<p>Hi everyone. I was just wondering how the recruiting process goes. I am a sophomore who plays field hockey at my school. I am not a prodigy or anything but i am pretty good. Do you think I have a shot to plat field hockey for Columbia?? Oh my gpa is 3.8 and psat is 200</p>
<p>Well this question would be better directed at the specialty admissions forum but since I just finished going through this process a few weeks ago I will give you some advice. The best thing for you to do right now as a sophomore is to continue to improve and make a berecruited.com profile for free which can help coaches to see your academic and athletic profile.
Then when you become a junior you are allowed to email the coaches and meet with them when you go to tour Columbia. Also a vital part of being recruited is your SAT score. Basically the lower your SAT score is the better you have to be in order to get the coaches interested in you. So if you get a 2200+ SAT score it will help you out a lot in the recruitment process and will make Ivy league coaches much more interested in you. During your junior year you should prepare a well written email describing your athletic and academic achievements and send it to the coach so that they will know you are interested in Columbia. Then they will probably email you every now and then to see if you have made any progress and to start to gauge your interest in Columbia.
After your junior year is over is where recruitment starts to get fast paced. After July 1st coaches are allowed to call potential recruits once a week. This is usually the time where they will start talking to the applicants they are most serious about. Then after September 1st they are allowed to offer potential recruits an official visit. Getting an official visit is the hardest part of recruitment and if you get one then you are on the coaches very short list of recruits they are interested in because they have to pay for all of the expenses to bring you to Columbia and feed you while your there. My official at Columbia was a ton of fun and they aren’t nearly as stressful as I feared. But during the official the coaches will have a one on one meeting with each recruit and see if the recruit is willing to apply ED to Columbia. Then they can run your profile by their admissions department to see if they can get the recruit in and if they can, then they will issue the recruit a likely letter and then that recruit is essentially guaranteed admission.
After going through the entire process and getting a LL my best advice is to make sure that you are diligent in emailing the coaches with every single new development. They want to see frequent communication and they use that to gauge a recruits interest in the school. I sent an email to the Columbia coach at the beginning of my junior year and kept him updated on competitions and grades and SATs all throughout my junior year. It let him know that I was seriously interested in Columbia which was crucial in me getting an official visit.
Another thing you should be mindful of is that not every sport is allowed recruits. Particularly at Ivy leagues where admissions spots are so valuable. You should look into if Ivy’s even recruit for field hockey and if so, how many recruits they are able to get. You could send the coach an email now if you wanted to ask about it.
Anyways I know my response was long but I hope it helped!</p>