 Hello my people, my name is Meacham. Today on the Score Channel we are going to be answering questions from Redditors. Are applying to college and are international to USA are the two biggest subreddits for people who are looking for advice on college admissions and that is my specialty. If you guys have some questions that we don't get to then go ahead and leave them in the comments below. But let's get started. How important is class rank? Very simple question. It is useful. Grades continue to go up, GPAs worldwide keep going up, it's called grade inflation. It's making it harder for colleges to determine whether a student is good or not just based on their grades. I mean if everybody's getting good grades, how do they tell people apart? Well then the rank can come into play. It's a factor that they use to help understand your grades but it isn't the most important thing. What is the recommended number of colleges to apply to asks a redditor from Intel to USA. It's really not about the right number. The important thing is to make sure there's universities that are a good fit for you. You could apply to 30 universities but if none of them are a good match for you, you might get rejected from all 30. So what we usually do at score is apply to 10 or 12 universities and we break that down into fit, dream and safety schools, three or four options from each of those categories. We know you're going to get in somewhere and maybe you'll get lucky and get into one of your dream schools. So far every single person that's gone through scores process has gotten into at least one of their universities from their list. It's not about the number, it's about the way you pick universities. There are, Nichelle asks how wait lists work if they just take them people off in the order they put them on the wait list or if they look to see who's most qualified or just pick and choose. They're usually looking at specific factors that they think make you likely to take their offer. The whole reason they're bringing you off the wait list is because other students that they already admitted did not take the offer. So what they're looking for is especially demonstrated interest. That is a big one. If you show a lot of interest in the university, they're more likely to take you off the wait list. If you have been wait listed, I would recommend you send some emails, ask if there's anything else you can do. Let them know that you really, really want to go to that university because they'll be more likely to pull you off the wait list and actually give you an offer. Alright, I like this one. Will I get rescinded for flunking Bible class? What is rescinding? That is when they take away an offer of acceptance. So a university admits you and then later, maybe because they see your final grades or they find something out about your application was false, they will rescind that offer. They can do that at any time. So be careful what you do. A Bible class is probably not the kind of class that's going to get your offer rescinded from a university. You're going to have to send your updated transcripts with your final grades for the year. They are going to look at that stuff and they are probably going to see that, yeah, you failed Bible class. If all of your other grades are really good and you just have this one class where something went wrong, they're going to realize that there was probably some other factors there. Can I get rescinded for a video of me twerking? This is a great question. I would say this depends very much on the university that you're talking about here. If you were applying to more conservative universities like Brigham Young University in Utah, that would definitely be a university that would see a video of you twerking and say, no thank you. My suggestion young people is really stop recording each other doing stupid shit, okay? One of the things that's great about me being slightly older is that almost all the stupid shit that I did when I was young is not recorded on camera. You guys go around and you're constantly like getting proof of each other's stupidity. Stop doing that, okay? Stop recording every stupid thing you do. Choosing roommates versus random roommates in college. This is an interesting one. I would just tell you to go random because you really can't make an educated decision over the internet. Like whatever you think this person is going to be like, you're going to be wrong somehow. So you might as well just go random, close your eyes and hope for the best. I think it'll be fun anyway. It's like a nice surprise and you never know. You might end up making a really, really good best friend who lives with you for the next few years. This is my absolute favorite question. Will I be made fun of if I bring my waifu pillow in the fall? Almost certainly. You got to accept that. Like if you want to be the waifu pillow guy, then you got to be ready for some shit, man. Because like people are going to make fun of you if you will bring a waifu pillow to your dorm room. I mean, I'm already imagining it right now. If I walked in, I would be like, bro, waifu pillow, what? And I wouldn't judge you. It's totally fine. Hey, who doesn't want to cuddle up with a waifu every night? I get it. At the same time, you got to understand people are going to make fun of you for that. And you better be ready to deal with it. My advice would be either don't give a shit and just bring your waifu pillow or maybe don't bring it. This one from Applying to College asks, should I get a letter of recommendation from a choir teacher that I've known for three or four years or should I stick to core courses? I love this question. Colleges are always looking for letters of recommendation that are related to their major. If you're going to apply to computer science, for example, somebody in the computer department would be ideal. You should definitely have one related to your major. But from there, I would encourage you to get a letter from the teacher that you love the most because that person is going to write a much better letter. Even if it's choir and you're not applying to anything related to music and it has nothing to do with your major. If you know that that teacher is going to write you a glowing recommendation letter because you guys just have a really strong connection, you should absolutely ask them for a letter and you should include it in your applications wherever possible. Basically, I tell everybody to go after three letters, one that's related to your major, one from the teacher that likes you the best and one from the class where you have the highest grades. Another intel to USA question, what can I do as an international freshman to maximize my chances of getting a full ride, full tuition scholarship in the United States as a computer science major? Whoa. All right, we're going to do another video on this coming up soon about full ride scholarships because a lot of people ask about that. It's great that you're starting in freshman year. You should definitely start planning early if you want to get a full ride scholarship. You need to do a few different things. Number one, I would strongly recommend you try to take the SAT and get the highest score possible. Number two, make sure that you have a ton of extracurriculars and make them diverse. Make sure you do some volunteering, some academics, some athletics, something artistic like music or painting or whatever. But make sure that at the same time, those are passions. You don't need to do 15 different extracurricular activities. You really just need to do four or five things in depth. Do them with passion. You want to make sure that you have only chosen universities that can give you this kind of full ride scholarship, very prestigious schools, Ivy League universities, for example. You can also find full ride tuition deals at lower level schools. For example, the University of Louisiana at Monroe has a full tuition scholarship for international students who qualify by getting a really good SAT score and a high GPA. Then I make $17,000 a year as an international student. As an international student, you're not allowed to work in the United States outside of the campus. You have to take a campus job. I tell people, never expect more than $8,000 a year, honestly, for on-campus jobs. The other $9,000, what can you do? You can hustle. There's no reason the IRS has to know about everything. If you come from a country that speaks a different language, if you see some white kids, like in your country's language class, like go walk up to the class one day and be like, yo, you guys want some classes, $20 an hour, hit me up. You could hustle. Look into the possibility of freelance writing or doing some like gig work on Fiverr or something if you know how to do something on Photoshop or video editing, like you can make that extra money. You can. How bad is living off campus? My parents have decided that each and every college is an awful place where everyone is always doing drugs and having sex, so they refuse to let me live on one. How much would I lose in terms of the college experience? I feel for you, my parents were also super strict religious conservatives. Living on campus means a few things. You are conveniently located to your college classes. You're going to have easier access to the food and dining options because you're right around the corner. It essentially is giving you easy access. I don't think you're going to miss out on a whole lot. You're still going to be able to be on campus during the day. You can hang out on campus and hang out with friends and dorms like you're not going to be prohibited from being on campus. The big difference, I think, is just going to be in those little moments like you're not going to be hanging out with your roommate and inviting friends over from down the hall to hang out and play video games at night. You'll be able to integrate. You'll be able to have a good time. Don't sweat it. Sorry, your parents suck. A couple questions here about extracurriculars and making things sound fancy, and I think I want to hit them both together. OkConsert8960 asks, how would I go about phrasing that I write fan fiction on college apps? He mentioned AO3. I don't know what that is. I'm not going to bother going into the fandom right now because I don't want to get absorbed into something. And then there's also this question here, how do I make it sound fancy? Going to a summer program, I made video games there, but what do I write as a title position in the Common App? You don't need to make everything sound fancy. You're not trying to impress the Queen of England. Most of the people that are working in admissions are former students. Most of them will find it funny if you say you wrote fan fiction or you helped make video games. They're not going to sit there and be like, oh, he wasn't lead designer of the video game team. You want to show passion with your extracurriculars. And if you change the names and make them sound very sterile and professional and boring, you're not going to show your passion. Your passion's not going to come through. Go ahead and put, I'm a fan fiction writer and I love to publish content about AO3. It's my favorite thing ever. And I've written this many thousands of words and it's had this many thousands of views. If you try to make it generic and say, I write fan fiction, but I don't want to say what it is, then they're not going to understand what it is. And they're not going to really appreciate your passion. Same with the video game design. If you want to say that you designed video games, go ahead and just put video game designer and explain in plain terms what you did. Don't try to make things sound fancy because all you really do is take away the meaning and you make it harder for the admissions officers to understand what you did. How do you stop caring about prestige? I see this question every freaking day on A2C and it drives me insane. There's a ton of people that are more obsessed about rankings and the prestige and the perception of their university than actually learning something and becoming a better person. How do you stop caring about prestige? Step one is to realize that prestige is a completely fabricated thing. It is perpetuated by rankings who get paid to do just that. It's not real. There's a myth that if you go to these prestigious schools that somehow your life will be automatically better and you'll just have everything in the world and that you'll get every job you want. And it's not true. There are way more jobs than there are graduates from these prestigious schools. So it's not like employers only want to hire people from Ivy League universities or top 20 universities. Employers, like myself, will hire people from any background as long as you're a good worker. If you can get the work done and you show good attitude and you show willingness to learn more while you're working, that's what matters to me. I don't care what university you went to. Most employers don't. Understand that prestige is really nothing more than a slightly easier time getting a job interview. That's it. Now, what I would tell you to do instead of focusing on prestige is focus on what you're actually going to learn, focus on making friends and having cool experiences in college because that's going to make you into the type of person that crushes a job interview regardless of where they went to school. Why would you get something just to impress other people if it's not the best thing for you? Don't make decisions based on what other people think. Make them for yourself. Related question about prestigious universities. How can I make my dad understand that I don't want to go to an Ivy? Parents obviously want what's best for you. You need to understand their perspective a little bit if you're going to try to reason or negotiate with your parents, especially when they're paying for your education. They're thinking that this is the best way for you to have a good life. Present some counter proposals. Like, you should put together a little presentation of all the universities that you really want to apply to and explain point by point why you want to go to those universities, how much they're going to cost, compared to perhaps some of the more prestigious schools. Also, look at things like employability, how easy is it for graduates to get jobs coming out of those universities. Again, many parents operate with the flawed mindset that you can only get a good job if you go to a really good university. Show them that that's false. Prove it with data. This idea of making your own presentation about your college list is something that we've actually implemented into our SCORE program. So, everybody who works with us has to give their parents a presentation about the universities that they want to apply to. And by doing that, we make them a little bit more in charge of the process. Very few parents come back and say, we don't like this list, we want to change it. If all you do is say, no, no, no, no, no, I don't want these schools, you're not providing a counter proposal. You're not providing any sort of alternative. Think about what you really want to do, not what you don't want to do. How do you get to know a school's culture? Obviously, going to a university is going to give you the most complete impression of that university. There's tons of vlogs from students at universities. Look up those vlogs. Just listen to some people talk about the place. Like, you can get a very honest perspective from a lot of students through YouTube and Instagram. Go look up vlogs, watch them, listen to them, get more information. Another thing you might want to check out are subreddits as well. Like, while we're on the topic of Reddit, go look up the subreddits for those colleges and just talk to people, ask some questions. There are a ton of students who are willing to share their perspectives and give you a very honest review of their university. All you got to do is look for them and ask. And if you like that, you can always check out the videos that we make where we interview students. That's why I want to go visit more universities. We're putting together a trip for September and another in October. You guys might want to subscribe if you want to check those out. Thank you guys for watching this. If you enjoyed it, please give it a like. I might go ahead and do another round of Reddit questions in the future. If you have a question that I did not answer that you would like me to answer, you can always just drop it in the comments below on any of these videos. I'm always happy to answer your comments. Love your questions. And I really appreciate you watching this. I will see you next week.