 one of the founders of SCORE and the host of the SCORE channel, your college counselor and a big part of what we try to do here is help people to study abroad and so it's invited by RASA Foundation to join you all today to explain a little bit of the US application process. Now the way that's gonna work today, the way I'd like to manage this, I'm going to show you some material and explain about this pro like how you can apply to the United States, financial aid, scholarships and really all the requirements that we need to go and apply in the United States specifically. For those of you who are with us in Zoom, if you have any questions, you can hit me in the chat for now. At the end, I'm also gonna open up microphones and let people ask questions as well by raising their hand so we'll definitely have participation. I want to hear from you. If you're on YouTube watching the stream live, you can also hit me up in the chat if you have any questions as I go through the material and I'd be happy to explain anything as we go. Basically, that's kind of what I want to do today. I'm thinking we'll be about an hour and then we'll have some time for questions and stuff. Yeah, really looking forward to sharing all this with you all. This is something that I have wanted to do honestly for a while because I think it's important to talk about the whole application process and I've made a lot of videos about aspects of the process but not so much like the whole thing. That's what we're gonna do today. I'm especially grateful to those from the RASA Foundation who invited me to join in here. It's just really great to be with you all. I'm letting a bunch more in now. We had a lot jump in here just a second ago. This applies to all internationals. You're welcome to participate everybody else on YouTube. This Zoom is specifically for those who were invited from the RASA Foundation but the rest of you all here who are watching live welcome and enjoy the show. I'm gonna share this screen for you all in Zoom here so you can see my slides. That should be good for you all. I think everybody's good here. Let's get to it. We're gonna cover a few different topics here and I want to start first with the most important part that I think we need to talk about which is the financial aspect of studying in the United States. If you want to study in the United States, I think it's important to understand that while the US is one of the most expensive countries in the world for students, it is also one of the countries that has the most full scholarships and the most opportunities for international students. So there's a chance that anyone here could possibly get a major scholarship and so I want to make it clear that some of what I'm gonna say today is not the most encouraging stuff but there is a chance. We need to be realistic about our chances and understand how the system works if we want to have the best shot at success here, okay? But I'm also not going to pretend that every single person can get a full ride scholarship because it's also very competitive and it is a challenge. I need to chat. You said you can't hear me. Is anyone else having problems hearing me here? Because I feel like we should be good. No, no problems. No problems. We're okay. Okay. Alright, yeah, if you're responding, I assume we're fine. Okay, maybe just check your device settings then. Okay, just making sure I didn't want. There's nothing worse than starting a stream and doing five minutes and being muted. But I think we're good. So, okay, so let's talk about the cost of what it costs to study in the United States and and how that cost works. And then we'll talk about how we reduce that cost. So when we talk about our total cost of attendance, we have to factor in a few different things. We have tuition. That's how much we pay to be a student. Room and board which covers our living expenses. Fees which are sometimes extra amounts that correspond to certain spaces or certain programs. And then yeah, you know what? You're right about the waiting room thing. I'm admitting all thank you for guys in the chat for telling me about the waiting room. Like remind me from time to time. I'm going to keep letting people in here. I'm trying I got three monitors going right now. I'm doing my best. But yeah, I think I could do that for you. That's actually a good idea. Let me try to find you real quick in here. Because there's a lot of people. I'm scrolling down. I'll do that for you. I appreciate your help. Yeah, teamwork. Okay, you're the man or woman. Thank you. All right. So I didn't see you. So I don't know. Okay, so we have tuition, room and board fees. And then we also have to think about other things like books and supplies. Usually there's a cost for some books, you may need to, you know, have a laptop for your classes. So those are some things you have to think about. And then there's other personal expenses, right? Like your life, you know, they're, they're not just going to give you for example, tissues and toothpaste, you know, there's things that we need to take care of ourselves as well in this process. So I think it's very important to remember that we have a lot of different things that we need to cover when we look at these things. And the scholarships and financial aid will cover some of these things, but not necessarily all of these things. Now all of these things can add up to around this range of expense. So 28,000 to $94,000 a year. Those numbers sound insane. And they are again, the United States is kind of broken. That's what happens when you have unlimited capitalism. There's a lot of other things I could say about that, but it's important to understand that this is the range that we're working with. Now, if your family is fortunate enough to be able to afford that, if you can handle something in this range, great, you don't have to depend on massive scholarships. You have a really good chance of finding a university in the United States. If you don't have enough to cover this range, right? Where does that put us? Right? So let's consider some different ranges and what our chances are of success in those situations. Okay? I got a couple of people saying they don't have voice. Check your settings because I should be good here. I think everything's working okay. So it may just be your audio settings. Alright, so and and I'm just taking a real quick peek here at some of the questions from the chat. We're going to talk about all these things chat like replying early action always. Yes, I will explain more about that. And as far as the fees for the US or Canada, we're going to talk about the differences and why the fees might be different for different levels and things too. So we're going to get into all that today. So it's important to understand where your financial situation is. If you have an annual amount that your family can support that is between zero and twenty thousand dollars, okay, then this is where you need a full tuition scholarship or more. Okay, you need actually to cover all of your tuition plus more to cover living expenses, room and board or fees and only about two percent of international applicants get that opportunity. So I want to make that clear like if that's where our range is and I want to make it clear. I work with a lot of people that are in that range. Okay, I work here in Peru in South America. There are many families that we work with that do not have more than twenty thousand dollars a year to spend on education. It's a lot of money. I understand that. So but it's also important to understand that that limits our opportunities because we're going to need serious financial aid or really, really big scholarships and it can be difficult to get those as international students. We have to be extremely competitive and only about two percent will get that and that number matches with my experience in score. Personally, I have worked with about 200 applicants who are abroad already like from South America and out of those two hundred four have gotten massive scholarships that allowed that and they had excellent profiles in every sense of the word and we'll talk about what those profiles look like. But it's important to understand that when we're below that twenty thousand dollar number, it definitely limits our possibilities. So we have to be realistic. If you have more than that, if you're between twenty and thirty, now you've got some good chances because there are definitely some universities that could give you what's called in-state tuition and you might be able to get into into that. Okay, and that and so I would say your chances are actually above fifty percent if you're in that range. So if your family can make that effort, if that's possible, you actually have a lot of opportunities available to you. So definitely something you can check out. If you have more than that, you are good like anything more than thirty thousand dollars a year. There's definitely a university for you and if you go like forty thousand or more, you can cover all the different private options. If you have, you know, infinite money turned on. Congratulations. You can afford to pay full price at a top twenty university and when you pay full price, you're more likely to get in. So this is more or less where we are. We have to understand. Okay. Where am I on this scale? And if I'm at the top of this, if I'm in that zero to twenty thousand dollar range, I got to work really hard. I got to have a great profile. I got to apply early. I can't make any mistakes on my applications. Like I got to do a great job because the chances are small. If I'm in that higher range, I can apply a little later. I can be a little more comfortable. I can relax a little bit. I still got to work hard. I still have to work, but I have a bit of an advantage. Unfortunately, that is how the system works in the United States. So I think it's important to keep that in mind. All right, we've got more people coming in. This is awesome. I love how many people are here. This is great. And by the way, yes, as I mentioned in the chat, guys, I'm not recording this zoom specifically, but this is being streamed on the channel and so everybody can check it out. So you'll be able to rewatch it there as well. I'm going to minimize myself a little bit so you can see me. Maybe I'll go to this side because I think I'll stay over here. All right. So, okay, so that's sort of where our financial situations are. And I want to talk about each of those aspects specifically. So starting with tuition, public universities charge more to international students. This is really important to understand. If you need like a full ride scholarship, you probably will not get it at a public university. So, you know, forget about your university in Michigan, forget about your university, Texas, Austin, like they generally don't have big, big, big scholarships for international students because their purpose is to provide education for the students in their state. If you look at Purdue, I always love to use the example of Purdue. In fact, I have it in here later, but Purdue is a great public university. Excellent for engineering. No scholarships for international students. They don't even really give anything to students from other states. They are all about Indiana. So you have to understand, okay, what options are, you know, available for you and which universities will give you benefits. Now, the cost of public universities is usually, you know, $10,000 per year for tuition if you get that in state. But it can go all the way up to 54,000 without that. The University of Michigan's tuition is around 54,000. Okay. Private universities, tuition can range wildly. You can have anywhere from 12,000 to 80,000 sometimes. So there's a lot of options there. But this is more or less what we expect for tuition, right? And merit-based scholarships are what will reduce the cost of tuition. So if you need to reduce your tuition, you need to look for merit-based scholarships and those will look at your GPA and your SAT scores and your academic rigor and stuff and they will determine if you can get that. So say I find, for example, a private university with a tuition of $20,000 a year and I have living expenses of another 12,000. It says 32 total. Well, now I got to see what can I get as a maximum scholarship amount. Maybe it's 15,000, which is 75 percent tuition. That's great. Okay. Now I'm left with 5 plus 12. Alright, 17. Are there any additional scholarships I can apply to? Are there any other things I can do? Can I work on campus, right, to maybe reduce that cost a little bit, too? So this is how you have to approach your your search to determine what is your budget? How much can you afford? Itemize the costs of the universities and then figure out how to reduce each of those as much as possible. That's really the key. Okay, so how early should we start coming up? I say somebody asks, as soon as you possibly can, you should you should work on it as much as possible. We'll talk about that more, too. Now, room and board. This is a tricky part for international students because it's mandatory in most cases. Unless you have family that lives very close to the university, you need to have a room and board at the campus. Like that is usually a requirement for international students and normally it costs, depending on where you are, between 12 and $18,000 per year. This will include a food plan which you can use to buy food at the university. Okay, now this is possible to reduce in later years as a student. Okay, if you apply to become what's called a residence advisor or residence assistant, you may be able to get free room and board in your later years. You'll never really see that opportunity for freshmen because first-year students, you know, they're not going to trust you with that kind of responsibility. Sorry, I need my coffee still. But if you are an international student and you've been, you know, responsible, have no discipline issues, good academics, your second year, maybe you can ask, maybe definitely your third year, and that could result in free room and board. So that's a really good hack to reduce that cost in future years. But it's also important to understand like, you know, you can't do that your first year. And most universities will require internationals to live on campus the first or second year, sometimes more. So keep that in mind. It's difficult to reduce this cost with scholarships. Most scholarships, as I said before, are going to focus just on the tuition. They don't usually extend to room and board. Okay, if you get a merit-based scholarship. So understand that this is oftentimes why I say if you need, if you need to get a scholarship that brings the cost below 20,000, that's why it's so difficult because universities typically expect you to at least cover your living expenses so they don't lose money on you. You know, and that's where when you need living expense covered, now we're really entering into difficult territories and that makes it harder to get in. Okay. Yeah, more people waiting. Are we hitting like a maximum or something here? Because I didn't think it was a maximum. I don't know, maybe people are just coming and going or getting disconnected. All right. So fees. Now these are usually small and they typically just have to do with your major. Like if you're in a science major, you pay fees for laboratory resources, the chemicals they use and the instruments they use and spaces and stuff. And so some careers will ask for more. You know, if you do computer science, you'll probably see higher fees than if you do political science. Political science probably won't have many fees at all because you're just going to sit in a classroom and talk and and write and read. Whereas a computer science classroom is going to sit down in a computer lab with expensive computers. And so those cost money and that's an additional expense. These are also typically not covered by scholarships. So keep that in mind. Like we will get to financial aid and how that can impact later. But the other thing is the personal expenses that I or sorry, books real quick books buy them used. And I'm not going to officially say you should pirate them. But September 19th is international talk like a pirate day. And it is my favorite holiday. So I'll let you decide what I'm trying to say. Book fees are ridiculous. And a lot of them are broken because teachers will tell you to like pay for their own book. It's kind of ridiculous. I've heard some horror stories. If you can buy used books, buy used books. You'll save money. So personal expenses again, things like going out to eat, taking a little trip, toothpaste, you know, those basic things that you need, you need to think about your lifestyle and how you want to live. And there is the classic student that lives on ramen noodles and that's possible. But I would prefer that you, you know, have a little more to take care of yourself. And again, maybe some money to fly back to visit family, to have family visit you. It's important to think about those expenses as well. And also your initial flight to the United States is often not covered by universities. There's a few exceptions for that. But yeah, you're going to want to make sure you have enough to cover some of your expenses. Okay. So, okay, let's move on a little bit to talk about something else which is important, which is how to get in-state and dual nationality. Now, if you have dual citizenship with the United States, that is great. But it does not give you in-state tuition automatically. So for anyone here who is a dual citizen, this is for you. Understand that in private universities, everyone is treated the same. International, domestic, in-state, out-of-state doesn't matter. Okay. In public universities, the residents of a specific state can get in-state tuition. But you have to be a resident. So just to illustrate that with my example. Okay. I am a U.S. citizen. I have United States citizenship. I am from Michigan, according to in-state tuition rules because I graduated high school in Michigan. I lived in Michigan for nine years. My parents paid taxes there. I paid taxes there. If I wanted to go back to the United States, I could go ahead and go to Michigan and I could get in-state tuition. But if I try to go to Florida or if I try to go to Pennsylvania or if I try to go to Texas, I won't get in-state tuition. Those states will not recognize me for that. And I may not even be able to get it in Michigan anymore after living in Peru for 14 years. It's possible they would say no. So it's important to understand that if you have dual citizenship, you have to actually be a resident for a full year not studying in order to qualify. If you are a resident of a state or you have been a resident of a state, you may be able to. And there are some agreements with other states. Like in the western states, it's actually really cool. There's something called the Western Student Exchange, I think it's called. And if you're like west of the Mississippi River, you get in-state tuition basically in all those places. So someone from like Utah could study in Hawaii and pay almost the same as an in-state student. So that's kind of cool. And again, guys, I'm not going to record the Zoom because we are recording on YouTube. So I'll leave the link with everyone at the end. You'll have it here. Now the benefits though that dual citizens have is that they get access to more financial aid. FAFSA is available at almost every university. So financial aid for dual citizens is much easier. And also there's usually more scholarships and maybe you can get alone if you want to help pay for your studies. So there are some advantages to having dual nationality. But if you're not a dual citizen, how can you get in-state tuition? There are some public universities that offer this to specific groups of people. I mentioned Florida. Florida has something called the Latin American Caribbean Scholarship. If you have a citizenship from any of the Latin American or Caribbean countries and you enter a public university in Florida, you may get in-state tuition even though you are not a resident. This is something we have taken advantage of in Latin America at score a lot. So we have a lot of students who have gone to those universities and they are paying $24,000 a year total. It's a good offer in the United States. They usually ask you to qualify for a scholarship first. Now if you're not Latin American Caribbean, obviously, you know, we're talking to my rest of foundation people from Afghanistan, obviously that wouldn't apply to you. What can you do? There are other universities. Louisiana has several universities that offer in-state tuition to international students. Texas also has many of them. The main ones like University of Texas typically don't do it for the full four years of study, but there are other universities like North Texas that will give you in-state tuition. Texas Tech, if you're interested in engineering or computer science is one of the best deals in the country. I have students there who are studying computer science for $23,000 a year. They're receiving in-state tuition because they had a small scholarship. So all you need is just a small scholarship and they will automatically give you that. And somebody asked if there's any sort of list of those universities and as a matter of fact, I actually made a video about that and I can send a link to that here for you guys. So you can see that video. I actually did a top 10 list of universities that give in-state tuition based on how much you could save. And hang on, let me grab that link and I'll paste that here. So yeah, feel free to check that out. I'll drop that in my YouTube chat too. If you guys want to open that in another tab and hang on to it. So that's just 10 examples of universities that give in-state tuition deals to international students when they qualify. So those can be really good options if you're in that $20,000 to $30,000 range and you're trying to find something affordable and something that's not too hard to get into. This is one of the best approaches honestly. But understand that that's probably the biggest discount you will get. So that's going to be tough. So yeah, again, those who can't if you're having internet trouble and can't join, you'll be able to watch the replay on YouTube later guys and that'll probably help you out. I know sometimes it's hard so okay. So again, I want to give you this example of what a public pricing looks like and what you need to look for when you decide to apply. So with Purdue for example, when you go to their website and look at their prices and this is from last year so it may have changed. But you'll see they have Indiana resident, non resident international. The cost for international is almost always a little bit higher than the out-of-state cost because of the additional visa fees that the university pays to the government. So there's a little bit extra for internationals but usually it's not that different. And you'll see here that the price does go up by double though for international students. Now again, this is Purdue. They do not have any scholarships for international students. So even if you love Purdue, if you can't afford that price that you see there, don't apply. Okay, don't waste your time and don't waste their time and just make your life easier. You know, make good decisions. That's a huge part of this process is choosing universities correctly. If a university doesn't have the ability to give you what you need, you should ignore it. Don't think that they're going to make a magic exception for you. They don't. Unless they have some clear scholarship mechanism or financial aid mechanism for you, that's what you get and that's what you have. So now in private examples, you'll see, for example, like the University of Tampa, we'll just tell you a flat cost because again, in private universities, they do not differentiate based on where you come from and you can just go ahead and, you know, apply. Right. Got a question about personal statements. Well, I actually wrote one live. We can talk about that more later on when I get to that part of the process. Caltech giving full scholarships, I don't know off the top of my head. I would have to look that up. But what you should look up, if you ever are wondering, does this school give full scholarships? The easiest search to do, and I will put it here in the, in the chat for everybody, is just search the name of the university. Okay. And, and then what I like to search for is my Spanish keyboard. I'm like, why is it not doing this name of the university plus we're going to say 100% of, this is, this is what you search. This is the magic search term that you need to use. I'm going to put this in the YouTube chat as well. You're going to say the name of the university. Okay. Plus 100% of demonstrated need for international students. Here's the thing. If a university does not promise to meet 100% of demonstrated need for international students, you probably won't get a full ride scholarship. So I would encourage people looking for full rides to actually, you know, choose those universities. And if a university promises to meet 100% of demonstrated need, I guarantee they will tell you very clearly. You will search that and you will find a page for financial aid for international students and it will make it 100% clear because they want international students to know that. They will tell you very clearly. There are only about 50 or 60 universities that do that. There are about 300 that will do financial aid for international students, but only about 50 or 60 promise to meet 100%. So understand that, you know, you need to look at that. You need to determine if that's possible before you apply. So let's talk about that. Let's talk about how we get it cheap. What do we do? How do we get that full ride, those big scholarships? I'm going to show you what to do. Okay. So again, we have two different terms that I'm going to use. Scholarships and financial aid, those are two different things. Scholarships are generally based on some kind of merit, usually academic merit, could be athletic merit. If you look for an athletic scholarship, could be some sort of musical or performance based merit, like for people applying to arts programs and theater programs and things. So we're always looking for something that proves that you are worthy of this scholarship. Merit based scholarships are what's available at most universities and this is what they look at. They will look at your last four years of grades in school to determine your GPA. Understand that they may convert your GPA differently. They will look at your original transcripts and make their own judgments. So even it, so don't sweat too much about converting your grades to the American system. If you have an official scale from your government, use it, but understand that schools can still make adjustments and they will still analyze your grades in the context of your system. Academic rigor, this is probably the most important factor. Academic rigor means how difficult your program was, how difficult your classes were. Now there is a sort of base level of rigor in your country, but then if your school offers more advanced courses like AP courses or international baccalaureate courses or more intensive courses, did you take those? Did you go for the most difficult thing that your school offered? If not, you'll lose some points here. If you did everything into the hardest level, you get more points here and this is what they really like to see. Now if your school doesn't offer more advanced courses, that's okay. They won't punish you because it's not your fault, but understand that you may not be getting the extra points that other people get and this is one of the reasons why here in Peru, we don't have anybody in MIT because MIT demands advanced mathematics courses for admission and we don't have them in our system. So we're stuck. So that's the thing to understand here. You want to take the most difficult courses possible if you can. Now rankings, if they rank your class, your graduating class, you should report that if your school does that. Some systems do not do that and that would only apply if it's available. SAT and ACT scores. If you submit them, I want to talk about this for a minute and this is important. Sorry, I want to make sure it's really clear when I say the SAT is not as important as it used to be. Does it help you? Yes. Do you need to work yourself to death for the SAT? No. Even in top universities today, there are many students entering test optional in some Ivy League colleges. That number is higher than 30% of the enrolled students every year. Test optional is real. I was very skeptical for a while. Honestly, I actually in 2021 recorded a video saying that I think it was a lie and then I didn't publish it because I wanted to wait for more data and as I got more data the next couple of years, I changed my mind completely. So honestly, if you're not a great person at standardized test, don't be afraid to submit your test optional. Okay. And a question from the YouTube chat here from Tadek asking, can I get a mission in aerospace engineering if I have an SAT score? I mean, again, are you applying to a college that requires the SAT? Because only 20% of colleges require the SAT. MIT requires it, Purdue requires it, public universities in Florida require it. But there are many other universities that don't. And there is no guaranteed admission for your SAT score even if you get a perfect SAT score that does not guarantee admission anywhere. Okay. You can apply it. Harvard rejects people with perfect scores every year. So it's not just about your test scores. Your test scores do not automatically reject you and they do not automatically admit you. They are just one component out of like 17 components that they evaluate. And every year the importance of SAT goes down. Okay. It goes down. So, yeah. I would not worry about it as much as you do. You should instead focus more on your essays. And in fact, many universities now say their essays are more important than the test scores. They want to get to know you with your essays. Nazrin, your question about using Common App to get scholarships. Yes. So when you apply on Common App, you will typically be considered automatically for these merit-based scholarships. In most cases in the United States, these are automatic. So when you apply on Common App and you finish the process on the university's website, you have already applied for the scholarships. As far as Duolingo, I will get to that later. I have a slide about that. Okay. Now, the other thing that matters are your recommendation letters. Okay. And I'm publishing a video actually in an hour and a half. I finished it yesterday. So just after this live stream is over, you'll be able to watch a video with some tips for you as students and tips for your teachers. I encourage you to share that video with your teachers and try to get the best letter of recommendation possible. Okay. Now, there are other scholarships that you may want to consider. There are sometimes what we call external scholarships or there are additional scholarships that the university may offer but that require an additional application. You will always apply for scholarships through the university, through their portal. You do not apply to scholarships on Common App. Okay. You always go directly through their portal and one word of advice for the international community, never pay money to be considered for a scholarship. Okay. That's usually a scam and you shouldn't have to do that. Any real scholarship that really is intended to help international students will not ask you for an application fee or for you to wire money first. Please don't do that. Okay. Please don't. Like, that's a bad idea. Now, the... Hang on. Someone asked about certificates of ECA extracurricular activities? No. No one's going to read all your certificates. Again, you do not need to have certificates or papers that certify your activities. In general, we believe you and obviously there's a limit to how many things a human can do in 48 hours or 24 hours. So if you're putting ridiculous numbers of hours and it doesn't add up, they will be suspicious if you go to an interview or you never talk about those activities in your essays or like they look it up on Instagram and don't see anything there. Like you got to understand that they have other ways of validating things. Anybody can go print a certificate. It really doesn't mean anything for them. So they want to see that that activity impacted you through your essays and through your conversations with the universities. So when we want additional scholarships, usually those are going to focus on activities. There may be scholarships for people who've engaged in certain activities or who have won certain competitions. They may also ask you to write essays or get an additional letter of recommendation for a scholarship. So it's always good to have extras, you know, extra ideas for your essays, extra letters of recommendation. Just have more stuff than you think you need because you may need them and it may help you out. One of my students, Claudia, who got a full ride at Columbia, she got that full ride as a transfer student and her first year she was at UCLA. She did not have a lot of financial aid despite having American citizenship and she put together $30,000 of external scholarships simply by using the university's scholarship portal and searching online and sending essays to like different scholarships and sending more letters of recommendations. She got $30,000 for a full year. That is what you can do. Okay. There are more opportunities for U.S. nationals. Claudia had that advantage but there are scholarships out there. You have to be willing to take some time and investigate and look and, you know, make sure you have everything you need. Okay. So yeah, fast facts. The video for letters of recommendation is coming out in an hour and a half. You have it. It's done. And yeah, are you looking up Instagram? Yeah. People do. I mean, I've heard, I've talked to admission officers. They're like, oh, this student says they had an NGO. Oh, let me go see their NGO and they search it on Instagram and it's just like, oh, you just, you know, made a few posts or something on Instagram or it's like, it doesn't look like you did anything. Like, you know, they can tell kind of when people are faking things a lot, you know. Question here about, is it risky to apply to many universities at the same time? No, it's not risky. It's increasing your chances essentially. However, understand that if you are applying to many universities, that's more work for you. So you want to make sure you do good applications that you apply to places that you genuinely want to be at. Don't just, I want to say, I really don't like the people that just apply to 30 top universities because they want to see what happens. Like if you don't genuinely know those universities, if you don't demonstrate interest, if you don't care about that place, they will know. They will feel that. They will smell it. They, it's hard to fake, you know, genuine interest, but it's easy to detect fake interest. So you should choose, you know, universities that you genuinely want to apply to that work for you. How can you access the videos I'm talking about? The score channel. You can go to my channel anytime you want. It's all there. So, and I'll show you a link to that later. Age limitations, no, there are no age limitations really. In the United States, we have freedom. People start college at all different times of life. TOEFL or SAT. It's not TOEFL or SAT. It could be both. And I'm going to talk about that later. So the other thing I wanted to mention here is community service or volunteering is also something that universities really prioritize a lot when they look at scholarships. So keep that in mind too. Like universities are more likely to invest in you if they feel that you are the kind of person who will give back. I mean, you don't deserve anything for free. Nobody does. We all have to work hard for what we want. And at the same time, the university says if I'm going to give this person money to do this, I hope that they are going to also give money, give support, give effort, give, right? Why should you only receive? Should you not also give? And that's one of the driving principles that I apply here at SCORE. It's like give. You know, we want to give as much as we can. And so, for me, I think it's important that you understand that too when you're looking for scholarships. Like it's going to be harder to get a huge scholarship if you want to get a business degree where it looks like you're going to go make a bunch of money after. It's easier to get a scholarship when you want like political science and you want to return to your country and make it a better place. Or when you want to study education and help more people. Like I guarantee you right now guys, I know a lot of people want engineering, computer science, medicine, like high paying careers. But it's harder to get scholarships in those because there's a lot of people applying and because you're going to make good money if you do that. Like, why should the American student take out a huge loan for medicine and you get it for free when you're going to become a rich doctor? Now, if your intentions are to work in doctors without borders and you know, help refugees and, okay, great. That will help. If you want to, you know, study political science and come back to your country and improve your country by taking an active role in politics, that is the kind of thing that university wants to invest in. But if you are, you know, trying to make a bunch of money as a lawyer, like there's a difference. So I think it's important to understand that, that like colleges prioritize certain kinds of people. If you apply to education, like I guarantee your chances of getting in and getting a scholarship go up, you know. A really good question here from Nilo. Is it important that our background and ECs align with the field we want to apply? Kind of. If you have some connection, you should have some connections to your major. Like it's ideally you should. Okay. But you don't have to all the time. It's not everything you've done has to be related to your major either. It's good to have some things related to your major, but you should also have a diversity of interest and do the things that you genuinely like to do. Okay. If you studied a master's degree based on education without research or thesis, can you apply for a doctorate? That's a good question. You would have to check out those requirements for each program what they require because some of them may require that research. There may be others that do not. So I would say you have to really check program by program. PhDs are processed at a much different level from undergraduate admissions. I'm mostly focusing on undergraduate admissions today to be completely clear, but PhDs are very much a personal decision between you and the faculty. So I would reach out even to professors at universities that you're interested in for that. Okay. If we say you're an AUAF online student, I don't. Okay. Does it affect your profile if you have a scholarship from somewhere else? Like, okay. So I understand your question, Marcel. So if you have a scholarship from like the government or some other organization, that could affect your situation. So if you, for example, have a scholarship that promises to cover full tuition, you don't have to request financial aid, for example, from the university because you already have the money in another form. And so your chances of admission go up. Here in Peru, we have something called the Comet Scholarship, you know, because you're like a beautiful comet in the sky. And that scholarship promises full ride scholarship to students who make it. They give it to a few people every year. We work with some of the people even that apply to those. And if they get that, we, they do not apply by asking for financial aid because when we ask for financial aid, it's going to impact our chances of getting in. So because they have full funding from somewhere else, they are treated as a rich student, basically, that can afford full price. And so that gives them an advantage. And so I want to talk about that about financial aid and how that works a little bit. So we can, you know, talk about that. Okay. And Nilo actually, so as far as my context, you can go to prepwithscore.com. I'm going to show you that at the end of this as well. So you can check that out. Biology Bachelor can apply for computer science master. Yeah, you might be able to. Yeah. If you have a certificate in programming, that could work. Try it. They're, they're more flexible than you might think. A lot of people do master's to even change career paths and stuff. So if you can handle the coursework, they'll, they'll consider you. IB test has roles. Yeah. Some universities even have preference for IB students or give scholarships to IB students specifically. Can you get a full scholarship without SAT? Yes, you can. I've seen it happen. It is possible. It definitely is. It definitely, I think, is better to have an SAT if you're looking for a bigger scholarship, but you can do it. You don't need to be 18. You can be under 18. In fact, here in Peru, most of my students are 17 when they go abroad or they just recently turned 18 when they start university because we only have 11 years of education. So they finish a year younger and then they go to the US and no problem at all. So, okay. Okay. That's a non-person online. Okay. Thank you to here for clearing that up. If you have like a scholarship to another program, you can mention that in your CV like as an award or in the award section of Common App. You could mention that you have this other scholarship that you've obtained to let them know like, hey, I'm scholarship material. But at the same time, understand that like, you know, it's not going to have a huge impact also because it's someone else's decision. Yeah. Live with relatives. Yes. If you live with relatives, though they have to be within a certain distance of the university. Usually the university will say like 10 miles or something. Like you have to be really close. All right. So I want to talk about how financial aid works because this is the route that most of us will probably take if we need a full ride scholarship. What you do is fill out some forms and in that form, you will explain your income and expenses, how much your property is worth and like how much you have in the bank or how in savings. And your family will say, this is how much we can spend per year on education. When you fill this out, you will use your local currency. You want to use your money. Okay. Don't convert things to dollars. They will do that for themselves. So generally, this is this is kind of like how we fill this out. All right. I'm going to explain a little bit where you fill that out and what you got. Yeah. I'm going to give you everybody a chance for open mic questions a little bit later, but I would, you know, if you have something, you can hit me up in the chat and we can clear that up as we go. So to get this, you need to look at where you can get it. Public universities basically never have financial aid for international students. Okay. Again, they are public. They receive their money from the state. Their job is to support national students. So unless you have dual citizenship, you can't get financial aid at public universities. All right. But again, there are those good publics that will give in-state tuition or even more to international students. So there are some public universities you should consider, but they don't do financial aid in most cases. Okay. Private universities, like I said, there's only about 50 or 60 that promise to me 100% of demonstrated need. Now someone in the chat asked me earlier, what does that mean? Okay. Let me give you an example. So when I fill out the financial forms, there I am explaining how much money comes in, how much I spend, how much I have, and how much I want to spend for college. Now, let's imagine that I have $100,000 in the bank and a big house and I make, you know, $70,000 a year and I got a bunch of money coming in. And my expenses are like $30,000. Every year I earn $40,000 that I can use. If I say, oh, I can only pay $5,000 for education, they're going to look at that form and laugh. They're going to say, that's not demonstrated need. You've got $40,000 of expendable income plus a bunch of valuable possessions and savings. You can pay more. Demonstrated need means that the number that you say you can spend matches with your financial situation. And the university evaluates that. So you can declare a number. You can say we can pay $5,000 a year. But if the numbers suggest that you can pay more, they will adjust that. They will not necessarily respect your answer. They evaluate demonstrated need. But the policy that these universities have is that if you are admitted, they will cover 100% of demonstrated need. So this is how my girl Alba got into Colombia. Colombia's total cost was about $88,000 last year. She came off the wait list. She had a, I think about like $9,000 a year of demonstrated need that, like that was all she could afford was $9,000 a year. And they looked at that. They said, okay, we admit you. And so out of that $88,000, you're going to pay $9,000. And we're going to cover $79,000 a year. You don't have to pay more than $9,000 a year. And so she got it. So that is generally how that system works. Understand that, you know, there aren't a lot of universities that do this and there are a lot of people that want this. So that is why I say only about 2% get those big offers. Okay. Now, just answer a couple of the questions here before I proceed. Bachelor degree in another country, you would want to go for a master's in the United States. So if you do a bachelor's, don't try to go back into the U.S. for another bachelor's. It really wouldn't make a lot of sense. It's not going to help you. And if you try to show them your bachelor's, they're going to say apply to graduate school. If you change your major, like in the middle of things, there's no guarantee you can do that. Some universities won't have space in the other major. And, you know, it may be possible in some cases, but there's no guarantees of changing your major. So don't think that, oh, I can like come in with education and get a great offer and then switch my major and do something else. Like, there's no guarantees they can do that for you. And they may not be able to make that change and you may be stuck in something. So choose what you really want to do. Now, I would say Abdullah for international students, bachelor's scholarships are more frequently and like easier to get in a way. Master's scholarships, there it really depends on what you're studying and if you can build some connections with the faculty. Like, I've seen people in the same university do their undergraduate and then make out like a deal with the faculty to work as a research assistant and do their master's for free. It's possible. But again, in the postgraduate world, it's more about your relations with the professors because the professors start making the decisions as to who stays and who goes. So you really want to get in good with them. Now, I want to talk about this that I think is important, need blind versus need aware. A lot of people will say, oh, it's a need blind university. So I have better chances, not necessarily. First of all, more people tend to apply to need blind international university. Like more people do that. Okay, more people apply to MIT, more people apply to Harvard. But the other thing is this, there's no such thing as truly need blind. Okay, they have other ways of sort of evaluating your situation. They can get an idea. Okay, if you give me your address, I can probably put it into Google Maps and see what your house looks like. If I have a zip code in the United States, I know more or less how much people make over there. Like there are certain factors if you if you've mentioned that your parents have high education levels, probably doing better. So understand that like, while they don't have the exact number in front of them, they have an idea. They're not completely blind. They're wearing some big sunglasses like cataracts sunglasses, but they can still see what's going on. Okay, so yeah. Now, great question from Alina. Is it a good way to get a U.S. scholarship and after arriving, leave the university and get the job? Now look, if you enter the U.S. on a student visa, you are not allowed to work anywhere but the university. The university can get you a social security number, which you need to work and pay taxes. But if you use that at other places, you're violating your student visa rules. And if they figure that out, they can deport you immediately. I never advise students to break the terms of their visa. It's not a good idea. If you finish your graduates or finish your studies, you graduate, then you may be able to get at least one year of work permission called OPT. OPT is optional practical training. Now you get a year, but to get that year, you must get that job within 60 days of graduation or before graduation. If you don't get it within 60 days, you have to return to your country. Okay? If you do a STEM career, you may be able to get three years of OPT. But again, you still have to get that first year set. So, yeah, it's tricky. Okay, great question from us about here. And this is a really good one for all international students. Thank you for asking this. Is it true that people of Afghanistan can't get appointments in the embassy for two years? Probably. But guess what? There's a hack. Okay? You get an emergency appointment when you have your papers for your visa. So, students are allowed to request emergency appointments in order to get to the United States in time to start their classes. So, if in your country, there's a long wait to get a visa, then go ahead and make the appointment for whenever you can. If it's 2025, make that appointment. It's okay. And then go back into the platform, request an emergency appointment, and it will open up a new schedule that you can choose a new date. They have a whole separate schedule for emergency appointments that they don't show you until you have an appointment. So, that is how we do it. That's what we do. We here at Score do that all the time. Here in Peru, it's like a year and a half wait for applications these days. It's gone down a little bit since the pandemic, but it's like a year, a year and a half. So, we always do emergency appointments to get in. Some of you have asked for high school scholarships. In fact, that is extremely rare. The only time that I've ever heard of that is like very wealthy private schools that want some diversity, but it's extremely rare, to be honest, for high school, like in the U.S. anyway. Usually high schools don't, most of them are public and they don't really have a lot of scholarships. Like, you would have to look at like, you know, private boarding schools and see if any of them have any kind of scholarship system, but generally that's not common for international students. So, again, most universities are need aware. They know how much money you can afford. Some say they're need blind, but I'm still skeptical, okay? Ivy League University, do they accept students without SAT? Yes, yes, they do. They're all test optional with the exception of MIT here. Like, they're all test optional. Like, you can apply without an SAT score. They have accepted people. I can show you proof. I did a whole video about it, actually. So, again, understand that when you ask for financial aid, you know, when you have more to spend, your mission is more likely, but obviously if you have a lower budget, that reduces your chance and make sure that you declare the amount that you can pay honestly, according to those things. Again, to make our legitimate extracur... Your activities will appear credible unless you're saying something ridiculous, like, I did eight hours a day of volunteering and another eight hours a day of work and I studied all day. It's like, well, when did you sleep? Like, if you're putting that, they're going to question you, but honestly, like, they're not asking for proof. You are assumed innocent, okay? You are assumed that you were telling the truth, but if you're saying things that don't make sense, they're gonna question it, or if you're saying things that are like extremely ridiculous, like, I don't know. I sold $4 million in my business. It's like, okay, I'm gonna look up your business, right? Because, like, if you're saying I'm gonna look up your business, right? Because, like, if you sold $4 million, I need to see this website. Like, I need to see this business. I wanna look at your financial statements, you know? But, like, I think that you really don't have to worry about trying to look legitimate, okay? If you're doing that, it's almost more suspicious. Possible to get a visa from U.S. Embassy in Brazil if you get a full scholarship. Yes, yes, you can. It's fine. Like, if you have a full scholarship, you'll get your visa. It's fine. One of the guys I worked with last year was from Yemen. My man, Iman. Shout out to Iman. He's in Dartmouth right now. He got his visa. He had to go to freaking Egypt to get his visa. He had to travel to Egypt from Yemen to get his visa. But he got it. So it's fine. Like, if you have a full ride and you could at least, you know, cover a little bit of living expense, like, you have enough money in case of an emergency, like a couple thousand dollars in case something happens, you have to fly home or something. You're good, okay? Yeah, your chance of getting a scholarship does change depending on what you study. I can tell you right now. Like I said before, if you are looking at a career that has, like, if you have a lot of financial intentions, let's say, if you're looking to study medicine and be a doctor in the United States, you're gonna make bank. So they expect you to pay. If your plan is, I wanna study medicine so that I can, like, go back to my country and build up the health system, that changes things, okay? So, and then again, there's majors where there is just less people. And, like, everybody applies to the same majors, like, and I don't wanna overgeneralize, but speaking specifically to many of the people who watch this channel, who are from, like, India and Pakistan and Bangladesh, there's a lot of people applying to the same majors, to engineering, computer science and stuff. And that limits your opportunities, too, because now more people are trying to get through a smaller door, okay? There are many other doors. There are many other majors, many other universities. Like, if we spread out, we have a better chance. If we all try to get through the same door, we're competing with each other, you know? So, there won't be other exams. Some of you have asked about exams. In the United States, there's no, like, entrance exams or, like, other exams. It's just English test and SAT, if you need it. And we'll talk about that. So, do universities have a simple form for financial aid? There is also the International Student Financial Aid application, which is ISFA. Some universities use that, but generally CSS profile is what we are expected to do. And I'm gonna get into that a little bit more here, okay? So, I'm just taking a look at some other questions I got here. With 73 in TOEFL, can you get a scholarship? Possibly, but you're not gonna have a lot of universities to choose from with a 73, okay? You definitely wanna have a better English level to have more opportunities, because there's a lot of universities that will ask for 80, 90, even 100, and that's important to understand. Also, 1410, a SAT score, sure, that's good, dude. Again, Muhammad, you don't need a specific score to get admitted. You can apply test optional, don't worry. 1410 is great, you can send that anywhere you want. You're fine, trust me. It doesn't have that much of an influence. SA for Common App, I did a whole live stream on that last month, actually, where I wrote an SA for the Common App, so you can check that out, too. 120 on Duolingo, that's usually solid. If you graduate and you love the country, can you immigrate and get a residency card? Possibly, if you get a job after college and you stay in that job and they like you, they could apply for a work visa, and then you have a green card, and then you could get citizenship. I'll be honest, that's something that most people won't do. Most people won't get that. It's about 10, 20% that succeed in that. Some universities make that easier than others. Some careers make that easier than others. Some, I mean, ultimately, comes down to you. Are you a great student who's gonna excel and then a great worker who's gonna excel at a company and impress people? Because if you are, your chances go up. But if you're just an average worker at a company, they're gonna say, I'm not gonna spend more money to get this person a visa when I could just hire somebody else locally. So there's no guarantees in the United States. If the plan is study and stay, understand that you will determine your own destiny. You will have to work hard, okay? 10, 20% succeed. But at the same time, there's amazing cases that happen. When I went to Southern Methodist University, the person in charge of international student affairs was a Peruvian woman who came out of a poor public university, studied at SMU, worked her ass off, got a great job, and stayed in the United States, became a citizen. And that's why she later abandoned her career to work at that university because she wants to give more people those opportunities. And 97% of the international students at SMU get jobs out of the college. So some colleges really make a strong effort to provide those opportunities to students. And I think that's something else to check in on is what are their opportunities for employment, their job fair opportunities, how much do they help you with that? So, all right, so again, just a couple examples of how these look like. In the case of Columbia, I have these cases of people who have gotten these massive grants or in USF, people who've gotten in state tuition with other scholarships. So this is some of the things that we recommend students look at. So let's talk about the application process. I think we've covered pretty much all the financial stuff that's important to know. So how do we actually apply and get in to these? And yes, we will do some open mic questions at the end here. So first of all, the first thing you need to apply are grades. You will send your complete grades through grade 11 and partial grades, whatever you have, up until that date, okay? So most of the time, if we're going to apply in the United States, we apply in our final year of school. You may also apply later as a gap year, that's fine. In that case, just send all your complete grades from high school. But generally, if we're seniors, we're going to apply with our complete grades through 11th and then partial grades that we have up until that point. The SAT, only 20% of universities require SAT or ACT today. Now, some universities still require it. If you want a university that requires the SAT, then take the SAT. If you want a university that's test optional, take a look at the data. I've already talked about this a lot on the channel, but you can look at the common data set. You can see what percentage of students got in with test optional, and that can give you a good idea of how optional it really is. You can see the scores that students got in with, so you can have an idea. I guarantee you don't need a 1500 plus to get a great result. My girl, Claudia, got a full ride scholarship of the 1400. Like it's possible, okay? You don't need to have the best score in the world. And having the best score doesn't guarantee anything either. So just understand that you don't have to do these anymore. And I want to share this quick story with you. I've shared it once before, but I want to share it again with everybody here because I love how many people are here today. The university representatives don't like the SAT, okay? They don't. They don't get to decide whether they use it or not because they're not the dean of admissions, but they do care about you as a person. They don't like the SAT. And as I was at a conference in Miami, the International Association of College Admission Counseling Conference, they had a talk about improving diversity in colleges and the woman was from UCLA and her recommendation was to stop considering the SAT, go test blind. And when she said that, the entire room erupted into applause and like 200 university representatives stood up and applauded. It was a unanimous sensation in that room. Everyone was happy to hear go test blind. They don't really like the SAT, okay? So understand that most of the people in admissions would like you. They would like test optional applicants, but many people are afraid to do that. So they're in sort of a weird chicken or the egg scenario like I want people to apply test optional, but nobody applies test optional. And so since nobody applies test optional, the statistics make it look like I'm not test optional. And so people keep applying with tests and I want them to apply test optional and it creates this sort of circle that like you can't break, but we can break that. I can tell you right now, you don't need to sweat too hard about the SAT, okay? I see some questions about English test. I'm gonna get to those a little bit later. And Tahira, I explained, you can get a visa. I talked all about the visa, like you can totally get a visa from wherever you are. If you have a full scholarship, you will get your visa, okay? If it's from a legitimate university, so don't worry. Let's talk about those test scores for English proficiency. This is a requirement in almost every case. This is one of the hardest things to get out of, okay? And I need to make that really clear. I know it sucks, but you're probably gonna have to spend some money on a test, okay? Remember, you also probably have to spend the money to fly to the U.S. Like if you can't afford this test, then your situation's much more complicated and you may need to look at like, you know, donations, family support, something to help you with this. But like, you need this English proficiency test if you come from a country where English is not the first language or was not the full medium of instruction. If you were in a school that only taught you in English, you may be able to get out of this. But even then, you gotta get a letter from your school, you gotta send it to your admissions officer, it creates problems. We have tried it, it's not reliable. I always recommend going with the IELTS or the TOEFL. Both work. Universities do not care about these tests. They do not prefer one over the other. They do not like give more scholarships to one or the other. There is no difference in terms of like what they like. Same with SAT, ACT. There's no like, oh, you gave me an SAT, so I like you more. No, ACT, SAT, same deal, okay? TOEFL, IELTS, Duolingo, same deal. But understand that Duolingo may be an option. It's not always an option, okay? Duolingo was the only option during the pandemic and so many universities adopted it temporarily, but not permanently. And many universities have also stopped supporting Duolingo. So understand that like, you may not be able to use Duolingo at every university. If you can, great. It's cheap, it's easier. I like it, I took it. Actually, I made a video a couple of years ago taking the Duolingo, but I recommend IELTS or TOEFL. I usually recommend IELTS because it's easier and I know a lot of times people think, oh, TOEFL is for the United States and like IELTS is for other countries and no, actually all my students in score, almost all 90% take the IELTS and they all get into universities in the US just fine. Nobody's ever had a problem with that. So far, the only university that ever gave me a problem for having IELTS and not TOEFL was oddly the business faculty in a university in Spain, just that faculty. And we had to like call them up and we fixed it, but like that's the only issue I've ever had with that. So don't worry. There is some flexibility with this, by the way. Like if you're one or two points short, don't be afraid to apply. Like a lot of people assume, oh, I didn't make the English score, I can't apply. There's more flexibility with English than you think. So a lot of times they may say, hey, we're gonna admit you, but there's a condition. You have to take some extra English courses in your first year. It's not a big deal. Good question for Marilla. Can we submit the scores ourselves? So you do self-declare your scores in the Common App, but later you have to send the official scores and I'm gonna talk about that too. I didn't get 160. I think I got 150 or like something like that because I accidentally clicked next, like really fast on a question by accident and it skipped it. It didn't even ask me like, hey, you didn't answer this question. Do you wanna answer? It just went, okay, next. And I got one writing question wrong because I didn't do it. And so that dropped my grade. So I didn't get a perfect score. So yeah. Generally for IELTS, we wanna see 6.57 ideally for English to get into better universities. For TOEFL, I typically recommend 80 as like a good minimum. There are some universities that will accept smaller scores than that, but 80 gets you a lot of options in Publix. 90 gets you a lot of options across the board. 100 or more gets you the best schools. So generally you wanna go for those scores. Duolingo, usually like a 120 gets you most places. But again, you gotta check and make sure that those universities still accept Duolingo because a lot of them don't. And don't expect English courses to count. A lot of times people will say, well, what about like my IB English? And it's like, yeah, some universities will count that but a lot more will not. So you need to understand that if you're gonna apply internationally to the US, you probably need this, okay? And so you should prepare and make sure you do some practice tests so that you can do that, all right? Speaking other international languages like French does look good on your profile, but also this is America and we speak American so it's not gonna give you a ton of bonus points, okay? If you do speak French fluently, I would encourage you to look at universities in France because they are way cheaper or Belgium where they are way cheaper. Like you can find cheaper options if you speak other languages. So yeah, think about that. Okay, essays, this is the fourth requirement. You need to do good essays. There are two kinds of essays. You've got the general essays where you send these to everyone that you choose. So your common app, personal statement, personal essay is a general essay, the COVID essay, a gap year essay if you do that. There are also supplementals where each university asks you specific questions. I'm going to be producing more content on essays. In fact, in three days, I'm doing a live stream where I edit people's essays for viewers on the channel. So if you wanna send me an essay and I will look at it in the stream, you can hit me up on WhatsApp. You can go to prepwistscore.com. There's a WhatsApp link and you can send it to me there. I will add it to my list and we'll go through them on Friday. But understand, your essays are huge. This is probably the part where most people make the biggest mistake, which is not doing these well enough or doing these last minute or spending five hours a day studying for SAT instead of 30, 40 minutes a day working on their essays. Honestly, this is probably the part of the process that you can control the most. Quick advice for these. Just understand, don't try to impress. Your job with the essay isn't to impress people. It's about being you, being real, okay? If you're trying to impress, they can smell it and they don't like it. This is your space to just be a real person. Say what you wanna say, share something personal. I wrote mine on a live stream recently. I've done it before actually, but I wrote one recently where I just talked about the time my house burned down. I lost my house to a fire like when I was 13 or 14 and I wanted to talk about that because it changed a lot of things in my life and how I felt and like things that I think and I would say it has made a very big impact on my life. And that's it. It's just a very honest conversation where I'm sharing some information about an event that was important to me and how it changed me and made me who I am today. That's one way to write this, but don't sit there and just regurgitate your extracurricular activities. Don't brag about how you got first place in the tournament. Don't make it like a whole, look how great I am, okay? That's good for the United Kingdom, but not in the US, all right? Yeah, for those asking, if you wanna go to my site, you can go to prepfiscore.com and there is a link to WhatsApp on there and you can write me there. Yeah, thanks Nilo and Numa for asking about that. You can definitely be extremely personal. Like I'm checking essays and score right now because we have people that are in the system that are gonna apply soon. One of them, you know, she talked about the death of a friend in elementary school and how that friend was like extremely important to her and that was like a really touching essay and I liked it a lot. I had somebody else write about the music their dad listened to on road trips and how those lyrics impacted them and those moments with their dad was like really profound for them. Like you can write about anything you want. So really don't be shy. Take that opportunity to do something different. And also try to write like how a normal person speaks. Don't try to elevate your language and make it super literary because that's another big mistake. Like remember, you're just speaking to a normal person and you wanna make it easy to understand you. So think about how you normally speak and try to be down to earth. In America, we are way less formal. Okay, we don't like formality. We don't like fancy stuff and traditional stuff. We don't like unnecessary decoration. Okay, we like to be very direct and to the point and very real with each other. So when you do that in your essay, you feel more natural to the reader. You gotta think about who your reader is. And if you're trying to sound like, look at all my vocabulary. I've used every amazing word in the dictionary. It's like, okay, great, but like nobody actually sounds like that. And so you don't sound like an authentic person. So keep it simple, keep it personal. Keep it real, okay? That's really important, I think, to establish. Okay, great question from Zubaira about early decision. It does not reduce your chances. Those people who say that it's already reserved for all these legacy celebrities and donors and stuff, they're not reserved for those people. Yes, a lot of those people apply early decision. But guess what? There's no limit on the number of people they could admit early decision. And if those plus were reserved for those people anyway, they were gonna get in anyway. So some of them will also apply regular because they know they can apply later. Nobody ever actually has any data to show that early decision hurts you. There's no data that supports that. The admission rates are always higher. Universities always encourage it. And in my experience, students always get more money when they apply early. So this idea that like, you know, I honestly think it's, some people want to scare you away from applying early so that they have a better chance. I don't trust anybody who says, oh, early decision, you know, it's just athletes. You shouldn't do it. I bet you they will. I bet you if they showed you their application, they apply early. Like, I don't trust them at all. It makes no sense. Every single admission officer I've ever talked to always encourages me to apply early. Every bit of data I've ever seen always encourages me to apply early. Okay, so again, Sarah, there's no difference in effect from TOEFL Duolingo IELTS. They are all treated the same. There is no difference at all. Just choose the test. It gets you into all of your universities. Okay. All right. If you get rejected from early decision, you can apply again in other slots. Yeah, we'll talk about that a little bit more in a second. CV or portfolio, this is another requirement. A lot of universities will ask you for a CV, which outlines your activities and other things, awards, educational experiences. And a portfolio applies usually for arts and architecture programs. They often ask for this. So make sure you work on that as well if you're gonna apply to those programs. Theater programs and music programs typically have auditions as well. So these extra things may be required. I usually encourage everyone to have a CV. And if you're gonna apply to any of those arts or architecture careers, you should also have a portfolio. Some places won't require it, but many of them will. Finally, recommendation letters is the last thing that you actually need to apply. We're gonna need one from a counselor at school, a person at the school that can verify that you are like a real person and that you did some activities. And this is one of the ways that they know that activities are legitimate. When someone from the school says, yeah, they participated in all these things and this is how they were. And like, the school counselor letter gives sort of validation to a lot of the things you say. The teacher letters. Again, a video is coming out about this in like less than an hour. But what I encourage you to do is always get one letter related to your major. So if you wanna study engineering, you need a letter in math or physics. If you wanna study medicine, maybe biology, chemistry. If you wanna study, you know, business, you may benefit from a business course or economy or like even maths as well because there's math and business. You can also ask your favorite teacher. You can also ask the teacher that has known you the longest or the teacher that you have the best grades with. Like those are usually the best people to ask, okay? Your school principle can absolutely be a recommendation letter. In many cases, I know, now this is something important. I know a lot of us do not have a school counselor that is like a real person that does this job. You need somebody from the school though to complete your applications. Without that, it's really hard. So I would encourage you if you don't have a designated school counselor to speak directly to the principal and ask the principal to take that role or assign that role. And then also tell them they need to communicate that to everyone because one of the biggest problems I've seen is like when there is no clear school counselor or when that counselor doesn't know what they're doing, students will sometimes create fake accounts and like upload stuff on their own and pretend to be somebody that they're not and sometimes if multiple people do that, the universities notice and it can get a school in trouble. Like they may not trust other students from that school and they can remove applications. I've seen this happen in Peru. We had to step in and like intervene in one school that was having this problem. So like really important to make sure that, you know, everybody is on the same page. Whoever that person is that's in charge in the school, you should work with that person. Do not try to submit stuff in any other way. You're just gonna create more problems for yourself and other people, okay? Can you start your process with only SAT score? Well, no, you need all these other things. SAT score is not the only thing you need. So you need more. You need all these other things I'm talking about here. Other letters, you can have other letters too. Some universities allow you to send a letter from a peer, from like a friend in school. You can send a letter sometimes from like a sports coach or somebody else from outside, you know? Good question about the CV, Sadia. You can submit two pages typically, like a front and back, you know? Two pages essentially is what you should do as a limit. More than two pages is rare. I would usually say you probably are putting too much stuff in your CV unless you have a really exceptional profile, in which case three. Three is my absolute max. Most of my students send with two, okay? Some will limit you to two. So if you do have a three-pager, make a two-page version just to be safe. Finally, talking about financial aid. So for those international students that need financial aid, the other thing you have to do for your application is fill out the CSS profile, which is open in October, but you would need to do it before early applications. So I would encourage you to, you know, start working on that as soon as it becomes available in October, okay? Muhammad, you can only choose one university for early decision. Early decision, you get one, okay? So there's no more than one. Pick wisely. Everything else, do early action as much as you can, all right? Let's talk about that specifically, when to apply. This is important, okay? I think the biggest mistake that I see on applications is applying late, all right? You normally want to apply 10 to 12 months before starting classes. So you're gonna start classes in September. Don't apply for spring if you need financial aid, all right? We wanna start in September, okay? Those early deadlines are usually November 1st. So that is your goal, November 1st always. I don't care if it's early decision. I don't care if it's early action. I don't care if it's regular. I don't care if it's rolling. Apply November 1st or before. Ideally, three days before, because the day before and the day of are terrible days. Platforms crash, systems break. Too many people applying last minute and not being responsible. Be one of the responsible people. Apply at least three days before, even more if you can, even more. Imagine you're the only person in their inbox. Maybe they decide to like check your application that day. Maybe they go, you know what? I'm gonna have to check like thousands of applications in a week. I better just like, like I got this one sitting right here, I'm just having my coffee. Maybe I can like check Subhair's, you know, application. Maybe I can check Mohammed's work right now. Let me do that right now. Let me take five, 10 minutes to look at one person's application calmly, peacefully. That can make a difference in your chances, guys. It really can. If you apply on the deadline like everybody else, you are one of thousands of things in the inbox. You apply a few weeks before they might notice you and go, interesting, okay. I'm gonna remember that name, you know. Recommendation letters are usually one page. I usually aim for 350 words in my letters. I also, in the video that's coming up today, you will see examples of my letters. I've attached a folder with examples that you can share with your teachers too. So can I share which top rank universities except Duolingo? You can Google it. Google Duolingo and they have a page on their website that tells you all the universities that accept Duolingo. You guys have to be willing to do some research on your own too, I gotta be honest. You have to navigate this system. So it takes work. It takes time to go into the page of every university. You can also search, name of the university, English proficiency requirements. If you search that, you will go directly to the page where they tell you what the score you need is and what exams they accept. But that's part of your work, all right? And if you're not able to find basic information, then maybe this isn't for you, I'll be honest. Like I understand it can be difficult. Sometimes I don't wanna be mean, but I know it can be difficult sometimes to find information but you literally have a magic information searching machine called Google. So learn to use it. You need to learn to use that tool. That is one of the most important tools in the world. 90% of my job is Googling stuff, okay? So get good at Google. I'm not telling it to you to be mean, I'm telling it to you because it's probably the most important skill you could ever have. So you need to learn how to use it. If you don't know how to search the right terms and find these things, then you need to like practice that, literally. That should be something you should do. What should your essays be about? Whatever you want. Like, write your essays about what you wanna write. Don't, there's not any correct answer to that question. Okay? Colleagues and mentor for recommendation letter, that is okay. If you absolutely can't get recommendation letters from a teacher, you can be creative. I've written letters for people that were in score. I've written letters for people that I've just helped, like, you know, independently of score who weren't even paying me. Like, you can do different things, but ideally they wanna see at least one from a teacher or someone from the school, you know? Words, all the essays have a word limit. So pay attention to what that limit is. Your common app essay is a limit of 650. I encourage everyone to be within 5% of the limit. Try to use all the words you can, okay? All right, so apply early. Now, early action versus early decision. Some people asked about this. You can only have one early decision school, but everywhere else, do early action always. If you are rejected from the early decision school or if you don't get enough financial aid from that early decision school, you can withdraw your early decision application and you may be able to apply to an ED2. There are some schools that have like two rounds of early decision, you could do that too. If you do get into your early decision school and you do get the financial aid you need, then you must withdraw your other applications and enroll immediately in that school, okay? You have to accept that offer. So that's it. Tamina, if they don't have email, meet with them and create an email account for them because they have to submit these letters through common app. They have to submit them through a portal with an email. Like if you got people, I've worked with some technologically illiterate individuals myself and I have gone as far as to say, okay, I'm gonna make you an email. I will help you with this, all right? But this is how they have to do it. So like sending it in person will not work. All right, talking about regular mission versus rolling a mission. Applying regular truthfully, the message is you don't really wanna be there. It's not your priority. It's not your first choice. It's not a university you care about that much. If you're applying regular instead of early, it's not the best look. I'll be honest, it's not. It reduces your chances. Rolling admissions means there is no deadline, but still, that is all the more reason to apply early because rolling admissions means they process the applications as they come in. So if you apply early, you'll be one of the first people they review and you'll probably get more scholarships. You'll probably have an easier chance of entering, okay? So understand that. Like I don't care whether it says rolling regular, whatever, you want to apply early, please. And I'll share an example real quick. This is going longer than I wanted, but I'm having fun. All right, so I've talked about Claudia before who got the full ride in Columbia. Well, she had another colleague in her same graduating class who actually had a much better profile in every sense of the word. She had a 1550 SAT. She was number one in the class. She had mostly the same activities and had like a really good, strong profile, super smart, beautiful essays. Very good profile in every way. Okay, Claudia was lower rank and had like 1400 on SAT. All right, still a great student, love her to death. But her classmate was objectively better in like every category. What was the difference? Her classmate came to us at the end of November. And was like, now I want to apply to the US. And was like, dude, you missed the first deadline. Like we have to rush. And she rushed and she applied to some schools and she got into some really good places. But she didn't get even wait listed to any of the Ivy League schools while Claudia did. She didn't get the big fat scholarships that other students got. So even though she had a better profile, because she applied December and January, she didn't get the same results. She could have had better results. Now she's in a great program and she got a really good scholarship from a public university in Cincinnati. So she's doing well. And I visited her, she's like happy, I'm glad for her. We found a way to make it work. But there was potential for a lot more. And that was just lost because of a couple of months. So believe me when I say applying early makes a difference. And it's the number one thing you can do. Now, after you do this, understand that there's still more to do, okay? You are not done when you apply in Common App. In fact, that is kind of like the beginning of the journey because you will need to pay a lot of attention to your email. Universities should send you access to their own platform where you have to upload official documents. For example, your official test scores. So in Common App, I say, hey, I got 1350 on my SAT. I got 650 here, look. But then when I get the access to the university's portal, I need to go into college board and say, okay, send my scores to this university. Here's the code. And then it will send it directly to that university. And then they have the official results and then your application will be completed. Same thing for like transcripts and grades, your teachers and school have to make sure they finish uploading those things. If, make sure also that your name matches everywhere. This is really important because I've seen people with a mistake in their name, or some people who use like their first two names on their SAT, but then not in Common App, you could have problems getting your stuff. We had this happen last year to a lot of students. Like, because in Peru, they have four names. Some of them have more, too many names. And so like some of them put just one name for the test and then two names in the application and then the application never got their test results and it was canceled. So you wanna make sure your names all match and that everything is identical always. There's usually a deadline after the application deadline for documents. It could be 15 days later, 30 days later, 45 days later. Usually like, okay, so if I apply November 1st, they might say, hey, everything has to be in by December 1st or November 15th. So pay attention to that. Like you should try to do that as soon as possible because these things can take some time, okay? And then finally, remember your school counselor has to upload grades and the recommendation. That is all very important, okay? So that is the process. That is everything we have to do. I know I have covered a ton of information here today. That was a lot, but I wanna hear from you. If you have any questions, you wanna raise hands, you wanna open mics, you wanna leave them in the chat. We can talk a little bit. Let's hear some of your thoughts and any questions that you might have. So yeah, what you got for me. I think I, yeah, yeah. Okay, great questions. Thank you so much, I appreciate you checking things out. I haven't really touched on external scholarships that much on the channel, mostly because they change very frequently. Like there are a lot of times they are dependent on donors and sometimes those donors disappear. They also tend to be very specific for international students. You might see an external scholarship for a specific country or for a specific group of people, you know, for specific people studying specific things. So a lot of times it's hard to answer that question for any one person. Like everybody needs to look and see what's available for them. There's a platform called Scali, which actually was featured on Shark Tank and it charges a monthly fee for you to browse all their scholarships with a filter system. That may be worth the investment. I personally haven't used it, but I have some students who have told me about using it and they said they like it a lot. Also with regards to the question about the answer, the SAT, right? So, well, before I answer that, as your question, how viable, how possible is it? It's really going to depend on what's available for you to be totally honest. Like I've seen people pull off $15,000, $20,000 in external scholarships. I've seen people get full rides from their government. I've seen people, you know, get external scholarships that can benefit them a lot, but it also depends on what's available for you. Like what's available for an individual in Bangladesh is going to be completely different from what's available for someone in Afghanistan. So it's really important to make sure that you find scholarships that actually work for you. So you might want to search for like, okay, scholarships in the US for Afghan students or students studying this or students who have done this and see what might be out there. Everybody's results will vary, to be honest. I know it's not the most satisfying answer, but it is the truth. Regarding the scholarships in the SAT, the SAT can result in more scholarships, both internal and external. Some colleges will even give you more money if you have an SAT score. So, and there are some that lock, like their best scholarships are only available for people with SAT. So it does help. And some external scholarships exist that have SAT requirements. So again, I do encourage students to consider taking the SAT if they need additional aid or scholarships because it can give you more possibilities, okay? At the same time, I would say most external scholarships are looking at other factors. Most of them are looking at activities, leadership, volunteering, or like your specific region or specific area of study. All right, Tahira, talk to me. Oh, thank you, Sarah, for holding this program. And I want to ask that I applied for a university in the United States. And I applied for a master's degree, but they asked me about credential evolution. I have sent a lot of email in a lot of companies and asked one of my teacher who is in the United States. But I think they don't take documents from Afghanistan and I want to get information a lot from you. Okay, that is a good question. I'm going to search something really quick and see if the company that I usually recommend does, I feel like they would be able to, but I want to see, yeah. Okay, so there, yeah, I would check out the company ECE. It seems like they do. So that's a great question that I can talk to you about a little bit. Credential evaluations are certified conversions basically of your studies abroad to a domestic systems grading system and like making sure it's equivalent for the level of study. Usually this is not that necessary in the United States, especially for undergraduate students, but sometimes for masters, PhDs and stuff, it is a requirement. This involves you sending your transcripts and your grades and everything to a specific company. There are two that do this a lot. One is called WES, one is called ECE. I recommend an ECE. We usually use them here at SCORE because they are faster and just generally better and I would recommend using them for those needs. So in those cases, if they ask you for a credential evaluation, then you would have to send your stuff to that company, pay them and they will do the conversion and they can send the final result to your university. That's a good question. Oh, by the way, I'll throw this up here real quick. By the way, these are just the contacts. If you wanna get in touch on WhatsApp, that's our WhatsApp number. If you wanna find the website or Instagram and check out some of the stuff we're doing, you can go there or you can go to my YouTube channel too. Okay, Lila Farr, what do you got for me? First of all, thank you so much for your time. So I have got two questions. The first one is somehow very personal. So I actually participated in an international competition and I think you may have heard of Rise Scholarship. And then I got finals there and I received a kind of letter from the University of Chicago that was saying you're a Rise scholar that can get admission in New Chicago. And I was through it and I'm totally confused that whether that is going to help me in the process of applying to the University of Chicago as my early decision at university. And also the next question was that if I apply to some medium ranking universities and if get admission, go there, can I apply as a freshman to my dream university like Stanford when I go to the US? Thank you so much. Okay, great. So all right, regarding the first part about that, about the scholarship, now I'll be honest, I haven't seen what they offer but basically if you are applying to a university with an external scholarship that you've received first of all, you know, like congratulations on that. In those cases, then you will be considered essentially as a student that has more income, right? So let's say for example, that I have a university that costs $70,000 a year similar to UChicago and I have an external scholarship for $50,000 and I have $10,000 that I can spend. I still need a little bit of financial aid. So I'm gonna fill out my financial aid but I'm gonna say that in my financial aid, I can afford 10 and I have this 50. So I only need 10 more from the university to be complete and so I am now a much better looking candidate because I can almost pay full price and since they're need aware, they're gonna look at that and say, ooh, good, okay, we're not gonna lose any money on you. We like that. Anytime you have more money to spend, you're more likely to get admitted. So that is really the main way that it benefits you is by having that extra support from an external scholarship, you're not necessarily asking for the university to give you as much money, okay? And that's one of the reasons why full paying students tend to get in more frequently. So if your external scholarship covers everything, then you don't need to ask for financial aid because you have that external scholarship funding and when you apply to the university and they admit you, you will then have to proceed to get your visa and you'll show them the scholarship information, you'll tell that scholarship organization, hey, this is where I'm gonna enroll and they will confirm that and then they will be able to say, okay, great, this person has everything they need to cover their cost of attendance and they will send you to the embassy, okay? So it does help you. It helps you, it makes you, instead of someone who needs a lot of financial aid from the university, you are now someone who is actually paying the university. So that makes a big difference. And with regards to your question about transferring, so if you are studying, whether in the United States or in another country, after you've accumulated 30 credits, you are eligible to transfer in the United States. At the same time, I don't usually recommend transferring in to the United States because typically scholarship awards are smaller, you may not be able to transfer some scholarships, you may find it more difficult to enter the university that way as well, not every university is transfer friendly. And so what we do a lot of times here in Peru, for example, like if I have students who are starting university, but they want to apply to the US, we just don't mention that they're in university because they have no way of knowing that you have 30 credits abroad, they don't have access to your system. So we just say that we're starting over as new students most of the time and that works perfectly fine. That's more or less how we handle the transfer situations. So once you have 30 credits, you can transfer, but understand that not every school is transfer friendly, some schools fill the whole class with new students. And so your only chance of getting in is if somebody quits or disappears for some other reason. So there are other places that are very transfer friendly, usually public schools, because they receive a lot of transfers. So I hope that answers those questions. Chacrea. Do you have my voice? Yes. Hang on, I think if you mute it again, it shuts off. Now you should be okay. Yeah. Do you have my voice right now? Yes. Do you have my voice right now? Mm-hmm. We're all good. So my question was, I'm currently a student of school and I'm in L1 grade. They've studied 10 grade and L1 grade together. And I'm planning for applying to college and university and I don't know whether foreign countries accept my certificate of school. And I am planning also to take my TOEFL in this winter. And what do you think? Can I apply for universities in the high school and what are my requirements? Like what should I be prepared for in advance? Thank you. Yeah. So generally speaking, I mean in the United States they're very flexible with the types of credentials and the types of things that they accept. You can almost certainly apply in the US. We have a lot of freedom in terms of the academic systems that we recognize and the types of options people have. So even if your system is not like the same traditional system or you've done something a little differently, I mean there's people that are homeschooled that do online school, they get into college in the US. Like there's a lot of flexibility. So I wouldn't worry too much about it. Just understand though that what we talked about with academic rigor is important. If your system is not seen as well as the official way or maybe has easier courses or something then they may look at it less favorably but there are possibilities. Like you can apply with almost anything. I've got students here in Peru for example that didn't go to daily schools in person. They just did remote programs where you turn in work and you attend like one day a week or something and they've gotten into college in the US. They try to be very flexible and understand that people have diverse situations and they try to look at you within the context of what was available to you. So they don't punish you for not being able to do something because when you're, I mean it's not your fault. Like my parents took me out of high school and maybe go into a distance learning program. Like that's not my fault. I can't do anything about that. I didn't have AP courses. I could have still applied and I could have still gotten in. I just chose not to and went to Peru but I still had chances. It wasn't like I was doomed because I didn't have the official standard usual thing. All right, so what else? Mohammed, I see you're here. You have a question too? Hello, greeting everybody. I hope you're all doing well. So I have a personal question from you. What's your prediction about the universities like MIT? Well, they require ACT in their next applications. I mean in the next years of application. So you know better that there are some students like currently there are a student in 11 or 12th grades and they wanna start preparation for the ACT test. But if the university will change their rules and regulations or if the university will not require the students to have the ACT, it will be kind of like wasting of time and wasting of the money as well. So what is your prediction about these universities? Because you know better that ACT has become really easy and I mean the new format of ACT, digital ACT. And one of the reasons that why most of universities are not accepting the ACT anymore is because that ACT has changed its format. So what's your prediction that will the universities require ACT like the universities like MIT? Will they require ACT in their next years of application? Okay, good question. Thank you. So I wanna start before I address MIT specifically, I wanna just address the general trend. Okay, so I made a video about this not too long ago and talked about how the SAT is not as important anymore. And in 2021, we had about 60% of the universities be test optional. In 2022, that went up, you know, closer to 70%. In 2023, it's about 80%. So most universities are trending into the test optional direction. And some of those test optionals are becoming test blind. Like there's a spectrum, we have test blind on one end, mandatory testing on the other, where it's considered very important. We have test optional in the middle. And we have test optional where like, okay, it's not a big deal at all. We have test optional where it's recommended, but it's optional. So there's a spectrum. Now, more universities are trending towards test blind, test optional. So more of them are going in that direction. Some universities though, have gone the opposite direction. They've gone back to their usual policies. I predict, I expect that, here's how you can answer that question. If a university was test optional during the pandemic temporarily and has not extended that policy, they will probably stay with the test requirement. So MIT was test optional briefly for the pandemic. After that, they went back to their normal routine. And when they went back, they, I don't think they're going to change again. I think they're going to stay with that requirement because if they wanted to stay optional, they had the opportunity. And they made a decision not to. So that seems like solid evidence that they will continue to require it. Some universities have put on their website how long they will be optional and they may change, renew that policy or change it. Some universities have already declared we will be requiring SAT going forward for these years. Like, so check the website's test policy, search for the university and test policy. Now that's how you can find that information. While I was at my conference last year in Albuquerque, the International Association for College of Mission Counseling Conference, we talked a lot about that. And there was kind of funny because like Caltech's representative who was test blind was there. And she was saying that, you know, they disagree with MIT. Two different perspectives on the same issue. Purdue went back to requiring the SAT. Georgetown went back to requiring the SAT. Public universities in Florida by law continue to require the SAT. Like, there are still places that will require it. And I expect them to continue to require it. But I also expect the number of test blind and test optional to continue to increase. OK, so if you're targeting MIT, I would plan on bringing a test score to be completely honest with you. I'd like to hear Raheela. I'll call you again in a second, but I want to hear Raheela here just because she hasn't talked yet. Wow, hello. Thank you so much for giving your time. Well, actually, my question is about the required documents by the university. Like, sometimes we, like most of the times we just prepare the required documents and submit all of them. But I don't know if the embassy like accepts those required documents that we have submitted already, like yes or not. Because unfortunately for some European universities, we had a lot like a high rate of rejection just because of the documents. Sometimes the university accepted Duolingo, but the embassy did not. And also sometimes embassy wanted some more documents like health insurance and also some other parents, I don't know, constant for students below 18. And this is my question for the required documents. And another question is about the like tofu or aisles. I mean, like, you know, you'd say that there is no difference between them, but what is the like a good number for tofu? Because most of us, we are preparing for tofu, but we don't know really like what is the most acceptable score for the tofu. Thank you. Okay, great. So on the first topic of the visas, each country has its own requirements and it's important to make sure that you comply with all of those things when you show up for your appointment. For example, health insurance is a requirement in most visa applications. So if you didn't have that to start, that could be a problem, you know? So you wanna make sure that you have those things that you need. Usually they wanna see a certain amount of savings to justify living expenses. In the case of the United States, a lot of times they wanna make sure that you have traveled before or have some more ties to your homeland to make sure you're not going to stay illegally. And I unfortunately, I hate that about the United States. I wanna be very clear that I disagree with most of the United States immigration policy. I think that hardworking, intelligent people who wanna live in the country should be allowed to no matter what, but unfortunately, the policy is such that even something small that suggests that you may want to stay in the US can be taken and given a rejection. So you need to be very careful about what you say. Don't ever suggest that you want to stay in the US. Even if they ask you if you wanna stay and work after graduation, the answer is, I have no intention to do that. I'm aware that OPT is available, but I don't even have an intention to do that. Even though there's a legal mechanism for you to stay and work, you shouldn't even say that you're gonna do it. Like they genuinely don't wanna hear that. So in European cases too, you know, sometimes there's issues with specific countries, there's a lot of different variables to consider when it comes to the visas. Now in my experience, most people do not get rejected for their visa if all their paperwork is in order, okay? And mostly what you need to bring, honestly, are just the things that they request on the website. So your I-20 form, which is what you get from the university, proof of funding like bank statements and stuff or scholarship statements and things like that. Your admission letter to back up what's there and then health insurance, the photos, the forms, passport, that's up to date and everything, you know, just the usual stuff. So most of the time, if you don't say anything you're not supposed to, you have everything you're supposed to, you should be okay. And at the same time, there are cases of projections like that don't make sense. So there's always a chance that the United States embassy is just gonna be mean unfortunately. I can't stand that. Shukriti asked about the link to the YouTube channel. There you go. There's that. I just put that in the chat for you guys. So that's where you can go and subscribe to the channel if you want and watch this later if you weren't able to see the whole thing. And if you wanna go to WhatsApp, you can go to prepwithscore.com. There's a, that's where you can find the WhatsApp link. Okay, I'll do a couple more. I gotta get going in a few minutes, but I wanna answer a few from the channel chat here real quick. And then I'll get to you guys who are in here. So a couple of questions from Ankit like about how much time writing essays. Man, it really depends on you, but I would encourage you to spend a lot of time on it. Honestly, revise and rewrite and get other people's input and work on those essays. Don't just write it quickly and say you're done. You can definitely start applying now for early action. Applications are open and I would encourage you to start working on them now. The good question from Bullscar about can you apply to colleges now and then submit SAT scores later? Some universities will allow you to do that. However, most will not. So your October SAT date is the last real day that you have to get a test score for the early admission rounds, okay? You can give your IELTS after the DSAT if you want. That's fine. As long as, remember, it takes about two weeks to get test scores. So you wanna have them before November 1st. So just keep that in mind when you're planning your test dates. Tadic, as I mentioned before, if you have an SAT score, you can get it anywhere. If you don't have an SAT score, you can get in most places. Aerospace engineering does not require a test score. No university forces you to have a specific score. Some will require you to have the SAT. Others will not, okay? Search online for aerospace engineering programs, look at the university test policies, see what makes the most sense for you, okay? And if you study business in a university locally, like Sarah asks here, again, if you're applying as a transfer, then they need to see that. If you're not applying as a transfer, you honestly shouldn't mention that studies unless it's less than 30 credits. Because if you say, oh, I'm studying a bachelor's in business in my local country, I'm in my fourth semester, then they're gonna say, well then, we're gonna send you to the transfer pile because you're not a first-year student. So careful when you say that. Okay, so, I'm not sure if I'm saying that correctly, but I'm trying. Sorry, Sarah, it's me again, just wanted to make sure you said that you would dedicate another session for like external scholarships and getting into more details about the financial aspect of the applications because now it's the biggest problem that we face throughout the college application process. I know well over like 20 people who have applied to colleges have gotten partially funded scholarships, but they're stuck, they don't know how to continue, so they've given up on everything. And we've got a number of welling students applying and facing the same problem. I know that external scholarships are temporarily available, but it would mean a lot to us to dedicate another session for it. I'll definitely see what I can come up with and maybe I'll put together a video about that in the future. As I said, it really is very much dependent on each individual and what they're doing. So it's kind of hard to sort of say, okay, this is what's best for everyone to do, but I will continue to look into it and see what I can come up with. And if I can find a way to give some good advice that applies to a lot of people or some good examples of scholarships or something, I'll see what I can do. I appreciate you telling me that and I will take a note of it and see what we can come up with. I'm always looking to help people out, but again, it is something that, again, it's information that goes out of date quickly and is highly variable from one individual to the next. So it's a little tricky to say, what everyone should do or how to produce something that would be beneficial because each person has, it's hard for me to address each individual situation if that makes sense. But definitely I'll take it into consideration and see what I can come up with. If I can find some useful guides or websites or tips for you guys, I'll try to do that, okay? All right, great, great, thanks. It's so nice of you. Thank you very much. You're welcome. Masoma, got a question? I don't know if it worked. I asked for them, maybe not here anymore. Did we lose you, Masoma? Oh, there we are. Yes, yeah, hi, sir. My question is a bit personal. By the accidents which happened in Afghanistan, I traveled to Tidegogh, Bangladesh. Now I'm an international student, but in here, I cannot find my beloved major and is it possible that I apply for US scholarship for interior designing? If yes, do I need portfolio or for example, can I be transfer student or something like this? If yes, for example, which documents are required for these scholars? Okay, great, good question. So interior design often falls under the umbrella of architecture or design schools in a lot of places. So what I would encourage you to do is just look at universities that would have scholarships and those programs. A good example might be, for example, Illinois Tech. Illinois Tech is one of my favorite recommendations when architecture related topics come up because they have one of the best schools for it and they also have a full scholarship for international students who have demonstrated leadership in some activity and have a very strong academic profile. They can give up to seven international scholarships a year and they're just absolutely fantastic for that area of study. So you may need a portfolio for some of those things as well. So keep that in mind. Portfolios can consist of 2D drawings, plans, 3D renders that you've done, designs in CAD programs and things like that. They can also be models that you physically have built. So if you've done any designs like that, you can use those too. So I would encourage you to have a portfolio for sure. Look around for universities that have that major and then see what their scholarship opportunities are. Usually university merit scholarships apply to everybody. They're not usually just for one major or limited to certain majors. So you should be able to find something. Okay, thank you so much. You're welcome. All right, everybody. So I think that's where I'm gonna call it today because it's been a good two hours. Honestly, this was a lot of fun and I really, really appreciate everybody being here. Thank you so much for watching and thank you so much for listening and the link to the channel, I'll put it again in the chat for you all. If you wanna check it out, you can also rewatch this since I've been streaming it live, it will stay up on the channel for you all for the future. And, you know, feel free to reach out if you ever have any questions. I'm always providing, you know, free information here at SCORE, the idea is like information should be free and I wanna be able to give you good information. So I really appreciate you all being here today and I hope that this has been helpful for you. So thank you so much and I'll see you soon. On Friday, I'm gonna be live streaming as I edit people's essays. So if you have an essay that you want to send me to take a look, you can hit me up on WhatsApp and send it over to me, I'll write it down. And on Friday, I'm gonna go through and give my feedback and share some tips for how to improve our essays. So that's what's coming up next. And also the video about recommendation letters should be out now. So if you wanna check that out, you can also stay on the channel and look at that if you need some help with your recommendation letters. Really recommend you share that too with your teachers. And just again, thank you so much. Really appreciate Rasa Foundation for inviting me today and for bringing all of you to here together. Super exciting to talk to hundreds of people today. So thanks a lot and I will see you soon.