that you should consider when applying to college is cost for every school that you're considering I recommend searching up its name followed by net price calculator on Google look I redirected to a link where you'll be able to input your family's Financial info nation and get an estimate for the amount of financial aid that you might receive these numbers are not going to be a hundred percent accurate but they'll give you a pretty good idea of what your family might have to pay out of pocket and as you're considering cost I also want you to consider if the school offers any merit-based scholarships or has need based Aid a merit-based scholarship is essentially money that a school will throw at you for having a certain GPA SAT score or ACT score need-based Aid is a financial aid that a school will give you based on the income level of your family and just a heads up the ivy league offers fantastic need-based Aid even for international students and as you're crunching the numbers for these different schools I also recommend that you calculate the ROI or the return on investment of the different schools you're considering look at your expected costs look at the expected salary of the degree that you want to major in and see if you think going to that college and pursuing that certain degree is a worthwhile investment on your money I'll provide a worksheet that you can use to calculate Roi in the description of this video alright so now that you've written down and understand the different things that you're looking for in colleges it's time to actually start finding different colleges that meet these criteria now you can use a bunch of different tools to search for colleges but before I dive into any of them I highly recommend that you go to Google Drive and create a sheet to keep track of all the schools you're interested in now if you're too lazy to go ahead and make this table yourself once again I have a template in the description of this video okay so one of my favorite tools for finding colleges is college boards College search so if you go ahead and Google College Board college search you'll see a page like this and you can search for colleges based on many different variables for example occasion Majors type campus life and so on but of course this isn't the only tool that you have to use you can also attend college fairs talk to your guidance counselor you can talk to friends and family members about schools they would recommend for you and you can even talk to my team over at next admit you can book a consultation called one of our consultants and they would be happy to help you find different colleges okay so as you're building out this table of different colleges and keeping track of variables like cost location majors extracurriculars and so on you should also identify the requirements for each of these schools look into whether or not the school requires you to take the SAT or the ACT figure out whether the school recommends you take a specific High School curriculum for example if you search up a school's name followed by a recommended High School courses you'll usually find a web page that lists the classes the college expects you to take during your four years in high school for example on this webpage on Harvard's website they recommend that you take four years of math courses in high school and then on top of course requirements you also want to see if the school has any supplemental essays allows you to submit a portfolio or requires you to submit something special for example Princeton requires students to submit a graded English paper Dartmouth highly recommends that students submit a peer recommendation different schools have different requirements so just make sure you're keeping track of them in your table oh and by the way if you want to learn about these supplemental essays for the IVs and want to understand how to answer them check out the Articles I've Linked In the description of this video okay so now you should have a table with a bunch of different colleges and a lot of information it's time to narrow your college list now you can do this in a variety of ways but I highly recommend that you consider visiting the schools or attending virtual info sessions or tours and as you're doing all this make sure that you're taking as many notes as you possibly can so you can narrow down your college list finally once you have your narrowed list you want to figure out if you want to apply it early anywhere so most colleges have two deadlines they have an early deadline and a regular deadline the early deadline is usually November 1st and the regular deadline is usually around January 1st now applying early comes with a handful of advantages the biggest one being that you can end the college admissions process pretty early if you get into your dream School mid-December congrats you don't really have to worry about your regular decision applications but on top of that applying early also shows the college that you're particularly interested in attending which might give you a slight admissions boost the extent of this boost even if there is one at all is usually highly debated but for most schools I think it saves to assume that it helps just a little bit okay so when it comes to applying early you have three different kinds of early applications you have early action early decision and restrictive early action so the main difference between early action and early decision is that early action is non-binding whereas early decision is binding in other words if you get in through an early decision program you are required to go to that school on the other hand if you get in through an early action program you can still choose whether or not you want to go to that school and restrictive early action is just a weirder version of early action essentially restrictive early action prevents you from applying early to multiple schools at once for example if you apply early to Harvard you can't also apply early to Princeton and Yale but the vast majority of schools don't have restrictive early actions so you probably don't have to worry about it too much and just a quick side note if you're planning to apply early to a school and want to submit your test scores I recommend wrapping up your SATs and your acts the summer before senior year and with all of that we have wrapped up the first part of this video which is building your college list the next part of the college application process is starting your actual application now generally you'll do this in August when all the college applications open up and before you go ahead and start working on your actual applications I highly recommend that you create a separate email address for everything College admissions related during the college application process you're going to get a ton of messages from the Common App from different colleges and other sources and ultimately you don't want these important messages getting lost or mixed up in your current inbox so when you're applying to college you can apply through several different platforms if you have the common application the Coalition application and you have Quest Bridge there are some other options as well but these are the three most popular ones plus bridge is mainly targeted towards low-income students but it is a fantastic program that I highly recommend students look into and when it comes to the Common App versus the Coalition app the Common App is a lot more popular and chances are that 99 of you watching are going to apply through the Common App so let's take a quick tour of the Common App and see how you actually fill out your college application so if you go to commonapp.org you'll see a page that looks like this I recommend that you click on create an account and start your account as early as possible chances are most of you want to click on first year student and then just go through the normal registration process so since I already have a dummy account let me go ahead and log in and show you what this looks like so when you log into the Common App this is what you'll see you'll see a dashboard that lists all the colleges that you're applying to you'll see a Mycologist tab a common app tab a college search Tab and then a financial aid tab so pretty much all the work is going to happen between these two tabs my colleges and the Common App So within the Mycologist tab is where you're going to write all of your supplemental essays and answer any college specific questions for example this right here is a supplemental essay for brown 200 to 250 words and you can write it right here in this box but I highly recommend you don't do this right away I recommend that you create a separate Google doc that has all of your supplemental essays and activity descriptions once you have finished your essays in the separate document and once you're happy with them copy them over to the common application station so you can submit yes the Common App does save your answers but I think you're much safer just writing everything in a separate dock okay and then under the Common App tab is where you'll have all of your general questions about you your family education testing and so on and it's in this tab that you will write your activity descriptions and your common app essay once again save everything in a separate Google doc first now there is a special part of the common application that I want to highlight so if you go to the Common App Tab and go to the writing section and scroll all the way down you will see a box titled additional information now many people recommend that you don't write too much in the additional information section and I agree but I think this is a fantastic spot to tell admissions officers about any extenuating circumstances course conflicts special classes you've taken and so on back when I was applying to college I even used this to list some additional Awards and activities I wasn't able to list on my main application but above all else I kept this section very short and concise okay so now here's one of the harsh realities of the college application process submitting applications costs money nowadays the average college application costs anywhere between 50 to 80 dollars to submit and if you're applying to 10 plus schools the cost can rack up pretty quickly well fortunately the Common App offers something called the Common App fee waiver which might let you apply to college for free I highly recommend that you search up Common App fee waiver click on the first result and then you'll see the eligibility requirements for getting a common at fee waiver and this page also has more information about how to get your fee waiver whether International students are eligible and what you should do if you don't meet the fee waiver criteria okay so now let's move on to part three of today's video college essays college essays are one of the most important parts of your college application because they are where your voice shine through every other part of your college application is more numbers based or is pretty objective for example your test scores your transcript your GPA these don't really give a sense of your personality and character and ultimately as admissions officers are building their classes they want to understand the kinds of students they're accepting thing so imagine your college essay as the one opportunity you have to sit in front of your admissions Officer and tell your story so the reality is there are different kinds of college essays you will have to write during the process you have the personal statement and then you have supplemental essays the personal statement is a college essay that will go to all the schools that you're applying to you may also hear me and others refer to it as the Common App essay supplemental essays on the other hand are school specific essays that you will have to submit for each individual College the reality is the college essay process is very nuanced and I can make over a dozen videos just about college essays and that's exactly what I'm doing I'm soon launching something called the college essay boot camp that'll take you from start to finish on your college essay but I will go ahead and give you my high level pieces of advice for the college essay tip number one which you have probably heard thousands of times already is show don't tell the college essay is ultimately a story where you are the main character you don't just want to tell admissions officers I'm hard working or I like computer your science you want to tell an evocative and immersive story that engages the admissions officer for example instead of just saying that you love computer science maybe you can write about the experience of building an app from scratch and as you're telling the story you want to make sure that you keep your writing conversational the college essay is not a research paper it's not some formal piece of writing you can use contractions and you should feel free to adapt a relaxed tone next make sure you don't rehash your resume the college essay is not a place to tell the admissions officer about all your accomplishments that's what your activities list and your honors list is for the point of the college essay is to convey your character world view and values to the admissions officer so Focus just on one of your interests or one of your experiences that can convey something like leadership or intellectual curiosity it also helps to ask yourself so what as you're writing your essay for example if you tell a story about building an app so what why should an admissions officer accept you does the admissions officer believe you're going to come to their campus and make strides in their computer science department do they believe you might go on to find a very successful startup one day it helps to think about how the reader of your essay perceives you and your potential and so that's why it's also very important to get feedback on your college essay ask your English teacher ask your guidance counselor and maybe even ask a friend or a family member but chances are they might not give you super detailed line-by-line advice they might just say oh yeah this is a good essay you should submit it or maybe they'll say oh this doesn't sound like you and you should try something else so if you want very detailed line by line feedback edits and an overall review of your college essay check out next admits essay review serve it we have a team of Ivy League Consultants who would be happy to give you in-depth feedback okay next let's talk about letters of recommendation so when you apply to college you will have to submit three recommendation letters one from your guidance counselor and two from your teachers these recommendation letters are essentially speaking to your character accomplishments academic ability and the help admissions officers get an outside perspective on the kind of student you are it's one thing to write an essay and say that your intellectual really curious it's another to have your teacher tell an admissions officer that you're intellectually curious I think it's best to ask teachers for letters of wreck sometime in October and make sure you're asking teachers ideally from junior year and those who have seen you interact in a classroom context make sure the teachers you ask are those that you know very well and those who can attest to your redeeming qualities I highly recommend you ask your teachers in person so you can gauge their enthusiasm obviously the best letters are going to come from the teachers who are very excited to write one for you also very important to know try to ask only junior year teachers you could ask a sophomore year teacher if you really can't think of anyone else but you do not want to ask any freshman year teachers for a letter of Rec chances are they probably can't speak much to who you are today and finally after you ask your teachers for letters of Wreck it helps to give them something called a brag sheet a brag sheet is a list of your accomplishments activities anecdotes from the classroom that can help your teacher write an outstanding letter I have a Brack sheet template that you can use and fill out and in the description of this video okay next let's briefly talk about financial aid which is a very important part of the application process most of you will want to fill out something called the FAFSA which opens up October 1st this is an application for federal financial aid some schools might also require you to fill out something called the CSS profile which provides a more nuanced look into your family's Financial circumstances to see whether or not a school requires the CSS profile you can just search up a school's name followed by financial aid requirements I might make a video or a guide about the FAFSA and CSS sometime in the future so let me know if that would be helpful a tool that I like to use to find scholarships is the College Board scholarship search here it is you can use this tool to find matches from over 6 000 programs and the great part is this tool will help you find scholarships based on your interests situations affiliations and so on okay so now let's move on to one of the final parts of this video submitting your application so now you want to make sure that you have submitted everything that is required of you and let me go ahead and read off my checklist that might be helpful all parts of your common app teacher recommendations counselor recommendation and secondary school report transcript view waiver or application fee and test scores and obviously for some schools test scores are optional make sure to submit whatever you can and then follow up with your guidance counselor to see if they've submitted everything else so a few days after you've applied to all these colleges it will send you individual links for the application portals and you can access these portals to track all of your application requirements and see what has been submitted and on these portals you might see something called the mid-year report now here's the thing after you apply to college these schools will still see your senior year grades they'll ask for your mid-year report which will reveal your performance halfway through senior year and then the school that you choose to attend will also want to see your final transcript to see if you maintained your grades so by all means try to fight off senioritis now something else that I want to flag are interviews a few weeks after you apply to a college an alumnus might reach out to you asking to schedule an interview now not every school does interview use but many of them in the top 20 do now College interviews are surprisingly casual they're just conversations between you and someone who has gone to the school and you should see them as an opportunity to learn more about the school and to ask any questions you have now once these are over and a few months have gone by it is finally time for decisions so now if you applied early to a school you probably already got your decisions mid-December but for the schools you applied regular to you're going to get your decisions back in March or April now if you applied early you'll either be accepted deferred or rejected if you applied regular you'll either be accepted waitlisted or rejected a deferral is simply a College's way of saying we haven't made a decision on you and your application will be re-evaluated during the regular decision route getting waitlisted essentially means that a college is going to wait to see who accepts their offers and then based on how much room is left they might take some students off the wait list now once you get your offers it's very important that you compare them with one another and find the best fit for you you will probably want to visit the colleges if you haven't done so already ready and if you find that a school is too expensive or isn't giving you enough financial aid just know that you can submit a financial aid appeal letter this is essentially a request for more money from a college and I'll link a template in the description of this video and after you've played this comparison game and figured out which college is the best fit for you it's time to lock in and commit to a college on May 1st which is National College decision day after that you might have to submit a deposit or sign up for orientation but largely that should wrap up the college application process now I hope this video helped and if it did it would mean the world if you could share it with other seniors who are going through the admissions process and if you want to hop on a call or get an essay review from me or my team once again you can find us over at nextadmin best of luck getting through the college application season and just know that I'm here rooting for you