A (10:23)
I have a funny story about that. When we were in, my oldest daughter who at the time was interested in creative writing, we went to Boston to look at some schools and MIT was not necessarily on her list but I made her go because we were in Boston. And so they did have a creative writing major. We asked them about that like and it was just kind of an interesting response. It's like well yes, we have it as a major, but you wouldn't come here if that's all that you wanted to do. You'd have to also do all this other stuff. You'd have to be really steeped in STEM to be able to do that. But I thought that was kind of interesting that they did have that there. And the one thing I did want to add about the public universities is some states actually split up their schools by engineering and non engineering. So for example UNC Chapel Hill, they do offer some limited engineering, but their main engineering. If you really want to have the full breadth, you're going to go to NC State. The same thing in Indiana. You've got Purdue, which is very STEM focused, but a public university. And then same thing in Georgia, you've got Georgia Tech versus University of Georgia. So keep that in mind that there are some states where they'll split that up by STEM focused public or non engineering focused publics. Yeah. And then I guess the last category is if you really like like everything in your kind of a renaissance person, and you want to go deep in liberal arts, but you also feel like you want to have an engineering degree, There are a number of schools that are part of what's called a three plus two program with a liberal arts college. So those typically you would do three years at a liberal arts college and then you would do your last two years at an engineering school. So you would get two bachelor's degrees. One would be a Bachelor of Arts and sciences in something non engineering, and then you would get a Bachelor of Science in engineering. And so Columbia, Dartmouth, Washu, those are typically a lot of schools that offer that. The second part, which is the two years and then there's any number of liberal arts colleges that participate in that, from Bowdoin, Brandeis, Bryn Mawr, Colby, Milbury, Davidson, Muhlenberg, Claremont McKenna. There's like a number of liberal arts colleges that will participate in that. So that's where if you. They don't admit by major. So that's again if you're just not sure, but you think you might want to explore it later. The, the one caveat that is because you get the double major or double bachelor's, you have to do an extra year of college. So from a financial standpoint, it's not necessarily that great because you have an extra year of college. So sometimes it's better to maybe do the four years of a liberal arts college and then actually go and get a master's in engineering for the same amount of time and then you have a master's. So that's just one another pathway to think about. So we thought we would start now and do a case study. And so I wanted to start with Callie. And I call Kali an intellectually curious, interdisciplinary, service oriented engineer. So Callie is a top student at a private girls high school. Her highest math was multivariable calculus. She attended the prestigious Governor's school program in engineering. And that's a really competitive program that brings in the top students from the state. You have to be nominated by your school and then it's a fairly robust application and they typically only choose one or two students from each school that are eligible, depending on the size to be nominated. And they don't necessarily all get in. She did really well on her tests. She had a 1590 on her SATs and she took five AP exams by the end of junior year with fours and fives and she was taking four more. Senior year she had multiple interests from business to engineering, but she definitely wanted to do engineering in some capacity. But she hadn't yet decided exactly how she was going to do that. So she wasn't ready to commit to a specific engineering major. She had done significant volunteering at the community food bank. Her mom was very involved, so she started doing it when she was a little girl. She continued doing it throughout high school. She was on the teen board for the community food bank. She also volunteered with a prendolo, which was a program that was tutoring students for whom English isn't their first language. So she got a lot of good experience doing that. And she also did some operation stuff for them because everywhere she went she would kind of bring in that operation systems mindset and she would apply that to certain things. She was a pitcher for her softball team. She was also really into weightlifting and nutrition. And she was a counselor at a camp, like a camp tech counselor at a local day camp. So the strategy for Callie was to identify a list of highly select medium sized engineering colleges with various offerings. Again, because she wanted engineering, but she wasn't 100% committed to only engineering. Wanted to emphasize her interest in using engineering to impact the world. That was really her core message, highlighting the depth of service through the food bank and Apprendalo and how those experiences really impacted the lens in how she thought about engineering. Also in her application, we wanted to showcase her intellectual curiosity and how she really thinks about issues and problems, solving it through an interdisciplinary lens. So her main essay, she talked about a class in a bioethics class that she took in her high school that really pushed her to think about things in a more nuanced way. She used to be much more black and white about how she approach things, but that class gave her a lot of gray area to think about. And it really pushed her, her thinking in a way that she hadn't before. For her supplements we wanted. She talked a lot about all of the different experiences that she had and that how the interactions that she had through volunteering in the food bank showed her how she could use engineering to solve problems. Like one example she showed was that when she was working in the food bank, she was, you know, moving some boxes around and noticed that there was a lot of food that had expired so she started thinking about how you could use some sort of modeling or some sort of engineering to perhaps mitigate a problem like that in terms of moving foods around. So her list was her reach and sort of what I would call wild card schools, because there was really. Her academic profile was such that she was eligible for any school, but it was just a wild card. So University of Pennsylvania and Princeton were her reach wildcard schools. Her possible schools were Duke, Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Washington University in St. Louis, Vanderbilt and Cornell. Her target likelies were Rice, Tufts, uva and Michigan. And her safeties were University of Maryland and Rutgers. And so her strategy was to apply early decision to University of Pennsylvania. Going into this, she really wanted the most prestigious school that she could get. That's how she felt about it. So she applied there and she got deferred, which is never the thing that you want to do. So then she was somewhat. She was. She was disappointed, understandably so. But she had a lot of other schools out there. And then she also got Michigan back and got deferred, likely because they thought that she wouldn't. Wouldn't attend Michigan. And I think they were right on that front. And so then she went into the regular decision and she had a lot of great acceptances. She got into Johns Hopkins, Northwestern, Vanderbilt Corporation, Cornell, Tufts, Uva, Maryland and Rutgers. She was waitlisted at Duke, WashU, and she was denied ultimately from Penn and Princeton. And so then she was trying to decide where she wanted to go. And it was interesting because as she went back and looked at all of the different schools, she really fell in love with Johns Hopkins because it was a perfect fit for her intellectual, lots of ability to explore her different. She had a lot of time to decide what she ultimately wanted to major in, and it really fit her. The other thing was there was the gym that was right near the dorm. And that was kind of a clincher for her because she liked the fact that it was a smaller campus and she could just see herself really fitting in and doing well there. So ultimately that's where she ended up matriculating. Fantastic.