This past year, colleges and universities nationwide saw an increase in freshmen applications. According to Amelia Nierenberg, a writer for The New York Times, UC Berkeley received 28% more applications, Cornell University received 32% more applications, University of Southern California received 20% more applications, and Harvard University received 42% more applications compared to last year. With the class of 2021 college application cycle coming to an end, I interviewed current seniors for advice on the college application process.
“One tip for underclassmen is that if you’re going to join a club, join it to be a part of it and be invested in it and … become an officer, or really get into the activities and become involved with the community in that area,” senior Lynn Nguyen said in a Zoom interview. “Otherwise, you won’t have anything to write about, like being a member … you get to do service, but what are you actually doing … to change a community to actually write about.”
“One tip for writing college essays is to make your essays personalized. I’m a very talkative bubbly person… and my essays reflected that pretty well,” Nguyen said. “I would use the language that I would use when I was talking to people; I don’t make it all formal. Don’t be using big SAT words because no one’s going to understand them. Use words that you would actually say and … have in your vocabulary.”
For financial aid for college, Nguyen recommends filling out the FAFSA as soon as the form is available, since the earlier one fills it out the more financial aid they might get. As for scholarships, Nguyen said that one should apply to the local ones who only have a reward of $500 or $1000 compared to a $40,000 scholarship because the application pool for the $40,000 scholarship would be very competitive compared to the $500 scholarship. She recommends looking at Ms. Canez’s College and Career website since the website has a lot of information about regional scholarships.
“A good chunk of my extracurriculars came from me tutoring… Every single summer, I would tutor somewhere. And so… I tutor math, I major in math, I want to be a math teacher, like it all connects in the end. Having extracurriculars that relate to your major or where you want to go in the future helps a lot,” Nguyen said. “A lot of other things I did were when I was a kid… I did Girl Scouts since elementary school, and I just continued. Things that you do when you’re small that you… keep continuing up to high school, [admission officers] like to see that continuation.”
Nguyen will be attending UC Berkeley in the fall of 2021 and will be majoring in Applied Mathematics. At first, she was leaning towards attending University of Southern California (USC) because it has a progressive degree program, which is when one can get a master’s degree alongside a bachelor’s, she said. Nguyen wants to become a teacher, and every unit a teacher takes after their bachelor’s, they get a raise to their salary. If she were to take a Master’s and Bachelor’s degree at the same time, she would be paid the minimum salary of a teacher, Nguyen added. In the end, she choose UC Berkeley because she felt that it was the better school for her career path.
“If you’re a junior … you should definitely start brainstorming, maybe at the end of May. So right as the school year stops, you should start thinking about what essay topics you want to do or … which schools you want to apply to,” senior Sruthi Ramesh said in a Zoom interview. “I would recommend that you have … an idea of the schools that you’re going to apply to by the end of June.”
A piece of advice for writing college essays is to be comfortable writing in first person since students tend to write in third person most of the time, Ramesh said. In order to get used to writing in first person, one could write a paragraph daily about how their day was just to familiarize themselves with how they sound in first person, she added.
“There were a couple of disadvantages [of applying during the pandemic] like it was so hard to get … information on schools and information on deadlines, especially scholarship deadlines,” Ramesh said. “Some advantages were since we didn’t have to deal with in-person school, the whole app process was just… easier, because, in in-person school, I barely had time to like, eat and sleep,… but then with online school,… I can do whatever I want, whenever I want. The concept of time is just different.”
Ramesh stated that the main way she built her extracurriculars throughout high school was through community service. She was only part of two clubs on campus and tried to do community service in multiple ways such as tutoring or volunteering at a hospital, she added.
Ramesh will be attending UC Davis in the fall of 2021 and will be majoring in Molecular and Microbiology. She was debating between UC Davis and Tulane and picked UC Davis because she liked the school’s campus and felt that UC Davis had the best program for her major, Ramesh said.
“As juniors going on to your senior year, it’s kind of late … to drastically turn around your GPA, or take more advanced classes to truly stand out. So it’s going to be heavy on your essay questions,” senior Katelyn Le said in a Zoom interview. “My advice would be to really focused on how you can differentiate yourself between all the other super qualified people, because I know… in our area, it’s very easy to think that you are qualified because your GPA is super high. You have these extracurriculars, but what also matters is emotional intelligence.”
Her biggest challenge was figuring out how to make her essays unique to her since she had lived an average life like most other people, Le said. However, she realized that no two people are alike, meaning that everyone is unique in their own way, Le added. Le stated that in one’s essays one needs to talk about events or things that shaped who they are today.
“My four major criteria for picking a school was the major, location, and honestly, my intuition and opportunities after graduating,” Le said. “So originally, I wanted to major in data science… and so I … looked at schools that have that major. My second criteria was the location. There’s a lot of stuff that goes into that like, traveling and the demographics of the student population. Another thing I considered was … what are the resources that the school offers, how much opportunity is the school going to give me. Finally, if you intuitively feel that a school is a really good match for you, then it’s definitely something to consider. You shouldn’t label your intuition as impractical because intuition is very strong.”
Le will be attending USC in the fall of 2021 and will be majoring in Cognitive Science. She chose USC because it has a great alumni network, has great school spirit, lets one personalize their major the way they want to, and has great post-graduation opportunities, Le said.
