How to get into college

Thank you so much to Tina Zeng and Daniel Halpern for reviewing this post.

To my lowerclassmen friends at ERHS…

Who am I and who is this for?

My name is Ryan and I am a first-generation, low-income student from Eleanor Roosevelt High School in NYC. I am attending Columbia University for my undergraduate degree in Computer Science. This post is a collection of thoughts that I think are helpful to having a good high school career and a successful college application. I particularly hope this post can help young students (8th graders, freshmen, sophomores, juniors) who are from a similar background as me achieve their academic goals. These thoughts are a hodge podge of anecdotal insights, advice, intuitions, and opinions of mine so take everything as you will. The blog also includes insights from Tina Zeng, someone who I deeply respect and is now an undergrad at Yale University.

Here are all the schools I applied to and the result:

Rejected	Waitlisted	Accepted
Stanford (Deferred)	Princeton	Columbia (John Jay Scholar)
Yale	Carnegie Mellon University	Cornell
Upenn	Rice	Johns Hopkins
NYU	University of Washington St Louis	Georgetown
		Vanderbilt
		Williams College
		GIT (CS)
		University Of Virginia (Rodman Scholar)
		Macaulay Honors College
		Stonybrook (Honors)

Cultivate a Strong Mindset (8th grader/Freshman)

Your mindset is probably the most important thing to get right as everything else will naturally fall in place afterward (i.e. motivation, work, and personality). This is not groundbreaking advice but have a growth mindset, be active, do things, and think about the long term. If you are a freshman taking the time to read this then I imagine you are already a go-getter; keep doing what you are doing. The first thing you must know about getting into college is that you CAN get into a great college. You don’t need to be a founder of a Fortune 500 company or win International Olympiads. What you do need is agency, independence, resiliency, intellectual curiosity, and an entrepreneurial spirit. In addition, one trait that is often undervalued is being a good person; someone who cares about humanity and truly believes in their ideas. I think there are numerous benefits to being a good person including better mental health and deeper connections with other humans. Humans are naturally drawn to helping other good humans.

Develop Beliefs (Freshman/Sophomore)

Develop good, interesting, and nuanced ideas. It’s incredible how in modern society we can just freely listen to the smartest people in the world and have the freedom to adopt their ideas. You can be much more certain that if a smart person has thought long and hard about a subject then their ideas will have merit in them. This doesn’t mean the beliefs are guaranteed to be right or that your beliefs have to be right. Determining what is right is wrong is intuitively simple but difficult when applied, just pick and choose what you think is most right and always be open-minded to new ideas. For me, I thought developing strong beliefs and ideas was critical in helping me land extracurricular activities that led to strong compounding growth as I met more interesting people to discuss with. Here are some of the people who influenced the way I think: Melanie Mitchell, Andrej Karpathy, Henry Kissinger, Lee Kuan Yew, 80,000 hours, Andrew Ng, Yann LeCun, etc.

Extra Curricular Activities (Sophomore/Junior)

There are so many free programs out there that want to help students like YOU. You are their target. However, prestigious programs are very selective so view this opportunity as a trial run for the college application process. Be ambitious and apply widely. As you are writing your essays, start deeply reflecting on what you might want to do in the future and the stories that made you who you are. If you are in NYC, the specialized high schools have a great database of opportunities. Some programs I joined were: ARISE NYU, Young Ambassador @ EFL Stern, and Civics Unplugged’s Digital Citizen Fellowship.

There are also so many great organizations out there like: Girls Who Code, AI4ALL, Google’s Code Next, etc. Take advantage of all of them.

Thoughts from Tina: “Think about program acceptances as a feedback loop. In addition, don’t feel pigeonholed in only applying to programs you have some background in – often if you can articulate why you want to participate in a program that you have no previous experience in, you’ll be fine. In the future, if you want to do more activities related to those programs, it’ll be easier.”

Exploring Interests

As you start to develop ideas, don’t pigeonhole yourself into activities. Take the time to explore. For me, I was interested in photography, filmmaking, economics, history, rock climbing, and AI.

Fit is extremely important

Each school, organization, and institution has its own culture, strengths, and passions. Most students underrate the importance of understanding these aspects of the schools they are applying to. My experience applying to Georgetown really solidified my thoughts on this. Even though I felt like I did not have the “best” essays for Georgetown, I believe what got me in was my incredible conversation about policy with my interviewer and how aligned my career goals were to initiatives at Georgetown like CSET. While I am unfortunately not able to attend Georgetown due to financial reasons, I hope to cross paths with the university in the future. Another example is Columbia, a school that truly prides itself in its Core Curriculum. If you can appreciate and understand why the University believes in it so much and how you can grow from being part of it, then it is likely your chances of getting in would increase (make sure to mention the Core Curriculum in your Columbia essays).

Recommendation Letters/Competitions

I view these elements of the application as just stamps of confirmation to decrease the uncertainty the admission officers may have of you: recommendation letters are a confirmation of your character and competitions are a confirmation of your skills. Letter of recommendations are one of the most underrated parts of the application – don’t make this mistake.

I think Karpathy has good ideas on recommendation letters (go to references, references, references): A Survival Guide to a PhD (karpathy.github.io)

Testing (SAT)/Grades

I’m going to make this simple for you. Use Khan Academy’s SAT prep. Then just try your best on the test. You really don’t have to spend money on anything, only time and effort. Test scores are just one part of your application.

Kartpathy also has good ideas on doing well: Andrej’s advice for success (stanford.edu)

Concluding thoughts

These are just thoughts that I believe helped me but that doesn’t necessarily mean they will help you. There is no right way of doing anything and everybody’s story is different. Furthermore, there is just so much luck involved and maybe some black magic happening in the background…[I have this theory that counselors are doing selective nudges in the background, but I cannot confirm. I promise I am not a conspiracy theorist]. I think as long as you are thinking, moving, failing, and improving, you will do great. Good luck and enjoy the journey!