My interview with a Tufts admissions officer

A few years ago, I interviewed Aidan, who was working as an admissions officer at Tufts. He offered such helpful responses to my questions and helped to clear up a lot of the more mysterious/confusing aspects of the admissions process. I hope you find it helpful too.

Do you personally visit schools? How important is the school and geography that a student comes from?

In a lot of admission offices, especially in the highly selective realm, most offices will have a territory management model where the office carves up the country and the world into “territories” that different officers are responsible for. A really big part of our job is the contextual process. Is that something you’ve heard of? 

Contextual in terms of knowing a lot about the high schools students are coming from? 

Yes, exactly. So a big part of the job of an admissions officer in this territory management model is forming relationships with the counseling staff at different high schools and understanding demographics of the different territories, what the different schools are like, their grading systems, and what level of opportunities there are. 

For example, there was a student in my territory this year who was from Buggytown, USA in the heart of Amish country. It was important for me to know that there aren’t as many extracurricular opportunities for that student as a student in Pittsburgh or a wealthy Boston suburb.

A big part of our job is understanding that context so that, when we’re evaluating applicants, we’re considering what they’ve achieved in the context of the opportunities available to them in their high school, in their communities, what obligations they have from their families, what their financial resources are, and what the educational background of their family is.

I think there’s often a big fallacy in the way that the general public perceives admission, as if we’re taking two files side by side and comparing them and deciding which of the two that we’re going to take. Not a single time in our process does that happen. 

We’re never making comparisons between two students or even the students at the same high school. So that’s the idea of the individual context, of each student having their own family background, ethnic background, financial circumstances, community, high school, and interests. 

Yes, and it is so complex because you might have multiple contexts converging in one student, like multiple circles of a Venn diagram overlapping to form that student. For example, you might have a student who goes to a well-resourced school, but their parents didn’t go to college.     

Right, it’s totally and completely intersectional and each student is different. 

Can a student help contextualize themselves? I know that at certain schools, guidance counselors do an excellent job giving that context, but at other schools, guidance counselors might be stretched thin. 

Yes, absolutely. That's a great point you make about the counselors having an opportunity to do that, but not necessarily having the bandwidth to write a long explanation of a student's circumstances. And often, counselors don't even know that their recommendation letter can be a place for that type of information or even how useful that information is to us as admission officers. 

It's always really great to see a student self-advocate and take the initiative to explain what their circumstances are. So the additional information section is absolutely a great place for a student to explain any type of family dynamics, like having to contribute to a household income, a lack of extracurriculars, or a scheduling conflict that prevented them from taking a certain AP class. Those details are helpful. 

What can be not as helpful is when the students try to use the additional information section as a place to write another, more flowery essay in a way that they would for their personal statement. I think it's best when the facts can speak for themselves. We absolutely want to see those details and contextualize them. But it's certainly not meant to be a place to just share another full, cohesive, 650-word polished essay. 

So students can put as much relevant information in the additional info section as long as it’s succinct? Are bullet points ok?

Yes, and bullet points are fine. 

The other thing is, it’s not always clear to students when they're filling out the Common App what counts as an activity for the activities section. A few years ago, they added an activities category for family responsibilities. 

The extracurriculars are meant to capture anything the student does outside of the classroom. That can be attending religious services. It can be having to make breakfast for siblings in the morning because their parents leave for work early. It can be taking care of contributing to the care of a parent or grandparent. It can be a paid job. What’s not as helpful is something like, “Oh, I read 10 hours a week, or I lift weights.” That’s not necessarily the spirit of it. 

One of my favorite things to see is a paid job. I think that's really impressive because they’re learning a lot of really great practical skills that they can apply once they become college students. We would count that just as much as being, you know, captain of the football team or another more fancy activity that's equally as valid. If you spend 20 hours a week working at Dunkin Donuts to help contribute to family expenses, that is very significant and meaningful. Those are the contextual pieces that students might not typically think to include as a “traditional extracurricular” because it's not a debate club.  

Do you think there is a section of the application that students don't think about enough or don't spend enough time on? Would you say the activities section? 

Yes. I think it really is a great place on the application where students can sell themselves in a very compelling way. But most of the students I see really don't take  that opportunity to its full potential. 

I often tell students that the really great thing to think about the activity section is the description. I think there's 150 characters that students have to describe the activity. A lot of students barely take up any of that space and they might write, “First chair in violin” if they're in the orchestra. 

But I think there's a cool opportunity to treat that description like a Tweet and to make it a very pithy, mini essay about not just what you do, but why you do it and why it's meaningful to you. 

We probably know what Model U.N. is, so we don't need a description of what exactly that is. I appreciate when students take that extra effort and use that space to the maximum potential. 150 characters doesn't sound like a lot, but you can do a lot of really impactful stuff with it. Students should take the time to think, “How can I maximize the space? What does this allow the admission officer to learn about me?” 

Do you think there’s a place on the common app students spend too much time on?

That's a good question. I think a lot of students, especially with a personal statement, agonize over what prompt they choose. There's maybe five or six different problems that students can select from on the Common App. This might just be me, but I have a feeling that a lot of other admissions officers are the same. Very rarely do I pay conscious attention to which essay prompts a student has selected for their essay. 

What advice can you give to students who are struggling with the personal statement? 

One of the first questions we ask ourselves is “What did we learn about this student?” You would hope after reading all these different pieces of an application you learn something about them. But very often we're at a loss for something to grab on to. I think students focus a lot on trying to give us what they think we want to hear in the personal statement. 

You can write a really great essay about literally any topic. It can be about your ride to school on the bus and writing about which pieces of your city or which landmarks in your town are meaningful to you or meaningful to your development as a character. 

What's really important is that we get insight into what ideas are in their head, how they think about the world around them, and what position they see themselves in the context of their community. 

You can write a really compelling essay about a very mundane topic, and you can also write a really boring essay about an otherwise very exciting topic. It's almost not so much the topic itself, but what it reveals about the student. Students would do well to think, “If an admissions officer is reading my application they don't know me. This essay is an opportunity for me to teach them what I want them to know about me after they read this essay.” The intentionality of the essay is really important. 

One piece of advice I've given my students is to think about their application as a puzzle. Each essay doesn’t need to tell their whole story. Instead, each essay can tell part of their story, and all of these essays come together to create a narrative as a whole. 

Yes, that’s a really great analogy. That's something that I thought of myself when I was applying to college. When I was applying to Brown, there was one question about a community that you're a part of. And for the longest time, I was agonizing over the question. Like I said earlier, a mistake students often make is to think too hard about the question. It was really getting down to the deadline, and I was like, “Oh, my God, what's a community like? What am I going to write about for this stupid essay?” I finally took a step back and I remembered that the admissions officers are only going to know about me what they learned through my application, either from me or from my counselor or from my teachers. 

I'd been doing dance at school as part of the performing arts department, but I realized I hadn't talked about that in my application. As a community, we had a really great way that we choreographed and danced together, so I decided I could talk about my dance class as a community. That was a really great way to answer that essay. 

It’s important to make sure that each individual component comes together to tell a story about you, whether it's your extracurriculars, your essay, your different supplemental essays, or your teacher recommendations. Each individual one doesn't have to represent the whole picture, but they should add up to the important things that you think they should know about you.