 Welcome to Purdue FAQ's Boilermakers Respond. I'm your host, Erin Anderson. Today we're talking all about the undergraduate college admissions process here at Purdue University. To help answer your questions, I'll be talking with Purdue admissions ambassador, Elise. Elise, would you mind introducing yourself to us please? My name is Elise Wrenschler. I'm one of our admissions ambassadors here at Purdue. I'm studying computer science and I'm a senior. I've been with Purdue admissions for around four years now. I've had such a fantastic experience with them. I'm really excited to be talking with you all today. I've absolutely loved my time here at Purdue and all the experiences I've had. Awesome. Thank you so much for introducing yourself, Elise. Before we start asking you all about the undergrad admissions process, could you tell us a little bit more about your role as an admissions ambassador? Of course. So do a couple different things that it's an admissions ambassador. So one of those is giving tours to prospective families, both academic tours as well as our student life tours. I also give presentations about admissions details to prospective families and meet with them on an individual basis to go over some more specific questions that they might have. Absolutely. Now let's get started. You know as much about Purdue admissions as anyone here. So can you walk us through it and provide an overview of what applicants should expect? Yeah. So whenever a student decides to apply to Purdue, you would first fill out our common application. It's an online portal that's going to let students apply to multiple different schools at the same time. You'll fill out some of your general information such as your name, your birthday, all of that kind of stuff. We'll have you answer some questions about your grades, some test score questions, as well as some extracurricular activities, different things like that. So you pretty much just fill out the application and then you're able to send it off to Purdue and we go from there. Awesome. We've both been through that process so we both know how that works. So how much does it cost to submit an application to Purdue? It costs $60 to submit your application to Purdue. That being said, there are fee waivers online both through the Common App as well as through Purdue that anyone can look through when they are applying and see if they apply. Do I need to decide on a major before I apply to Purdue? So you do need to decide on a major. Purdue is a direct admit university. So when you're applying to Purdue, you're going to be applying specifically to one of our majors here on campus. That being said, we're going to give you the opportunity to list two majors down on that application. So we'll consider you for admission for that first choice major and then if we're not able to offer you admission for that one, we'll then consider you for that second choice major. Absolutely. Love the options that Purdue offers. Who can I contact if I have a question about the admissions process? There's a couple different ways you can contact us if you have questions about the admissions process. The first one is if you're here on campus with us, the Office of Admissions takes drop-ins for pretty much the entire day with regular business hours. You can come in, meet with an academic counselor in person and get some of your questions answered. If you're not able to join us here on campus, we can also be reached by the phone or by emailing us. So all of our contact information is on our website. We're pretty easy to get in contact with, so never feel afraid to kind of reach out and ask us your specific questions. Absolutely. Can I make changes to my application after it's been submitted? So you can not make changes to your application after it's been submitted. That being said, if you need to upload any additional documents, you can do that on our Purdue application portal. But if you are applying for that early action deadline, so before November 1st, anything you submit after November 1st is not guaranteed to be looked at or considered in your admissions decision. Okay, good to know. Does Purdue have a wait list and what does that process look like? So depending on the year and which major program you're applying for, it is possible that Purdue might have a wait list for that program. If you do get placed on that wait list, you will get that with your decision and then will kind of evaluate based off of space and capacity levels and then you would be notified if you did get into Purdue at that point. Definitely good information to note. What are some of the common mistakes to avoid when applying to Purdue? So most of the common mistakes we're going to see are in the essay. So one of those is going to be, say, spelling Purdue wrong. We see that quite a bit. Maybe putting a different school in besides Purdue in your application in that essay. We also quite kind of see a lot of grammatical errors. So just having other people proofread those is what we recommend, making sure they're looking through and everything looks nice. Some other common mistakes we see are going to be applying to the wrong major. So since you're not able to go back and change which major you're applying for, make sure that that's getting double checked as well. Absolutely. What if I don't know what I want to do or what I want to major in when I go to college? It's perfectly fine to not know what you want to study quite yet. We do have a program specifically for students who don't know what they want to major in yet. It's going to be called exploratory studies. You can apply for that program as one of those major choices either for a first choice or a second choice. You'd be able to go into that program. They help you kind of explore a couple different majors or a lot of different majors and figure out what you want to do from there. Are other people allowed to read through my application and give me feedback before I submit it? We want to hear directly from the student who is applying to Purdue. That being said, it's nice sometimes to have a second set of eyes. So having someone there to kind of help you read through specifically the essay, looking for any grammatical mistakes, anything along those lines is definitely recommended. Absolutely. Thanks for joining us for Purdue FAQ's Boilermakers Respond and thanks to Elise for giving us an insider's perspective to Purdue's admissions process. Do you have a question about campus life that you want answered? Let us know in the comments. 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