IVY League Profile vs Average Profile | What gets you into an Ivy League School?

all right crazy videos of family I have a very very special video for you guys today now for those of you guys that are new to the channel or even the old ones um my name isn't crazy Medusa my name is soloni and I am a graduate from Cornell universities now over the last few years I have gone through and looked at a ton of student profiles all the way from Elite profiles that got into Ivy League's Stanford University MIT all the fun stuff um versus you know not so great average profiles that maybe didn't get into their dream colleges but nevertheless did get into some some universities in the US so I thought it would be fun to make a video comparing these two profiles and kind of giving you guys the scoop and laying everything out there as to what makes a profile Elite versus average and spoiler alert it's not just about the numbers and grades there's so much more that goes into it so we're not without wasting any time let's hop on to our comparison Matrix and look at what we're going to be comparing the profiles against now this is just my personal opinion and I don't want to offend anyone um again this is something that I'm I've compiled over the years and years of mentoring students one-on-one um Link in the description for the mentorship if you guys are interested so the comparison Matrix that we're going to use today is going to comprise of three things so basically we're gonna have your grades so your high school grades any AP tests students have taken SATs TOEFL all that fun stuff then your essays will look at the Common App essay as well as supplemental essays and your extracurricular activities in the activities we'll also look at like honors and achievements so that entire like last part of the application process in general right so looking at our grades now this is a very controversial topic when it comes to International students because I've seen both type of students okay I've seen students on one hand that have average grades and you know treat them like they don't matter because they're like oh you know we'll just make it up for essays and then I also have some overconfident students that think that just because they have a 90 they're going to get into all of the elite schools so both of those things are kind of like tilting the balance here and there and the goal is you need to have a perfect balance and what I mean by that is okay so let's take a look at the elite profile that you see on the left here now this student for example um got a 95 in class 12. um 89 in 11th 92 86 so the marks are kind of like above 85 on average right and the average profile on the other hand has has like a you know maybe 65 or maybe 70 to 80 as the average now the point here is to be humble enough in both cases if you have those good marks you need to understand that that alone is not going to cut it but if you don't have such great marks you also need to accept the fact that because you don't have such great test scoring marks um you will need to work extra hard in other parts of your application now that for example can mean for example here this student took an AP biology uh test and scored four out of five whereas the average profile didn't you know write anything now what this kind of shows us and for those of you guys that don't know what the AP exams are let me give you like a quick crash course so typically students that study here in the US when they take courses in high school let's say they want to take biology they have the choice of taking three different levels they can choose one there's a regular level honors level or AP level and it is difficult in that order regular is the base level that you need to pass high school then if you want it to be more difficult it can be honors if you wanted to be the toughest it's AP now EP is optional it's extremely difficult the coursework is difficult syllabus is difficult exam is very difficult and a lot of students here maybe take like five or six different AP courses the advantage of this is it shows colleges when you're applying that you've done this rigorous academic curriculum and you've excelled in that it shows High aptitude for the student now in many cases when you take enough number of AP courses you can also skip those basic classes in the first year of college like if you if you take AP biology you can skip biology one-on-one in call 101 in college by doing that a lot of students are able to you know finish their undergrad degree in two years or three years as opposed to four years and that's whole a whole other process that I don't want to go into but my point in explaining this part is that AP courses are available to International students as well so a lot of international students along with whatever board they're doing whether it's ICC cbse state board IB they also take AP exam just to add that extra boost to their profile and my recommendation for AP exams is first excel in your own curriculum and then treat AP as like a next step I have come across many students that are close to failing in their own board and they're like oh let me just take AP classes instead if you cannot perform in your own academic curriculum there is a very very rare chance that you're going to be able to perform well in the AP curriculum it is difficult for a reason and also failing in your own curriculum and doing well in the AP exam also doesn't make your case any better it shows that you weren't able to excel in the coursework that is from your own home country right so treat it as like a next step like you've done great next what can you do better take AP classes and take the AP exams right so that's how I would treat the aps now when it comes to SATs and toefls obviously you know as you can see an Elite student would have a better score um versus um an average student that maybe hasn't written the test or doesn't have such a great score same thing with the TOEFL test um now a lot of cases TOEFL is you know optional as well as the SAT and ACT and the common data set for a lot of colleges shows that even though it's their test optional if you submit your scores they will be considered so the best way to go about this is take the PSAT it's a practice sat that you can take for free online and see how well you're able to score in it if you're a good test taker take the test submit your score like evaluated on on your own like personal um criteria for yourself you know yourself better than anyone better than me better than a counselor better than probably even your parents you know what you're capable of if you feel like you can take a test and perform well use that to your advantage right so with this this kind of like wraps up all of like the aptitude based numbers game and we move on to our second criteria Matrix which is the Why Us essay now the Why Us essay I've just picked Cornell for this um example here but basically what we're going to look at is um every uh College may ask you like a supplemental question and a common supplemental question that's asked in most universities is why do you want to study at our University so I've taken you know Cornell for example here and let's see what an average essay would look like now an average essay would probably say that the campus is located in Ithaca which is very beautiful talk about some you know facilities in Ithaca maybe the fact that Cornell has a renowned biomedical research center their facilities their connections with hospitals and you know how excited that student is to attend this Academic Program okay so right off the bat what is missing here basically this average essay looks like it was taken from Cornell's website and just paste it here I have no information about the student I have no as like a college admissions officer I have no information about why that student really wants to study at Cornell and I also feel like this essay that the student wrote could probably be copy pasted in every other college essay just by changing the name of the place like Cornell is located in Ithaca so this probably the student has probably done something like Harvard is located in Boston and I'm really excited to blah blah blah you you get what I mean right there's no uh Personal Touch and there's no real connection that the student is um making here with this essay now an elite essay on the other hand let's take a look at this so I'm excited about um Professor Vanessa's research on 3D printing and it resonates well with the fundamental fundamentals of microfluidics that I learned during my research internship Last Summer the first sentence right off the bat gives so much information about the student the fact that this student has completed an internship on microfluetics and is already interested in a professor's lab now the student didn't talk about Cornell specifically he or she went through the effort of finding a lab that they were interested in and then talking about that lab and how it relates to what they're interested in now furthermore I am eager to take advantage of Cornell's entrepreneurial ecosystem including programs like elab and the Blackstone launch pad again these are things that you won't necessarily find right on the website you really have to dig through and understand that this is what Cornell has to offer which is different than any other university no other university has or the Blackstone Launchpad this is specific to Cornell or even you know Cornell's Indian association to stay in touch with my home route so basically within this particular essay the student has touched on three things one uh found a professor whose research they're interested in and made a connection with their own personal interest and experience to um talk about some core curriculums that are specific to Cornell that they're interested in and three maybe something outside of the classroom that they want to do on the Cornell campus and this is a very wholesome essay right off the bat this essay cannot be used for any other college so this student really did go through that effort of writing this essay specifically for Cornell and it kind of gives a sense of okay so by reading this essay if I was an admissions officer I would say Okay so this student really you know wants to be connected to home and at the same time is really passionate about biomedical research because um they've done some amount of um you know research themselves to know what they want and if you're not really sure as to like what exactly you want to do that's fine maybe you can talk about just some course work but the point is to talk about something specific that you want to do right so moving on to our activities now before we compare like Elite versus average I wanted to give you guys like a full summation of what a wholesome activities list looks like now this is something that I see so many students miss out on because honestly what I notice is that um students will usually have like maybe one or two activities so they'll have a lot of academic activities or leadership activities and maybe some community service now these are the top three in my opinion students are really like they're like okay this is what colleges want to see I'm going to do a bunch of these but what about the others now I'm not saying that you have to have all like eight of these in your profile because obviously you know that is not something that they expect from you like they don't want you to be an all-rounder and they don't want everybody to be the same but you should at least try to cover five to seven activities in these group of eight and this shows that you're doing different things outside of the classroom a lot of times um students forget or don't understand the difference between volunteering versus community service that's a big one and then maybe something that's just completely for their own passion if I was in high school right now maybe volunteering at a hospital during the summer would be something would be one of my passion activities or honestly like if I if if I wanted wanted to take something completely non-academic I would say maybe um taking like basketball classes for young children in my apartment that would be a passion activity it's not something that I have to do it's not like I'm getting paid or I'm a coach to do it it's just something that makes me feel better and makes me enjoy what I do so the point is try to have like this wholesome profile where you're covering at least majority of these you know eight um categories that you see on the screen here um but basically now with these in mind let's look let's compare both of the profiles right now the big thing I actually want to touch on here is the fact that the way you present your activity makes all of the difference and what I mean by that is let's let's look at you know this particular activity where let's say a student is a classical music um a singer Indian classical singer right so on Common App you're allowed to write three different kind of descriptions you can write a position an organization and a description right I believe there are 50 characters for position and then 100 for organization and 150 for description but basically an average profile is letting us know that okay it's classical music that's the position and learn Indian classical music and won a bronze medal on the audition for Indian Idol what's wrong with this okay so I don't know what the bronze medal was in like how many students participated was this like a national thing was it a school thing what is was it a district thing and what is Indian Idol like from the eyes of n admissions officer and international admissions officer who's not from your home country you can't expect them to automatically know something right now I understand that of course they could go on Google and find out and blah blah blah but honestly like this really doesn't carry value yeah if you were like if you maybe Scott selected in one or two rounds that would but then just auditioned I would cut that out entirely right so that's gonna be my first recommendation like things like this you don't need like this can just go away entirely on the other hand if we take the exact same profile and look at what an elite student profile uh student would do the first thing is if you have three positions to put it in your goal needs to be that you're providing different information in all of those three positions position description and organization so in the position they say Performing Arts classical vocal okay it's like a category in the organization there's a clear mention of which Academy that student learned the classical music from shows credibility in the description learned certified classical vocal music for four years I like that it says four years it shows the time to improve my technique and and art history in ancient Indian tradition okay this shows that the student also likes to kind of be connected to Indian Roots being a part of the school team and winning at National competitions helped me become more expressive and step out of my comfort zone articulated my thoughts to Mentor younger students now I like both of these two sentences one because as an admissions officer I'm not really interested in the fact that you won a bronze medal I'm more interested in why did you feel the need to compete like what was your motivation behind that and this student expresses exactly that the student is trying to tell the admissions officer that they wanted to step out of their comfort zone and that's why they wanted to kind of challenge themselves it shows a very positive attitude as you for you as a student and it shows excellent discipline determination like sticking to an activity for four years is not a piece of cake and then lastly after like competing and whatnot that this student is passing on like their knowledge to the younger students by mentoring them so I like that part too now you can see both of the activities are literally the same so I see a lot of students that kind of try to mimic an activity for example I can give you a list of my activities my 10 activities that I did that I used to apply to college and I guarantee that if all of you guys were to copy the same exact activities they would look different and the reason behind that is it matters how you present these activities and what I guess what I want to mention here is when you're trying to describe the activity talk about key contributions challenges some innovative ideas and how and if you optimize something the admissions officers are more interested to know what you did rather than what you kind of achieved towards the end like the end goal is maybe a part of the activity but they want to know like what went on in the middle why did you do an activity like what was your motivation behind it if you faced a challenge how did you overcome that like things like that like they wanted all of these activities eventually are for them to understand your personality so that wraps up our profile comparison let me know what you guys thought of this video it was a little different than the ones that we usually do but I just thought you know uh getting all of this out there um after reviewing hundreds of profiles is something that might be useful to you guys as students and my last like key takeaway is the fact that you can be the smartest student in the room I was not the smartest kid in the class like honestly from the grades standpoint I would consider myself very very average I didn't get a 99 I didn't get a 95 I was in the 80s I was a very you know okay student but I was just genuinely very interested to do things outside the classroom like I was always the first one to participate in my school science exhibitions or sports activities I wasn't a big I wasn't big into like the cultural stuff but things that I really like and that is what you know showcases the personality of student someone who's a go-getter and is just personally motivated to do something and how well you can you know learn a skill whether that skill is inside a classroom or outside a classroom at the end of the day what matters is if you are able to communicate and present your profile you will be successful and this the kind of like the most average profile if presented in the right way can lead to great success and that's one of that's what I want to leave you guys off with if you guys are interested in the mentorship program they are one-on-one check the link in the description and we will end the video with our new tradition which is question of the day so today's question of the day is from Poonam who asked in the previous video what are the Visa interviews all about and what is the motto Behind These so let me kind of do like a quick summary of student visas basically if you are trying to come to the US to study you'll most likely need an F1 Visa in the F1 Visa um they basically ask you a couple questions things like uh what degree you're coming to study why are you coming to study in the US they'll ask for your I-20 which is a document that the college gives you um kind of confirming that you received admission and all that stuff and they may ask you a few questions as to what you plan on doing after graduation and the fact that why are you leaving your home country to come and study in the US these questions are mostly tailored to understand what your goals are and as a student um the ideal the most ideal way to answer these are to just you know be truthful about your academic intentions so talk to them about why you decided to choose a degree if you've been accepted into other colleges what are they that you may be asked how many colleges did you apply for why do you want to come and study in the US can be because of the facilities of the quality of Education because there's Cutting Edge innovation in your field things of that sort right keep your answers short to the point um and at the end of the day they are also trying to test your English just to see if you can communicate and understand their language so that's what the Visa interviews are all about um if you guys have any other questions about this video that we did or anything else drop those in the comments below subscribe to the channel if you haven't already smash the like button and I will see you guys in the next one bye [Music] thank you

Channel: Crazy Medusa

Views: 318,146

Keywords: saloni verma, saloni verma official, What gets you into an Ivy League school?, What is the easiest Ivy League school to get into?, How hard is it to get into an Ivy League?, What are characteristics of Ivy League?, What GPA to get into Ivy Leagues?, What is the lowest GPA accepted at Harvard?, Can a poor student get into Harvard?, Can an average student get into an Ivy?, What to do in high school to get into Ivy League?, Do you need straight A's to get into an Ivy League?

Id: lBQVmD6ZEsw

Length: 21min 8sec (1268 seconds)

Published: Mon Mar 06 2023