UCLA Admissions

so I've been the director of admissions of UCLA for about four years now prior to that of all places I worked in the emission office at USC for seven years before that I worked in the emission office at Pitzer College out in Claremont for six years and then before that long time ago I worked in the emission office at the College of William and Mary back in Virginia I grew up in Virginia moved out to California in 99 and I've been here ever since so I love it here I'm a Californian I don't even mind the traffic anymore that's a lie but I have to say that but I really have enjoyed my time in California I share a little bit about my professional background so that as I'm talking about our admission process which is really what I want to focus on with you this afternoon on you understand that I can I can give a little bit of perspective to what we do and how it's similar or different from other institutions and I'll kind of give the big reveal it's more similar than it is different to every other institution that I've been a part of even a small liberal arts college like Pitzer the way we read applications and make admission decisions is much more similar between those two schools than you might imagine I was the first person in my family to go to college I went to a place called Christopher Newport University which very few people outside of Virginia have heard of and really have never had any professional door not open for me because people didn't recognize the name of my undergraduate alma mater so I think again to echo what Rob said you know you you make you great you're a big part of what makes these institution so special so don't think that it's just them imparting their value on you but it's you contributing something to the undergraduate institution that you'll be a part of so I want to as I said talk a little bit specifically about the admission process at UCLA and and maybe the UCS in general and I'll I'll add some some some character of some of the private institutions I've worked at as a part of those remarks but the first thing to understand about us at UCLA the the volume is a little scary and there's just no way around so we had 97 thousand students freshman applicants for admission this past year 22 thousand transfer applicants so a total of 119 thousand students applied for admission made UCLA this past year that's a lot it's a whole lot it's more than anybody else in the country I don't really say that as a form of pride to be honest with you they're not excited about that we don't brag about that that's not something that we thump our chests and say hey look at us it's just a fact of the matter that this is a remarkable institution we're in a very populous state we get a lot of interest from students in California and around the world and I think I'm happy that so many students are interested in our institution but that volume certainly creates some challenges for us and the biggest challenge is really maintaining this commitment that we have to a holistic undergraduate admission process we care deeply about every part of the application believe me with 119,000 apps there isn't a lot of fluff in the application everything that's there matters it contributes something to the admission decision otherwise we wouldn't ask wouldn't ask you to provide that information if it wasn't valuable to us in some way there is one application for the UC system allowed this this is something that you'll become familiar with but you'll start to get to here are these other terms like the common application the common application is an application that's accepted by most private colleges and universities in the country and a growing number of public institutions utilize the common application as well we are not a part of the common application the UC application is its own thing we use this application you fill it out electronically you submit it one time and it goes to whichever of the nine undergraduate campuses you choose to apply to so it allows you to just do one app and apply to as many of the institutions as you'd like you have to pay a separate application fee for each school you can apply to nine I think that would be kind of crazy but you could apply to nine but it's up to you to determine how many of those campuses that you want to apply to the deadline is November 30th the application is open now so for you seniors you're able to start working on the UC application right now you can't submit it until the month of November but you can begin working on it and preparing and getting familiar with it in time to click Submit but that eases things for you a little bit so you're filling out one application for the UC maybe you're filling out the common app for a number of institutions you might apply to there many private schools have a supplement to the common application which you'll fill out that is specific to that institution so when I worked at se we accepted the common app but we had a supplement to the common app that was specific to our University so we asked a couple of additional like short answer questions and asked students to provide some additional information so that we can understand your fit with our institution and not just seeing all the common information that you might provide in an application so for the UCS you fill out the one application you click submit by November 30th and that's when we really begin our work and I'm going to talk about the freshmen process here I'm not going to talk much about the transfer I'm happy to answer questions about that later but I figured you want to really hear a little bit more about the freshmen process so once you click Submit on the application that the information is disseminated to each of the campuses that you might have applied to it goes up to the office of the president first in Oakland and then they disperse the information out to each of the campuses you apply to when you apply to UCLA I could care less where else you've applied and I say that because I don't want anybody to leave this room thinking that there's any kind of information sharing amongst the UCS I'm not calling my counterpart at Berkeley and say hey you've taken this one all right we're going to state you not like none of that kind of stuff happened so you're being considered as an individual student for each campus that you've applied to there's no sharing of information when it comes to the decisions that we're going to be making but even with the volume that we have at UCLA every application is read at least twice before a decision is made and I mean read again if all we cared about were GPA and SAT scores we could fill our class with an Excel spreadsheet in an hour and save ourselves a lot of trouble be easy to do if all that matter were numbers we could start and end with a microsoft office tool and fill our class but that's not the kind of process that our faculty one to run they are interested in and looking for students that are going to come to UCLA and continue to make this place special and we cannot figure that out by just looking at a couple of numbers you're much more than a set of numbers now what are the things that we are looking at what are the things that we consider and care about in the admission process well certainly the backbone of any application is your grade are your grades and your curriculum in high school so if I if I were to talk about this from a deficit standpoint the most difficult deficit to overcome in our admission process would be poor performance in the classroom so if the grades aren't there if you're not taking the kind of rigorous program that's going to make you competitive in our process then that's going to be a challenge because that's the thing that is most indicative of student success on our campus we can see from the data that when we look at students with unweighted weighted GPAs ApS honors classes these kinds of things we can see that the quality of success the level of success that that student achieves once they're enrolled at UCLA is directly tied to the quality of work they've done in their high school program so I think we're certainly going to look for that in the process so I think for those of you as that are in your senior year you're going to report out to us in the application what are the grades and curriculum that you've taken in high school for those of you that are a little bit earlier in high school my advice to you is challenge yourself push yourself a little bit academically take those rigorous / rigorous classes honors AP IB classes that are available to you now here's where the admission counselor part of me is going to talk out of both sides of my mouth okay so I'm going to tell you on one hand on end this is this is as honest as I can be we admit at 18 percent of the students that applied last year if you want to be competitive in our process you need to have really taken a rigorous program in high school you need to take advantage of those honors AP and IB classes the counselor part of me is going to tell you please don't push yourself too much and what I mean by that is you got it you got to have a life you got to take some time to get involved outside of class do some things that you love do some things you know and I hate to counter one thing Rob said but don't everything you do isn't about how it looks on a college application do something stupid just because it's dumb you're you're a teenager like you're when you're in your 20s dumb means a lot more than it does right now so take the time to do the things that you love and yes find things that you love that maybe you can talk about in a college application but don't let the motivation is one of the things that you know a question I get a lot is you know what type of service should I be involved in good grief the one that you care about like this isn't I don't want you to go out and do service because you're checking off a box on an application I want you to do because you care about the people that you're serving you care about you know whatever community is that you're committing yourself to so I I want you to find that balance and I think you can find that balance if you really develop a college list that isn't just places that have our level of selectivity because regardless of how well you've done this process is going to be inherently unpredictable when you have things that are qualitative and quantitative you can't always predict the outcome so do the things that you love do the things that you care about apply to a broad range of schools where you've got some that you're confident that you're going to be admitted to those institutions and you know you could thrive and do well there you can take a lot of stress out of this process so that's the part one like be a teenager do some fun things you know it's not all about because I think what's what's happening now is we have more and more students for now young people you know people who are you know well into their late 20s and early 30s and high school is all about getting into the right College your undergraduate program is all about getting into the right MBA or JD or you know our medical school and then you wind up in your adulthood working or you have a family and you look back and you're like I didn't really need that I don't really have fun I didn't really get to be a kid it was all about get the next step you know maximize that next opportunity so find that balance so that just do what you can to really find that balance so certainly as I said the backbone of the application is going to be the academic work that you've done the strength of curriculum and the grades that you earn there if you stumble a little bit early on are you dead in the water absolutely not we do look at trends we do want to see if you stumble early on that you're you're on the right track going into senior year now you see is a little unique in the sense that our UC GPA is based on sophomore and junior year so you're going to report your freshman grades in the application but the first one grades don't impact that UC GPA you're going to report the classes that you're taking in your senior year but in the initial decision whatever grades yearning in those is not going to impact the admission decision okay so it's really just sophomore in junior year that those grades are the ones that we're going to be paying closest attention to now for every other institution that I've been a part of strike that comment every other place I've been we're looking at everything freshman sophomore junior or first semester senior year all of it matters so word is wise it all matters so just push yourself and make sure that you're doing well and in each of those air sir Tinley as a senior don't take your foot off the gas pedal at the end of the at the end of the process because I to be honest today rescinded an admission offer for a student who in their last semester got a couple of FS so just one you know getting admitted isn't the end of the process you got to finish strong you got to finish in the way to gain you admission to begin with to make sure that you you push through to the end there when it comes to things outside of class what should you be involved in what I said before do what you love do the thing that you care about and what I would say is it's it's not the length of the resume that matters as much as it is the depth of commitment to the things that you do that really stands out to us so we like to see students who are sticking with it you know doing something and doing it over a long period of time you know don't all of a sudden in your senior year decide I'm going to get the Spanish club and I will join the yearbook and I'm going to do all these things because we're going to see through that you know we want to see longevity we want to see commitment because to be honest the the reason why we care about those things is we want to know what kind of member of the community are you going to be on our campus are you going to be somebody who gets involved grows takes on progressive leadership and responsibility and really commit yourself to whatever activities you might be involved in so that pattern is kind of what we're looking for in high school the myth of the well-rounded applicant everybody thinks we're looking for well-rounded applicants sure I've got nothing against a student who is well-rounded but I also have nothing against a student who is perfectly lopsided a student who they've got these one or two things that they are passionate about that they love doing research and they've thrown themselves into this kind of research they've been involved in this particular service program for a number of years and they've committed themselves to that great don't join things disingenuously because you're trying to pad your resume now I'm not saying to stop at one thing but you know find the balance again find the things that you love and commit yourself to those things think less about what it is that that that I want to see you about more about what it is that you want to say what are the things that you really want us to know about you what are the things you care about and be sure that you're you're really pouring yourself into those kinds of activities in high school standardized testing boy so we require that you take either the SAT or the a CT you have no preference which one you take if you take them both whichever one you do better on is the score that we're going to consider in the decision making process we've got the new

Channel: Premier College Guidance

Views: 53,352

Rating: 4.9579315 out of 5

Keywords: Premier College Guidance, UCLA, College Admissions, How to get accepted, extracurricular activities, SAT, ACT, College Essay, Comprehensive Review, Holistic Review

Id: 2heNS3z3ByM

Length: 15min 0sec (900 seconds)

Published: Wed Oct 19 2016