MORE Activities Colleges Don't Care About! What could HURT your admissions chances!

hey guys are you wondering what activities may hurt your chances at college admission if so that's what we're going to talk about in this video [Music] before we get too far into this video but I first want to do is remind everyone to subscribe to our channel if you haven't already you can do that by clicking on subscribe below this video the other thing that I want to remind everyone is that we have an awesome video based prep series for the AC T it's called the best ATP prep course ever you can check it out now at super tutor tv.com it's over 50 hours of video instruction I've coached a student to a perfect score on the AC T and many other students to perfect scores in individual sections so if you're prepping for that test it's a great way to get prepared it's like private tutoring but much more affordable so go check that out we're also coming out with the best SAT prep course ever this fall fall 2018 so if you're studying for the SAT and you've got a little bit of time sign up for our newsletter at super tutor tv.com slash subscribe I will keep you in the loop for when that drops so before I get too far into this video I know I have another video called activities colleges don't care about and in that video I really went over from my personal experience what kind of activities colleges don't necessarily see as like a bonus factor in admissions but this video is different from that video in a few ways and that's what I want to talk about right now the first way that this video is different from that video is that I'm going to be going over some ideas that actually might hurt your college application rather than just be sort of neutral forces that don't do anything that's the first difference and then the second difference is this is not about what I think it's not about my opinion it's literally about social science research or survey data that I've found from reading different articles and different sources so let's get into this video so the first category of activities that colleges tended to potentially discriminate against are activities that are deemed career oriented career oriented means that these extracurricular activities are the kind of activities that are getting you ready for a real-world career that could be a co-op work program that teaches you how to do things like auto mechanics or air conditioning installation or we're dressing but it could also be some very well-known organizations like ROTC or JROTC 4-h club or who's you're farmers of america this is based on research from a couple of Princeton sociologists Thomas Espen shade and Alexandria Walton Radford they've conducted research basically on college admissions and who gets in and who doesn't and what sort of forces may be at work in that whole college admissions equation here's what they found correlated this is kind of crazy they found that if you were involved in those activities and moreover if you were in a leadership position in those activities that you had a 60% less probability of being accepted to a top-tier school the authors of this study speculate that this trend may be due to the fact that colleges were worried that when students were really involved in these organizations that these students may not actually even want to attend University that they may be on the fence whether even to go to college and that that kind of attitude may have been reflected in their applications and that might be why these correlate in that way at the same time others have said oh my goodness this is totally anti red states discrimination and what it's doing is its marginalizing whites who may live in rural areas and keeping those people from admission to elite schools and that's totally unfair so the next kind of activity that might hurt you on your college application is what I will call online shenanigans what I mean by that is being involved on the Internet in some way on social media in a way that's identifiable that potentially makes you look bad and this is based on a survey that was done recently of college admissions officers to competitive universities so this isn't necessarily just elite University is its competitive universities whatever that means and they found that 30 to 40 percent of admissions officers had used internet searches at some point during their evaluation of students they found that anywhere between thirty and forty two percent of the time depending on the study that you looked at that that internet search ended up hurting the applicant that they looked up online so I think that's just a fair warning to say when you're online be careful don't say things that are inflammatory don't associate your names with controversy whether it's political controversy religious concert can't reverse e or otherwise and similarly if you're talking about even positively about other universities on your Twitter feed and saying how much you love that university you've got to be careful because Harvard doesn't want to know that you're in love with Dartmouth that's not going to convince Harvard that it should let you in it probably will make one point gosh why should we admit you you don't even like her College that much so be really careful about the things that you post online the other thing that I'll say though is that some of these people who did search the internet said that what they found positively impacted their decision in favor of the students so there's also like around a 40% chance that whatever you have online will help you so just because you have some sort of online presence maybe you have a youtube channel maybe you have a blog maybe you have a very active Twitter account just because you're involved online doesn't mean what you're doing is going to hurt you but I do think it means that just like with everything else you need to be careful when it comes to your digital footprint okay and then finally so my last kind of activity that may not help your college application and could actually hurt it would be doing stereotypically Asian activities if you are Asian so don't shoot the messenger please this is just based on a study okay so a study in the Asian Journal of Social Psychology published in 2017 by Daniel chai and Alison Wesley found that in a survey and this was a hypothetical survey mind you it wasn't an actual survey so this isn't based on actual data it's based on a hypothetical survey okay in which they had admissions officers from competitive and selective colleges answer a battery of questions based on hypothetical situations so they'd say to them hey here's hypothetical student a here's hypothetical student B tell me what you think their chances of admission are right so it's a survey it's not actual admissions percentages and so it could have bias in it based on what people think versus what people actually do if that makes sense okay but what this survey found was that they had modelled essentially this stereotypical Asian American and then they presented this student to these admissions officers - half of these admissions officers okay and the stereotypical Asian American had activities that were quote stereotypically Asian American these activities included playing the violin and a chamber orchestra participating in school Science Olympiad club fencing and participating on the math team so those were like the stereotypically asian activities on the other hand they also presented a non stereotypical Asian American who had non stereotypically Asian American activities and those activities were playing drums in a rock band participating in student government playing baseball and being photographer for the school yearbook so these were their composite characters and the way that they modeled their study is they had half the counselors were asked to evaluate two Asian American students and one had the stereotypical activities and the other did not and then the rest of the group was asked to evaluate two white students who had the same activity role so basically what they found is that among the white students the responses were very similar right the social competence factor judgment for these students that were white Americans was within range of each other right they were statistically probably not too Stickley significantly different in terms of whether they had these stereotypically asian activities or counter stereotypically asian activities the white students were like oh cool according to the people but what they found is that when they judge the social competence of the Asian American students when the Asian American students had the non stereotypical activities those students were actually judged to be more socially competent than even the white kids but when they had the stereotypically Asian American activities they were judged to be less socially competent than the white kids if that makes sense and less socially competent obviously than the asian-american non-stereotypical kid based on the activities the other factors that they judged were what contribution of diversity with these students offer basically the Serio typical Asian was not judged to offer much diversity to the college campus in comparison to the non stereotypical Asian American and the white Americans were judged to have less contribution of diversity overall as well I don't know if there was statistical significance between the Asian American stereotypical activity kid and both white American kids but there definitely was a discrepancy between that non stereotypical Asian American and the stereotypical Asian American in terms of the activities role okay so what do you make of this and what do you do if you're an asian-american student and you do stereotypical Asian American activities well my best advice is I've worked with students before who do have stereotypical Asian American activities but who has spun those activities in ways that make them seem unique so my best advice to you is if you're in that boat and you have the potential to be marginally discriminated against because you're doing things that sound stereotypical probably your best plan of attack is when you approach your essays to make sure that you seem like you are an individual and you are your own person and you're not just a stereotype I'm not discouraging you from doing whatever it is that you love but I am encouraging you to find what it is that makes you unique and find a way to tell that story even if your activities alone don't tell it I hope you guys like this video if so please give it a thumbs up subscribe to our channel if you haven't already and I will see all of you guys next time on super tutor TV and if you missed our first video on activities colleges don't care about go check it out because there's more I'll see you guys later

Channel: SupertutorTV

Views: 253,234

Keywords: SAT, ACT, Brooke, Brooke Hanson, Hanson, prep, SAT prep, ACT prep, college, harvard, princeton, yale, supertutortv, tv, super tutor, admissions, high school, learning, tutor, tutoring, activities, volunteer, volunteering, extracurricular, sports, team, club, clubs, teams, application, colleges don't care

Id: oOWm-6ZvQKQ

Length: 10min 17sec (617 seconds)

Published: Thu Jul 05 2018