Always great advice… thank you. I have appreciated your realistic, pragmatic guidance. I will share what worked for my S23, so maybe it will help others if they still have kiddos to go in the process.
We treated safeties and matches with the utmost importance.
S23 is 3.8 uw, 33 ACT, 7 AP’s, white male, varsity athlete, good music EC’s, from a small private school. “Average excellent” in every way. So I was worried…
One we developed a balanced list, we decided demonstrated interest was going to be our strategy. It seemed to us, that other than Institutional priorities, Yield was extremely important to colleges with SO many kids applying to SO many schools.
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We looked up online what the respective admission counsellors looked like, got their names & read about them.
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We scheduled official visits at each match and safety school. We emailed the admissions officer that we were coming… sometimes with a question… and that we looked forward to meeting them.
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We sought them out at the visit. We had a prepared question. We introduced ourselves, tried to share some personal, memorable things, so maybe they would remember son when reading app. Tried to make a connection. We followed up after the visit with an email and what son liked about the school, how excited he was about school X, and how he intended to apply EA and hoped they would enjoy reading his app.
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If the admission counselor was not there at the visit and we did not get to meet, we followed up with an email of all things he liked and how excited he was to apply to school X.
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Some schools if we liked them and they stayed on the list, we visited twice. We did all day events if available during junior Spring, Summer before senior year or Fall of senior year. Some of the communication listed above was done around the second visit,… and we told them that we loved it so much that we had to come back.
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We also signed up to receive schools email & did tons of virtual events.
I know this seems like overkill, but it worked for my son to the EA schools where he applied. He went 4/4 on match & safeties where he did this. And 2/3 on low reaches where he did this.
The schools on his list that he did not do this demonstrated interest, he got deferred.
I think applying alone is not enough anymore.
It also got my son excited about these schools… showing all this interest.
Visit match and safeties first.
My heart goes out to all of you in this current cycle. Maybe this will help someone in the future.