 Today's video is going to be the next installment in my Ivy League Secret series. Like I said in the last video, this series is going to be focused around me, sharing my personal experiences, stories, and advice to help you guys get into your dream school. I've made some videos about when to start your college applications or when to start writing your college essays, but I've never really laid out kind of a concrete time schedule. What you guys should be thinking about each year of high school. One of my goals for this series is to have a video covering each grade of high school and sharing with you guys what I was doing during that time and giving you guys tips on what classes, extracurriculars, or outside projects to take on. This episode is not going to be that, not yet. Rather, this video will be a broad overview of how I approach the college application process from the time I first thought about college to the moment I got my Yale acceptance letter. I'm really excited for this video because I know a lot of you guys are like freshmen or sophomores that have heard about this whole college application thing but don't really know where to start and don't really know what you should be doing each year of high school. Before I get into it, I do want to mention that today's video is sponsored by Crimson Education. Crimson Education is going to help all of you guys out that are overwhelmed with college applications or don't know really where to start at the moment. If you've been watching my channel for a while, I guarantee you've been recommended at least one of their videos that have been created to help a student's dream of studying at a top-ranked college possible. Crimson Education's main goal is to connect students with a team of strategists, mentors and tutors that will help them create a successful college application. Whether that be extracurricular and leadership projects, college essay topic help or brainstorming, or even SAT prep and tutoring. The best part is that it actually works and they've had over 330 offers to top 50 colleges since 2013. For those of you applying internationally, don't worry Crimson has over 25 offices across the globe. If you've ever felt lost in your college apps, you don't know where to start or maybe you just want to stand out in the growing competition. Definitely get in touch with Crimson to hear about a customized plan that is affordable for you. I'll leave my own personal link down in the description below. There's a form you fill out. They'll contact you immediately and help set up a plan that'll work for you. So definitely go check that out. Alright, so you want to go to college. Maybe you're a freshman that hasn't thought about where they want to spend their four years after high school. Or maybe you're a junior that's just about to start college applications. Wherever you are, I hope this video can provide some value. Alright, I'll start with my own personal experience. The first time I ever even thought about college was around the age of six. For those of you that have been following the channel for a while, you know that my dream school is always Stanford. Why you may ask? Well when I was six, I asked my parents what the best college was and they were like, well Stanford, Harvard, Yale, and I immediately just latched on to Stanford for some reason. Little did I know that my interest would eventually fall into engineering and Stanford would have been a great fit. Anyways, no six-year-old should ever even be considering college at that time. But I was already hooked on Stanford. It wasn't until about sophomore year that my list of schools really began to develop. I was considering schools like Yale, Harvard, Princeton, MIT, Notre Dame, the Air Force Academy, Berkeley, but honestly it felt like I had a lot of big-name colleges on my list just to have them on the list. I hadn't really done any research into them. This list just kind of developed after a series of conversations with my dad. By the beginning of my junior year, I finally had a chance to take physics, calculus, and a couple other engineering classes that I really fell in love with. And I knew I wanted to be an engineer. This made the search for colleges way easier because now I knew what to look for. By mid-junior year, I whittled down my list, added a couple other schools, and I was pretty confident with what I had. I think it was around nine schools, Stanford, Yale, Princeton, MIT, UVA, Georgia Tech, Air Force Academy, Naval Academy, and Berkeley, I think. As junior year came to a close, I began actually looking at the past year's applications for all these schools, so I would know what to expect when application season actually hit. And I realized how much work it would actually be to apply to these nine different schools, especially when two of them were service academies and required nominations. This led to me eventually dropping the Naval Academy. Just because of the workload of trying to get two different congressional nominations was just too much for a school that I wasn't completely set on. After a visit to Stanford and Berkeley, I really just wasn't feeling it on Berkeley's campus, so I dropped that too. So by the first day of school of my senior year, my list was down to seven. Ended up applying to all seven schools, and you guys know how the rest of the story went. I was rejected early to Stanford, but I was accepted early to Georgia Tech and UEA, then I was rejected regular from Princeton and MIT and accepted regular by the Air Force Academy in Yale. Although I was pretty happy with the way I eventually began to settle on my list of schools, I believe there was a far better way to go about it. So let me lay down what I wish I would have done when it comes to thinking about college, starting with freshman year. All right, so freshman year, you should know that college exists, and it exists as a place for you to study something that you love, and something that you can see yourself doing for the rest of your life. You really shouldn't even be worrying about a list of schools yet, but rather, you should gradually begin to take notice of what you'd like to do at school, like what are your favorite extracurriculars, and what type of classes you find yourself having the most fun in. High school classes are in a lot more specific subject areas than classes in middle school and elementary school. So you should soon begin to realize what you like and what you don't like. So yeah, freshman year just kind of begin to establish a general idea of what you want to do with your future, because it's a lot easier to choose a list of schools if you know what you want to do. Like personally, for me, I knew I wanted to do engineering, so I chose hardcore engineering schools like Georgia Tech and MIT, while also choosing schools in the Ivy League that had good engineering programs, but also had a great liberal arts opportunity to balance that out. And if you're having trouble doing this, don't worry. A lot of people go into college having no idea what they want to do, and that's fine, but just realize it is going to make your college search a little more difficult. As sophomore year rolls along, you should begin researching colleges. Go to the College Board website, see what their average GPA and SAT, ACT scores are, and see where you fall into. Of course, this is sophomore year and your GPA is subject to change, and you've probably only taken the PSAT, but still you should have a general ballpark idea of where you fall in with all these schools. Sophomore year, I used to love researching schools, like finding and comparing all the stats, looking at pictures of the campus, and like watching YouTube videos. Actually, I remember researching colleges the summer before my sophomore year and watching a bunch of videos, and that was actually the first time that I saw the, that's why I chose Yale admissions video, which you should definitely go check out if you haven't. By the end of sophomore year, I would recommend having a list of around 15 to 20 schools that you did a little bit of research on, and that seemed appealing to you, and also ones that have good programs and the subject area you're interested in. As you begin junior year, I recommend that you probably whittle down your list of schools a little more. For me, as I researched my list of schools more and more, I only decided to keep schools that I could definitely see myself going to. Now, I'm not going to tell you how many schools to apply to. That's completely up to you, but do realize that each one of these schools has a pretty lengthy application, and you will have to complete this during the fall of your senior year when you're busy with a bunch of other things. Like, I know people that applied to like 15 schools, but that takes a long time, especially when some of those schools you probably aren't super interested in. Like, I couldn't see myself being interested in more than like 10 schools tops. Like, I thought about applying to other IVs just because, but honestly, I thought like Princeton and Yale were the only ones that like really appealed to me, and the only ones I could see myself personally going to. At the end of the day, it's up to you, but realize it's a lot of work. Regardless of how many schools you eventually decide to apply to and how many you knock off your list, you should definitely have a whittle down, like, almost final list by the end of your junior year. And one of the big things that should go into you kind of choosing your final list is college visits. Personally, I did all my college visits the spring of my junior year. A lot of people do it during spring break. It's a great time to go, great time to go see all the schools, see what they have to offer, check out the campus. I feel like college visits is probably the best thing you can do when it comes to choosing a college because as soon as you step on campus, you're going to get a feeling in your gut of whether you could see yourself going there or not. Like, for me, like I mentioned earlier, I got on to Berkeley's campus and I didn't feel at all. I mean, nothing against Berkeley or anything. It just didn't seem like it was the place where I could see myself spending the next four years. So anyway, by the end of junior year, have your list whittled down. It doesn't have to be final yet because college applications don't start till August, but it should be pretty close to the list you eventually apply to. Now, the rest of the process you guys probably know about. If you haven't, definitely go check out my other videos. I normally recommend once you have your list of schools by the end of junior year, probably starting your Common App essay during the beginning of the summer. Begin looking at the old prompts. Definitely have that done by the end of August. So once school starts, you can begin like knocking out all the supplement essays. I'm not going to go into all the tips I have on that because I've made countless videos about that before. Just go check out any of the how to get into Yale videos or any of the videos that I did where I talked about college essays. That should all be there. Like I said, this schedule is pretty much what I've drawn from my own personal experience from the mistakes I made, from what I did well. Yours can definitely differ. This is by no means something that you have to stick to. I mean, this is literally just my personal experience. But I hope it was helpful for you guys. A lot of people just don't know where to start when it comes to college applications. And maybe they'll make mistakes freshman or sophomore year and they'll really be regretting it junior year. So I hope this kind of gave you guys a little bit of a schedule to follow. If you like the video, definitely comment down below, let me know. If you have any other ideas for future Ivy League secrets video topics, definitely suggest them down in the comments below. I maybe will do your video idea. Definitely go check out Crimson if you want to improve your applications and improve your chance of getting into these Ivy League schools. Drop a thumbs up. It helps a lot more than you think. And subscribe if you're new for more content like this in the future. And also expect more Yale vlogs coming up in the next couple of days. Anyways, that's about it. I'll be back again in a couple of days with another video. So, see you soon.