 Hello, my people. I am Meacham. I'm your college counselor, and we're going to continue the video that I made last week about how to build your college list. The next step, once you've figured out which colleges you really like, is for you to really evaluate your chances of getting in. And what we're going to do now is go to the second tab, which is the admissions criteria tab. All of these things that we're going to take into consideration here are going to get added up and calculated into one awesome score that's going to give you an idea of your chances of getting admitted. The name of the university is already populated from the previous sheet, so you don't have to like write it in here. The first thing we're going to need to look up is the acceptance rate. Now, I do not recommend you Google this because you're often going to get bad data. Check this out. University of Pittsburgh acceptance rate. I'm going to get a number that says 66.7%, which seems really, really good until you look at the actual data and realize that this number is way off. Where do we get the actual data? We need to look for the common data set. The most recent one is for the students that entered in 2022 and they report that data in 2023. That's why it's numbered like this. We're going to go straight to section C of the common data set. This is the data that tells us how many people were admitted, how many people applied, how many people actually enrolled. And what we really want to figure out is the acceptance rate, which is these two numbers here. So if I get my calculator out 2699.79 divided by 53,072. It looks like it's a 49.1% acceptance rate. That is much lower than what Google said. And it's really important that we have accurate data here for this for the test policy. For example, we can actually find that out by scrolling down a little bit further. So that's perfect. It is indeed a test optional university. What's the percent of the people that were optional? We're just going to add these two numbers up and then take the difference. 47, 16, that would be 63% of the people brought a test score. So we'll say 37% were optional. The next thing that we got to do is see what factors they evaluate more in this university. You're going to see all that stuff just up here in C7. This is like the most important part of the common data set. And I swear if you do not look this up and you do not take the time to actually understand what the college cares about, you're going to have a bad time. Like take the time to do this research. I guarantee it's going to make a difference in your application success. We see here that there are academic and non-academic factors, and I have put all of these into the sheet so that you can keep track of what matters to what school. Academic rigor is almost always going to be a very important. So we're going to mark that class rank. They say it is just considered GPA, almost always a very important item. So again, your academics will always be some of the biggest factors in your application. Test scores, they say are just considered. Again, the SAT is not that important anymore my people. Application essay, very important. They really care about the essay over here at Pittsburgh. Good to know. Recommendations, considered. Now we're getting into some of the non-academic factors interview. I don't even see it here. What's it say? It says not considered. They don't consider the interview. Extracurricular activities are just considered. Not the most important factor over here at Pitt. We got talent and ability. If you've got special talents and abilities, good for you because that's important here at Pitt. And so is character and personal qualities. First generation is just considered. Volunteering, you'll notice, is considered important down here. Work experience also important. If you've got some work experience, they like to see that over there, which is interesting. Demonstrated interest, one of the most important and least considered variables. There's going to be videos about each of these things in the future. So make sure you subscribe. We're going to talk about how to demonstrate interest in a future episode. Alumni relation, that's like if your parents or like a brother or sister attend the university. Also known as legacy admissions. They say that's not considered good for you, Pitt. That shouldn't matter. Residence. So geographical residence and state residency. Obviously, if you live in the state of Pennsylvania, for a US, Pennsylvania and public university, that would be something they would consider. Obviously, they probably prioritize the people that are in the same state. There's also religious factor, which is considered. And the last thing is race or ethnic status. That's probably going to disappear from all college applications very soon with the Supreme Court made a video about that, that a bunch of Russians invaded just to suppress it. So if you want to actually watch that video and help me recover from the Russian invasion, you can go ahead and do that. There's a thingy in the corner of the video up here for you to click that if you want. Now you will see here that my awesome Excel sheet is starting to provide a score, your odds of admission here. And I want to make a point here that this is not a perfect scientific method. Universities can evaluate things in different ways. This is just to give you a rough idea, a general idea of your chances. So in order to do that, we have to have like a rating for yourself and we're going to put that in up here. I'm going to put the CVS away and expand this out for you so you can see a little better. The self rating, we're going to rate from one to five and it's very simple. If you really think like you're excellent in these categories, you're one of the top 10% of applicants, you're just amazing. Go ahead and put a five in here for yourself. If you're like really solid top 75% or above, but maybe you're not that top tier S tier, top 10% kind of person, a four would be good. Three is like, hey, I'm a little bit better than average, but I'm nothing like special, nothing wow in this category. Two would be, maybe I'm below average in this category. And one could be like, I got nothing for you. Be honest with yourself. Obviously, this is not a perfect science. You can also use some decimals if you want. If I were to rate myself, right, just being honest, my academic rigor was horrible. I was homeschooled and I took a lot of easy courses. Two is probably even generous for myself class rank. Then I also would say that I was very low in that regard. My GPA though wasn't bad. I actually had a pretty good GPA all in all because I took such easy courses. So there's that. So I'll put myself as a four test scores. I would just say that would be a onesie because I didn't even really do those essays. I'm a really good writer. I'm gonna, I'm gonna say I give myself a five on my essays rec letters. I think I had pretty solid stuff. I had teachers that liked me at least. So there's that interviews. Are you good at interviews? I think I'm pretty awesome at interviews. Oh, extracurricular activities. I was somewhere in the middle of the road here. I wasn't amazing. Talent or ability. I don't consider myself a very talented person. I'm gonna say I'm below average. Character, you know, I think I'm a pretty decent dude. I'll give myself a four. Um, you know, would a would a five really give themselves a five? First gen. For this one, I left a little comment here. Just put five or zero. It's either it's either you are first generation or you're not and I am. My parents did not complete college. Um, nor did my grandparents like nobody in my family ever did volunteering. I didn't do much of that to be honest. A little bit, a little bit, but probably below average work experience though. I worked a lot when I was a teenager. So I got a lot of work experiences that I could talk about and demonstrating interest. This is something where you need to make sure you put a lot of effort and I know I do. These are other categories that are specific to the university. So it doesn't really make sense to have a self rating here because you would have to like redo this for each college. You know what would be like a good score for religion? Well, that depends. Does the university have a religious affiliation? Are you in the same one? That would be good. State residents either you are a resident of that state or you're not. So if you're comparing universities from different states like you wouldn't be able to put a single score for these categories, what I've done is just kind of created a little space for you to make an adjustment. You can add some points or take away some points depending on how you feel you match up with some of these other factors. Again, these are never going to be like the main factors. These are always going to be smaller factors in the grander scheme of things. So don't worry about them too much. At the end, you will see that it has spit out a score of 47.5 and so the hypothetical maximum that we could get from our scores if I had like fives across the board would be 67.5, right? Right here I have 47.5 and all I've really done here is just made a quick comparison that will tell us if we're looking good or not, right? And this is based on the acceptance rate. If I divide 47.5 divided by 67.5, I'm going to get 70%. So that kind of is suggesting that I'm like an above average applicant. I'm pretty solid. Like maybe there's 30% of applicants could have better results than me and since that 70% is better than the 49% in the acceptance rate, it's going to spit out a thing that says, hey, you're looking pretty good here like you are. I mean, this is fair, right? I may not have the most, you know, rigorous academics and my GPA is okay and like I've got really good essays that's making up for some of that stuff. I've got some other personal factors that I think I really will really help me, right? But if I didn't have those, I might be screwed. If these numbers were lower, right, or the acceptance rate was lower, you would see a different result. For example, if I put this as a 25% acceptance rate school, I'm not so hot anymore. I'm essentially saying I'm in like the 70th percentile of applicants, right? So if they accept only one out of four, that means there's like a gap, right? About a 5% gap between me and the other applicants and so I'm probably not going to have a great shot here. I might be able to make it. I might get lucky, but like I shouldn't count on it. But at the 49% acceptance rate that they've got, I feel like I would probably get in, you know, I'm looking good. That's what this whole sheet is for, is to kind of give you an idea of what your odds might be, okay? Again, there's always going to be variants from one person to the next, from one admissions officer to the next. If you obviously apply early, that's going to increase your chances. We haven't even gotten into the application requirements yet, which is going to be the next video of this series. This is just a good way for you to measure roughly what your chances of success are for the colleges that you're checking out. So hopefully you're doing your research, you're deciding, okay, I want to apply to this college because it's a really good fit for me. I think I can make the financial aspect. I can cover that. And looking at the criteria that the university cares about, I can see that I'm a pretty good fit for this college. So if you're looking good on your applications, you're going to want to make those applications. And that's what the next video is going to be about, is how to actually fulfill your application requirements. I'll see you next week.