 What's up guys, it's Josh and we're back again with another video. Today we're gonna have another installment in my Yale student interview series. Today I don't have one of my sweet meds necessarily, but one of my very close friends here at Yale. This is Jacob, he lives across the hall. Today he's going to talk about his experience throughout the college application process and what he thinks of Yale so far. So Jacob, you want to introduce yourself? Hi guys, what's up? I'm Jacob, as Josh already said. I'm from Mesa, Arizona and I'm super pumped to be in one of Josh's videos. Big fan? Big fan. Huge fan. Huge fan. Um, yeah, so Jacob actually lives right across the hall. You know what, they haven't really seen the room set up yet. You want to just go show them? Sure, let's go check it out. Okay, sure. Alright, so we just go out my room, take a left and then right across all here, he has to stay over the well to get downstairs. We're going to the suite across the hall. Welcome. Oh, let me clean this up. Jacob, so this is your suite? It's my suite. Your roommate's already gone for Christmas break, right? Yeah, yeah, he's gone. I got living the single life right now. Yeah, that's good stuff. Single life, it sounds like I'm dating him. Single life isn't, I'm not in a double right now. Yeah, so. Jake and I have bunk beds, but Jacob actually got a pretty good suite here. He, uh, he has single beds. It's a lot of space. It's quite nice, a lot of space. And we're back. All right, Jacob, so you went to high school in Arizona. I did. Give us a little rundown of like your high school experience, you know, what extracurriculars you did and just like overall, like, how did high school prepare you for life at Yale? All right, well, I went to a pretty big public high school and we had about 4,000 kids there. Let's see, so in high school, I was part of my high school's marching band. I was a part of our biotechnology club. Our technology, what did you do there? We worked in a lab, so like our school lab. We did cloning plants, cloning plants. Yeah, it's pretty cool. We didn't have that at our school. That sounds pretty cool. That's very fun. OK, anything else? I took a lot of AP classes to not have a lot of time for much else. So obviously the stuff you did in high school played a major part in your application, but in general, why do you think you got into Yale? Like, did you have like one special thing that kind of distinguished you or do you think it was more like a combination of things? Well, I think what Yale's we're looking for is somebody who is well rounded. They want people who aren't just focused on one thing, but many. I feel like my high school career really emphasized that. OK, cool. Not to mention the test scores. The test scores matter. Test scores matter. So do essays. Essays play a pretty big. Essas are pretty important. Yeah, they're not looking for you to just, I don't know, be the best. They want you to have personality to personality. So what other schools were you considering and what made you choose Yale? Well, I applied through the Questbridge National College match program. So how exactly does the Questbridge program work? Questbridge is a scholarship program that lets you rank up to 12 colleges from the list of partner schools and you rank them in order of preference and you have to end up submitting applications to all of those schools that you choose to apply for. And once you do, they'll whichever schools accept you, they'll match you with your top one from your list. But what I did, I applied to Yale, Stanford and Columbia in that order. And usually there are other schools not supposed to tell you if you get in. But Stanford ended up telling me that I also got in. So yeah, yeah, I was not going to lie. Little salty when I found out Jacob got into Stanford and Yale. Still is. He still is still just just a little. Just a little bit. All right. So do you have any advice for those that are in there? Like early years of high school, like freshman, sophomore, or maybe maybe in middle school, they're about to start high school. A lot of people have regrets in the early years of high school, especially when it comes to college applications and stuff. Do you have any advice for those that are just starting high school to kind of get a jump start and start prepping for their college applications as early as possible? Well, I can tell you that all the big schools up here, they're definitely looking for you to take advanced classes. So if your school offers AP classes, you should definitely start taking those. If they offer honors, take those. If they offer IB, definitely get into those programs because they give you a leg up on everybody else. You also want to make sure that you're looking into extracurriculars. You want to find one or two things that really define your high school career to give you some personality and stand out amongst other applicants. Yeah, definitely start early with extracurriculars because what colleges are really looking for is like leadership positions. I mean, colleges love leadership in general, and you're going to have a lot harder time getting those leadership positions if you kind of join your club like the year, junior or senior year. So I'd really recommend trying to find some clubs that you're interested in and start your freshman or sophomore year so you can kind of gain experience and membership in the club, and then you'll hopefully be elected to a position you're doing your senior year. You also want to make sure that you're not just applying to a bunch of clubs. You want to be in just a couple that really and you're really committed to them rather than being into like 100. But you just are. Yeah, I know I know I personally wasn't a lot of clubs. But you'll you'll find that even if you try to join a lot of clubs, first of all, colleges don't really care if you're in like eight different clubs. Like it's pretty much meaningless for them. What I found, at least personally in my application, was that there were like three or four clubs that I really enjoyed and that were really personal to me. Like, for example, like my my rocketry team in high school, that was that was a big time commitment for me. And I actually ended up writing one of my engineering essays about that was a really big extracurricular for me, as well as, you know, like baseball and orchestra and all those that I started like early in my freshman year. Big rocket science guy, big, pretty big rocket science guy. You know, I'm continuing here. Now we're working on satellites. So that's some good advice for people that are just starting high school. But what about those, you know, juniors or seniors this year that are have already either like started applying to colleges this year? You know, the the regular decision deadline for at least for the Common App is coming up, what, like December 31st? Yeah, January 1st for some colleges. Yeah. So any advice for those seniors that are currently in the process of applying or those juniors that are beginning to, you know, kind of develop their list of schools? What advice do you have for those people? Well, for the juniors, I'd say you need to start applying early. That was one of my biggest mistakes. As most people would say, I'm sure you need to start applying for all those schools, scholarships, write your essays early, start in like August, I'd say, and then you won't be so stressed come November when everybody else is stressed. Yeah, I think I think I had a video about like when exactly you should start your college applications, but to sum it up, I'd really think that you should knock your Common App essay out in the month of August when you're just chilling during summer break and then, you know, gradually start working through the supplemental essays, but you definitely want to get the Common App essay out of the way first. And don't discount like the the little short answer questions and all the other things on the application. Those sometimes can be almost like just as important as the actual essays themselves, because they reveal some unique parts about you. And also, one more piece of advice for me, your junior year is going to be your most important year when you're applying to college. Your junior year is when you're going to want to load up with all your difficult classes. I know I took like six AP classes my junior year. It was it was pretty rough, but it shows colleges that you're dedicated and your junior year is kind of the heart of your application when you're applying. That being said, don't let up in your senior year, though. Make sure you're still taking those AP classes. It still looks good. They want to make sure that colleges want to make sure that you're not just skipping out your senior year. Yeah, for those of you that that managed to get accepted to a college early or found out about it already, don't slack off at the end of your senior year either. They still have the choice to let you go. So be careful. Make sure you keep your grades up for a second semester, because I have heard stories of people getting their acceptances rescinded and you don't want that to be you. Yeah. All right. So obviously, Jacob did get accepted to Yale. Really? Because you're here? Yeah. Yeah, obviously. And everyone I've talked to kind of has their own unique story about when they found out that they got accepted. You know, so what's your story? Well, I just came out of lunch. I was going into my academic to Catholic on class, went to sit down, opened my computer and found out I had an email. So I looked at the email from Yale and found out I had accepted and sitting in class. Not very exciting. Did you like tell anyone? I didn't cry. Did you tell anyone else sitting around you? I did. Did the whole class freak out? There were like two people in there, but yeah, they freaked out. Oh, yeah. That's not very. It's not very exciting. Not a very exciting story. OK, I've heard some better ones, Jacob. You're going to have to work on that, OK? I will. Every part of the day I want to know that your mind's on other things and it tears me to ruin. Get out of my head and it hurts me to know it'll never be the same.