Yale is one of the most prestigious Ivy League schools. It is a member of the “HYP” – Harvard Yale Princeton – and plays a very special role in the history of the Ivy leagues and in the history of elite American universities.
*This continues a series on how to get into top schools. If you’re interested in Stanford, click here.
To get into Yale there are five things that you want to do extremely well
Number one: Visit the campus. Ivy League schools, in general, pride themselves on legacies. They are also impressed with people who demonstrate high interest by visiting the campus. This is one of the clearest ways to demonstrate that you are really very interested in Yale. You can show that you would love to attend by making a physical appearance on campus.
All the top universities try to manage their yield rate. This is the percentage of people they accept who end up enrolling. The higher the yield rate for a university, the better they look in college rankings publications like US News, Time, Business Week, and so forth.
By visiting campus, you demonstrate that you’re very interested. This is looked upon quite favorably. Make sure when you visit Yale to schedule a campus tour with the admissions office, and make sure that you write down your name because they do keep track of these things.
The second thing you should do is make sure that you do extremely well on standardized tests. Ivy League schools really do look at your SAT, your ACT, your SAT II/SAT subject tests, and your GPA. These things are all indicators of how well you’re going to do as an undergraduate.
Start preparing for these tests. Take your first ones in middle school if you can. Do everything you can to make sure that you get good scores. Buy prep books, take classes, get individual tutoring help from current students, and so forth.
When it comes to your GPA, you should definitely not slack off during your freshman year. A lot of people come from middle school thinking that they can take it easy during freshman year. BIG MISTAKE!
This causes them to give themselves a hole that is very tough to crawl out of in sophomore and junior year. The reason for this is that once college application time rolls around, and it’s time for you to fill out the Common App, you won’t be able to rely on senior year grades to boost your number in your class rank.
For this reason, you should start freshman year focused and hungry. Make sure you get the best grades you can in all of your classes. Do extra credit work where required in order to negotiate with teachers. This is necessary if you are going to keep your eye on the prize
Yale is very different from Princeton and Harvard. It really cares about legacies, and it also cares about the arts. For this reason, if you’re creative, your chances are better. If you’re good at music, it helps. If you are good at fine arts performance, theater dance, or any kind of creative, artistic pursuit, all of this will help. If you’re not good at those things, don’t worry.
My point is that if music and fine arts and the creative side of the world really interest you, Yale is a great place to attend school. Therefore, you should really cultivate those hobbies and commitments in order to perform as well as possible. Make sure you take advantage of the opportunity to submit supplemental application material to Yale to really demonstrate your skills.
Want to attend Ivy League schools? Check out my insider’s course and guide to getting into Harvard, even with a 1360 SAT from a public high school.
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