College: Applications, Choices & More with Laura Clarke, College Admissions Advisor

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Speaker 1: Hi. This is Laura Vandercamp. I'm a mother of five, an author, journalist, and speaker. And this is Sarah Hartunger. I'm a mother of three, a practicing physician and blogger. On the side, we are two working parents who love our careers and our families. Welcome to best of both worlds. Here we talk about how real women manage work, family, and time for fun. From figuring out childcare to mapping out long term career goals. We want you to get the most out of life. Welcome to best of both worlds. This is Laura. This is episode two hundred and sixty six, airing in early September of twenty twenty two. I'm going to be interviewing Laura Clark, who helps people apply for college. So she's got some tips and recommendations, particularly for our listeners who have middle school and high school aged children, about how you should be thinking about the process, little things you can be doing. I mean that I came away from this interview with is just taking a few minutes now, even though I don't have anyone applying to college currently, to look at the common app A lot of colleges use the common application these days, and if the first time you're looking at it is when you're actually filling it out, you may not have been thinking about the things the information that you will need to put on there in the future. So certainly, if you have a child who wants to keep track of how they are spending their time and doing leadership roles and things like that, knowing what you'll need to fill out later could be really helpful as you are doing that. So I enjoyed that we'll have a good interview with her. But Sarah, it's been a while since we applied to college, doesn't it. Yes, we thought we'd take a little trip down memory lane, so to speak, especially since I don't have much to add to this college discussion yet, as my oldest is not even in middle school. Although I still think it's interesting, so I think this episode will appear to a wide variety of listeners. So personally, I applied to seven schools. I remember taping up the names of the school onto like I can kind of picture it the logos from those paper things that used to come in the mail on one of my shelves. And I don't think I picked any school that truly could be considered a safety school, but I must have had a reasonable array because I got into five out of the seven. I was a I had great SAT scores and my activities were strong, mostly music related. But I would say my grades were good but not perfect, and that probably led to my couple of rejections. One of them was from your alma mater. But I can't be mad at you personally because you're a year ahead, so you didn't like to steal my spot exactly. That's true, am. I am one grade year ahead of Sarah, which is funny because you know, once you're like an adult, it just completely does not matter, like ooh, Sarah's behind me in school. And I did do the quintessential college tour. I can't remember it was with just my dad or both of my parents. That's terrible, but anyway, I know I went to like several New England schools, including Williams and was where I did end up going, and I thought it was awesome. And then I also got to go back there for a second look after I was accepted, and I was completely sold and that helped me make my choice. And my other strong memory is that. Okay, So I applied in nineteen ninety eight, which is my graduation year. And it was in this transitional time when people were still handwriting things, but then other things were like typed and I felt like the savviest kind of top students at my high school were like using a word processor to fill in forms that were like paper forms, and I was like, f it, I'm just going to use neat handwriting and turn in my turn in my handwritten forms. And I was very intimidated by the idea that I wasn't like going the extra mile and lining up the word processor exactly to like write in these lines. But it worked out. Also my essays, my essays, I think, were awful. Yeah, I remember using an electric type writer. So yes, it was in that transitional time those of us in what we call now the Oregon Trail generation that we had computers, but they weren't doing all the cool things that they do now. And I remember that because it was a form. How do you typewrite on a form? Will you use a typewriter because it can fill in on the lines very easily, That's how you adjusted up and down. And we had an electronic typewriter that you could race things quite easily, like it deleted things. In a way that was much better than you know, the generation of devices before that, where you had to use the white out and the correction tape and all this stuff that our younger listeners are like, what on earth are you talking about? But yeah, I remember actually writing rough drafts of my essays, my college essays, in the parking lot of Fizzoli's Italian restaurant, which is where I worked the summer before my senior year. We got two fifteen minutes smoke brakes and one thirty minute lunch break in the course of an eight hour shift, and so I was writing, you know, these essays often working on afts during my smoke breaks. I'm putting in quotes. I wasn't smoking, obviously, but I was gonna say, did the nicotine help? I was not smoking on my smoke breaks, but you got a smoke break, so you know, I would go write my essays. So I'm very curious how many of my fellow Princeton students were writing essays in the parking lot of their fast food employer on smoke breaks. Probably not that many. I don't remember asking anyone to edit them, which is funny that that's just the confidence of youth there. Yeah, I wound up applying to seven schools and I did get into them, but we had this whole drama afterwards that my parents wanted me to go elsewhere because tuition was going to be significantly cheaper elsewhere. Namely, you know, my father taught at Notre Dame for a great many years, and so we got probably like close to full tuition discount by that point, or close to it, and I wanted to go elsewhere, and I did not want to stay in South Bend, Indiana. I even I know Notre Dame is a wonderful institution, and so there's a bit of a showdown over that. And what wound up breaking the stalemate is that one of my uncles offered to help with the tuition, so he wound up helping for part of my freshman year. And then my father actually got a higher professorship after that, so his income went up a reasonable amount, so they were not that it was easy to pay for. But I think it was helpful for being able to do that. But I don't know. It's one of those things that now as I'm living through this with my kids in the next few years, is very important for me. To let them go where they want to go. And I think my husband and I may have a showdown about this because he is a little bit less excited about brand name colleges. I think, you know, Harvard, Princeton. He would get his head around that. I think the part where it would be harder is if it's in the middle, right, like if it's not terribly selective or highbrow institution, and that compare that to say, the honors college at Penn State, which I'm sure would be great and would be a much better bargain. My husband might be pushing for that, So we'll see how this all pans out. But anyway, I wound up going to Princeton. I'm with you. I'm with you and letting my children I really, I think both of us feel and I know this isn't like universal and it's not necessarily right or wrong, but we do feel the same way and that I hope to let my kids go where they'd like to go. Yeah, where they get in and where they choose. Although we may do something like if a child does choose a less expensive place, offer to pay for some portion of graduate or professional schools should they choose that path later on, so that like, you know, there's a little bit of cost balance they might go on in their head because I don't think we can afford to bankroll both college and like med school should our kids choose to all do both of those things. So I guess there might be a little bit of push pull there, But otherwise I just hope they get to go where they want to go, and I know that's a lucky thing to try to plan for. It's also for us, like I mean, we've been saving from since Annibal was a baby, and it's not an insignificant portion that I see go out of wine up every month still, so something that we're planning ahead for. Yeah, and my husband's also made the point with, you know, as he talks about with the kids, like if you think you're going to graduate school, you might be better served by, you know, taking a different approach than to undergrad I mean not even just that it would be cheaper, but that you are a different candidate coming out of as the top of you know, a different like a big state honors college or something versus being one of I don't know, it's just a different sort of game that you're playing. But you know, if you're only going to undergrad, which is what I wound up doing, then it does matter a great deal more which school I think you go to. And yeah, Princeton has opened a ton of doors for me, not that other places wouldn't have as well, but I've heard it's even harder to get in to all these plays. Yeah, I'm sure I wouldn't have gotten into five of seven today. I don't think my grades were good enough. I think there's like generational reasons for that, just in terms of sheer numbers of humans. And then there are other complicated reasons as well, but I think population wise we kind of lucked out. Yeah, well population was, but they're also I mean things like the common application. I mean, it's a wonderful innovation, but on the other hand, it makes it easier to apply to a higher number of schools, and so then that winds up happening as well. But yeah, looking at the numbers, I mean, you know, Princeton has gone down from I think it was something like these are not the right numbers, but it would have been like twelve percent acceptance when I was going in like six percent now or something like that. I Mean, it's just really ridiculous. So we shall see how this all winds up working out as we go through it in the next few years. But Laura Clark has a lot of great things for people to think about, so give this episode a listen. Well, Sarah and I are delighted to welcome Laura Clark of Clark College Insight to the program. Laura, can you introduce yourself to our listeners? Sure? I should also say I feel a little starstruck. I have a longtime listener of the show, so I'm delighted to be here as a guest. Thank you for having me. My name is Laura Clark. My husband and I live outside Washington, d C. With a three year old girl and an eight month old boy who may wake up during this session. That's the best of both worlds. Is completely here for that. So I've listened to your advice about childcare, so our truly excellent nanny is here standing by in case awesome, in case he wakes up. Yes, Mike, my two year old is currently napping too, so we'll see It's quote you just feel a naptime hustle. Naptime hustle is what we are both doing. Yeah, and tell us a little bit about your college counseling experience here. Sure. So what distinguishes Clark College Insight, which is the small college admision consultancy I own, is that we are super empirical. So we don't rely on the common wisdom or on what colleges say about themselves to understand colleges incentives and behavior. Rather, we look sort of we peak behind the curtain to the extent possible to figure out what colleges incentives are because we believe that their behavior and decision making flows from those incentives. So how do we find out what those incentives are? As I said, rather than believing what colleges say about themselves, we turn to sort of the information that they've had to cough up. And that information comes from largely from two lawsuits which are actually about to go to the Supreme Court brought by the Students for Fair Admission, which is a group that brought lawsuits against Harvard and UNC. And in the course of those lawsuits, those colleges have had to turn over data and documents, internal documents for the court to see. Also, And this is like particularly interesting to me because I used to work in this industry. Both colleges and SFFA hired expert witnesses. In this case, they all hired economists to do econometric analysis of the data that colleges had to turn over to reveal the relative weights of different factors that colleges consider in admissions. So what I do, and what I have done, is review hundreds and hundreds of pages of expert testimony to glean lessons about how colleges make decisions, and then I help families apply that knowledge to give their kids the best chance possible. So, I mean, one of the fascinating things, and I think that you want to make people aware of too, is that you know, there are these highly selective schools, but there are also a lot of schools that aren't, you know, completely selective. And so if your goal is that just you know, your kid gets a good college education, you don't really need to even you don't necessarily have to worry about this as much as you might say, yeah, absolutely. And I think there is such a frenzy about college admissions now that I think some people feel kind of guilty if they're not aiming for Harvard. And what I always tell my clients is that not striving for the most selective colleges is a completely valid and humane choice. Like if your family looks at you know, the path ahead of them and wise the trade offs and thinks, you know, that's just not really for us. That is a completely valid choice. And I feel sometimes my clients feel a little guilty telling me that it's like, well, that's totally a question that is up to each family, and so I want to not that they need my permission, but I want to give your listeners permission to work with their children to figure out a set of goals that works for their values. Priorities, yeah, their family priorities. And then I know that this is primarily a decision about personal priorities, not really a place for evidence, But I'm kind of an evidence junkie, So I'm going to give you a little anyway and say that just having the moxie to apply to selective schools says something about your kid's abilities. And I'm not just making this claim. This is something that Stacy Dale and Alan Krueger found in a twenty fourteen paper in which man, I just read, is that too nerdy? Laura? Thank you. They said that the average SAT score of the highest ranked school that rejected a student is a much stronger predictor of that student's subsequent earnings than the average SAT score of the school that the student actually attended. So really, just having the moxie to apply some more selective really says something about your kid and means that his or her qualities will stand him in good stead for the rest of is it her life? That sounds good, very reassuring time. So yeah, yeah, exactly. And I think another thing that you know when you and I had talked before, and I think a lot of people don't necessarily think about. One of the things that's come out is that colleges want a well rounded student body. But that doesn't mean that each student is well rounded, correct, absolutely, so colleges are looking for well read rounded classes rather than well rounded students, and that has some implications for how kids should think about their extracurricular activities. And again, there is an implicit clause in everything I'm going to say today, which is, if your kid is trying to optimize for college admissions, then dot dot dot. So if your kid decides I love orchestra, and I love yearbook, and I love playing basketball, and I want to do all those things, great, he or she should do that. But if a family has made the decision that they're kind of going to plan a high school career with an eye for optimizing chances, then that knowledge that a school is trying to create a well rounded class rather than seek to admit well rounded students has some implications for what kids should do, namely that they should try to choose something they enjoy and specialize in it. And I always hope that also freeze kids from the incorrect assumption that they do need to sign up for a laundry list of activities that they don't actually enjoy. So if your kid does not want to do the yearbook in the orchestra and the basketball team, that's okay. In fact, that's you know, if he or she can specialize in something, especially something that's a little bit off the beaten track, that is probably even better for college admissions chances. Awesome. Well, we're going to take a real quick ad break and then we're going to be back with more from Laura Clark about applying to college. So we are back talking with Laura Clark of Clark College Insight about applying for college. So a lot of our listeners, I mean, we have people with older children as well, but let's say you know, people with kids around my kid's age, Sarah's kids age, you know, more of the early teen preteen area. You're thinking about this looking forward? What should people start to be thinking about as they are looking at high school and looking at coursework that their kids might need to do. Sure, and so I'll take this opportunity if I may to say one of the two fundamental principles that guides my work with clients, and that is to start early. And why do we want to start early? The first is because lead time matters in some spheres high school success, and again, high school success with an eye to optimizing for college admissions is path dependent. For example, the math sequence in many school districts is pretty by the book. You're not going to be able to skip ahead a level. So that path dependence means that it's good to cast a careful eye out over your kid's high school curriculum starting in eighth or ninth grade. The other benefit to starting early is that it avoids crunches. So if your kid is going to be studying for the AIS and preparing for the school play and preparing for the SATs at the same time. That's a recipe for a lot of misery. But if we think ahead and create a workback plan, then we're able to avoid those kind of crunches, which just minimizes the stress and unhappiness that your kids face. And that's what we as parents want. So I do commend to parents of kids in eighth grade or so a couple key steps. The first thing to do is to start saving examples of your kids graded school work in core classes what some school departments call solids, so English, science, math, social studies, or history and foreign language. And the goal of hanging on to these things is to equip school counselor later on with some information about your kid's interests and past successes when that school counselor is writing a letter of recommendation for colleges. The next thing to do is to start keeping a record of a kid's a wars, accomplishments, hobbies, extracurriculars, volunteering, basically anything outside of the classroom. And if you track the beginning and end dates for each of those activities, the number of hours worked in a week, the number of weeks per year, and positions held. Then when it comes to fill in that section of a common app It'll be a breeze. You will have that information at your fingertips and be confident that is accurate, rather than trying to think back three years in the past and think, well, was I the treasurer or the vice president? Just is a way to make life easy for yourself in the future. This one is a bit mercenary, but if you or your spouse or potentially your parents or your in laws attended colleges that give a preference to the children of alumni, it makes sense to start getting involved now, so you can sign up to interview applicants, volunteer in other ways for the alumni association, and if your family budget permits, maybe think about write in a few checks just to show the school we're engaged, we're excited to be involved, and the implicit message there is if you let my kid in, then we will continue to be So turning back back to academic enrichment and away from more mercenary things, it makes sense to sit down with your kid and think about what language he or she would like to focus on for the next four years. The most selective schools want to see four years of the same language. So if your kid thinks, hey, maybe i'll try Latin, and then it turns out that he hates Latin and wants to switch midway through junior year, that might foreclose some options. So it makes sense to do a little thinking ahead of time about what language would be best. Back to the topic of sort of casting a weather eye over what could be your kid's high school curriculum. It makes sense to take a look at the ap and ime classes that are available at the high school your kid will attend. And again we want to focus here on the solids, so English, Maths, Science, social studies, foreign language, and with your child, think which of these classes interest you? In which of them do you think you could reasonably get an A or a B. And then, if you can glean this from the school's website, figure out are there prerequisites for these classes? And this is particularly important for the math sequence, which usually is quite path dependent. And then is there a way that your kid could get some of those prerequisites out of the way in summer school. Just something to think about for the goal of avoiding crunches. It makes sense to think about a way to distribute those advanced classes throughout high school. So useful information to know is does my child's high school allow freshmen to take AP and IB classes? If so, are there some you could allocate to that year? Are there some you can allocate to sophomore year or junior year. The goal here, again is to minimize stress and unhappiness for your kid. We don't want them to be, you know, crammed into a bunch of AP classes and one year and exhausted. It's also good to front load classes to the extent possible. I always encourage my clients to have their applications ready for the early Decision or Early action deadlines. They don't necessarily need to apply according to those deadlines, but at least they'll have the option if they have an eye for those deadlines. So if we front load, then we can show colleges an appealing transcript by the time the beginning of senior year rolls around. The last thing to do on the academic front is to set up a meeting, if possible, with the school counselor to discuss this plan with him or her. This accomplishes a few things, and make sure that you haven't missed some information that the school counselor will know and it also starts to establish a relationship with that person. Usually the school counselor will write one of the letters of recommendation that will eventually go to a school, So we want him or her to have a good idea of your kid and his or her strengths. The last thing to do is to do a lot a little bit of thinking about extracurriculars. So again with an eye to finding ways for your kid to spend time doing his or her existing natural interests, nothing forced or unnatural. I think, are there activities available at the school that meet those interests and meet a couple other criteria that I recommend my clients think about. If there is a club, fantastic, If there's not, you could discuss with your child whether or not that would be something that he or she would start. Could he start the cooking club? For instance? Another thing to think about is whether or not you could get the ball rolling on one of those activities that will begin in the school year by signing your kid up for a related summer activity. And that's it. That's my checklist for eighth grade families. Yeah, So with that, I mean I wonder if we could pivot a little bit into thinking about summers, because of course this is a time that kids can use to demonstrate interest in something. I mean, should we be thinking about mapping this out for the four years? I mean just like looking around for programs, like should they be taking classes most of the time, should they be working? Should they be you know, I don't know, doing summer stock theater. I mean, there's just a million things you could do. Absolutely How should you approach this absolutely well, the first thing to do is to think about what your kid enjoys. I don't think that it makes sense to do just summer school for two reasons. The first is just because you want your kid or assuming that your child does not naturally just want to be enrolled in summer school all the time, Maybe he or she does, in which case you've got a future Nobel Prize win around your hands and you don't need any advice from me. But assuming that your kid doesn't want to just do summer school in the summers, it makes sense to you know, get a little enjoyment out of what is also kind of the last period of childhood before adult responsibilities start to set in. Also again, putting on our mercenary glasses, lifting up the lens of college's self interest and thinking about how to plan a high school career with that in mind. Academic achievement only gets a kid in the good pile. Once he or she is in the good pile, there needs to be something else that differentiates him or her from the rest of the pack. So focusing exclusively on summer school, unfortunately, I don't think is a great choice because it's not going to distinguish your kid from the rest of the pack in that way. Well, let's talk about distinguishing though, because this is I mean, this is something we've actually talked with like personal brand building experts on this podcast before, and I think adults might think about this some with them, Like if you are trying to make a case for a big promotion, like it helps to have some project that you've spearheaded that you are showing to your you know, the higher ups, that shows that you are capable of X, Y, and Z that you know is unique and didn't exist before. Right, And I assume that there's some element with that with kids too, Right, Like you said, you get in the good pile, right, and then you need something to distinguish yourself. Is that something that distinguishes people often a project of some variety that has built their personal brand. I love that. Parallel to personal brand building, that's great. Yes, it definitely could be a project. I think the best thing to get yourself out of the good pile is some kind of extracurricular involvement, as you said, and I do have this list of criteria which we can table and maybe come back to if you're interested about. If your family is trying to optimize for college admissions, what are a list of criteria to assess when choosing an extracurricular activity. And definitely one of those something that I think would take a lot of those boxes would be some kind of passion project. In particular, something like that would demonstrate a kid's capacity for leadership, would show that he or she is a self starter, has a good sense of initiative, And those are criteria that often show up in college's personal scores. So some schools have nearly all schools have academic scores and extracurricular scores. So an admissions reader will pick up your kid's packet, say okay, I give this a kid a one, and this ranking the academic ranking another score for the extracurricular ranking, and some schools, and we know that Harvard is among them, also have a personal ranking, and so demonstrating initiative and leadership would be a great way to push up your score in that field. And I think having a passion project is one such thing. Maybe you could just run through the quick criteria, then absolutely good extra curric I mean, otherously, you kid has to be interested in it. But as you were saying exactly, that's the first one is to choose something you genuinely like. And that is in part to enjoy the last part of childhood, and it's in part so that your kid doesn't wash out. So if your kid says, I'm going to, you know, study Latin as my passion project. I'm going to spend my summers reading ancient texts, but then it turns out that he or she hates Latin, that's not going to be an extracurricular activity with the sticking power that we want. We want kids to choose something they like so they stick with it. We also want our kids to choose something that they are good at so they can excel. So if your kid is not a great Latin scholar, for example, choosing Latin. Even if that's something here she enjoys, might not be a great choice because the kid won't show the track record of a good performance in that field that a college admissions officer would want to see. Leadership is another important criterion, and this is something to think about with lead time too. So if a particular club at your kids' high school only allows seniors to hold leadership roles, those might not be the best options, because again, we want to have an appealing package ready at the beginning of senior year to make those early deadlines. So something that allows your kid to have a leadership role by junior year is optimal. We want our kids to stand out. So admissions officers are in a huge time crunch. We know from a survey called the State of College Admission, which the National Association of College Admissions Counselors puts out. NACAC, which is a somewhat inelegant acronym. NACAC does this survey, and we know from the survey that admissions officers at some schools are reading more than a thousand applications every year. So if your kid does something that is a little bit unorthodox, a little bit different from what many high schoolers are doing. That's one way to stand out in that extremely time pressed person's mind, and that's something that again will may lift a kid out of the good pile into the admit pile. We also want to encourage our kids to take on activities that show intellectual curiosity. I mentioned that colleges have a couple of these scores, the personal score, the extracurricular score, the academic score. Intellectual curiosity shows up often in a couple of these. And again, if we pick up our magnifying glass and peer through it, just to focus on a college's self interest, we know that admissions offices essentially work for the faculty, and the faculty you want to teach kids who are curious and engaged. So kids who are intellectually curious seem like they're the kind of kids who are going to be a joy to teach, that the faculty will enjoy teaching, and then those faculty will stick around at that college longer. So again something that I think has both intrinsic value cultivating intellectual curiosity in our children, but also from a more mercenary standpoint, a college can look at a kid who demonstrates this characteristic and think, okay, great, this kid is going to help me in my quest to attract and retrain high quality faculty. Yeah, you need the kid doing Latin who's actually translating his own you know, Latin plays into English and then getting them performed and whateverwhere else it could be a yeah, well, getting high school kids to do this might be an interesting thing. Let's talk about tests, though, because this is obviously a subject that a lot of people are wondering. You know where this stands? Right now? That you know, you may have great grades, you might have interesting you know, academic extracurricular stuff. Where do the standardized tests come in with all of this? Sure? And I think sometimes this is a fraud topic because talking about standardized testing sort of summons up our own seventeen year old feelings about standardized tests. I was not thrilled before I took the SAT, and I'm sure that many of your listeners weren't either. It's sort of a rite of passage, but not a super pleasant one. Many colleges have changed their testing policies. Part of that was driven by COVID because the college board was not always offering sittings of the SATs such that kids could submit their scores. And then separately, there's some skepticism about whether or not test scores measure something that is useful for colleges to know how predictive they are of college success. So there's some sort of political controversy about whether or not colleges should continue to use them. And consequently, some colleges that put in abeyance their requirement to submit test scores have now made that more of a permanent policy, not necessarily a forever policy, but they say, oh, okay, we're going to continue this trial of not requiring applicants to submit test scores. The other important thing to mention here is that the UC system, which is very important competition for basically all the colleges in the country, is test blind. So that means even if you take the test and submit your scores you see admissions readers won't read them, so there's that sort of competitive element too. However, I counsel my clients to take the test, and that is because even at schools that are test optional, which means you can take the test or not submit the scores are not. Kids who take the test and submit their scores tend to be admitted at higher rates, and I can mention a few examples of that. So at pen for example, in twenty twenty, score submitters were admitted at seven percent, So seven percent of students who submitted scores were admitted, and the admission rate for non submitters was four percent. At Colgate those numbers were twenty five and twelve percent. At UVA those numbers were twenty six and fourteen percent. Emery those numbers were twenty eight and thirteen percent. So in many cases, the students who take the test and submit their scores have maybe as much as double the chances of getting in. And of course there may be a lurking variable there that the kids who do better on the test are likely to submit it. But my counter to that argument is, let's say you did get You do have the potential to get a great score. You don't want a college to think to attribute that lurking variable to you. So what should kids be doing though? If they are going to take it? Are there things they should be doing to propose Absolutely for the essay? Sure, at definitely, And I know I will talk about this at the end of the episode, but on my website I offer for free timeline of tasks that families can think about doing, and those tasks fall into the season of each year of high school. So the testing schedule I recommend is available on my website. I can talk about it a little bit now. Another principle that I want to emphasize is not putting too much weight on testing, and that is because, and this research finding runs counter to the popular imagination. Test prep raises scores about fifty points, that's about it, and retaking the test a few times can raise scores between thirty and sixty points. So those are definitely steps that it makes sense to take. There's no reason to leave those points on the table. But I don't think it makes sense for parents to push their kids to do exhausting, miserable test prep because it's probably not going to raise scores that much, and also because it's going to make your kids miss. So why make your kid miserable for something that is not going to have that much of a benefit anyways. And again, if we put on our mercenary glasses here all the time that your kid spends and I don't mean your kid, Laura, forgive me, I feel like I'm not trying to load all of these tasks onto your children, one's child. All the time that one's child spends on test prep that may not have the anticipated benefit, is time that he or she is not spending doing something that could have more of a payoff. Taking that additional ap class, working on an independent research project with a teacher who then can write a glowing letter of recommendation, becoming the president of whatever club it is that he or she is interested in. So I don't think that the juice is worth the squeeze for very rigorous, intensive test prep. I will make a quick plug here for an online seminar I offer which your listeners can sign up for on my website, which offers a few more details about what forms of test prep are most effective. So there's actually a lot of research on this. As you can imagine a data set that renews itself every year with a fresh batch of high schoolers, which is automatically quantitative, it's already in numbers. Is something that's very appealing for education researchers. So of all of the elements of college admissions, testing is the one for which we have the most robust evidence based. So I offer some findings from that research on my website, And you know, people also need to think about they're going to need letters of recommendation. So that's probably something that you want to be thinking about as you're going into your high school career. You know who you're forming relationships with, who the teachers that might do that. Absolutely, absolutely, So it makes sense to stand out in a good way in your classes, and that's particularly the case in sophomore and junior year. And then something else that it makes sense to do again if we think about starting early and optimizing our lead time, is to ask teachers for those letters right when the school year ends, so their experience with you is fresh. You know, they remember that excellent presentation you did, and also so they don't move on to another school and then you lose them exactly. All right, well, this is all very cool. Lots of things to think about here, anything else you wanted to cover real quick? You know that I'm missed out on here. Oh sure, so I guess I mentioned the second of our sort of foundational principles, and that is to start early, to allow yourself lead time, an adequate workback plan, and to minimize stress and task crunches. The first foundational principle of my work is that college's priorities, not our kids' merits, drive college admissions. And I think that is kind of a painful truth to realize, because we want to think about colleges as sort of immune to market pressures. We want to think about them as these sort of idyllic places where young people can be come more fully themselves. But of course colleges are, you know, acting in a market. They're competing with each other, They're trying to optimize for, you know, certain goals that they have. So what I try to do is align my clients applications and high school careers with what colleges are after. So that way kids are spending their time anytime that is away from, you know, enjoying the sort of golden last years of childhood, they know that they're spending that time really effectively to get the most bang for every hour. Excellent, Well, Laura, we always end with a love of the week, which is, you know, something that is really cool right now? I can go first? Sure, So that to you again. At my son, actually, my oldest son went to a pre college program on a summer on a college campus this past summer and he had a really good time, and I think it was a good experience for him because you know, partly it's just about getting independence, sure like that you can you know, many of us live in suburbs that aren't infinitely walkable, so it's like you're not going out all is doing all yourself, and when you're on a college campus it is, and you sort of start thinking that way. So, you know, even just the idea of like how much you know you have to budget for Starbucks if you're not going to run out of money was a good thing. So, you know, we haven't figured out all our summers for the future because he just finished a freshman year, is going to sophomore year. But I think it was a good, you know, fun thing that we found for this summer. So I'm glad that happened. That's great. How about you. That's a much like a much more important love of the week than what I was going to mention. I want to hear your mine normally I say normally I say coffee, So don't worry about it. Mine is a lot more frivolous and also totally unrelated to excellent moral formation or education or anything. So mine is this citrus juicer that I bought. It's from a brand. It's called Chef n c hef apostrophe n chef and I don't know. Okay, anyways, it's a very effective citrus juicer. Someone recommended it online and I bought it, and it's really like induces me to juice citrus. I've been making a lot of key lime pies just because it's such an effective juice limes. Oh, I love it. Yeah, that's my level of the week. Is this is this citrus juicer? All right, well check out the chiff the cheffin citrus jucer. Yeah. And so Laura, why don't you tell our listeners where people can find you, because I know you said you have the webinar and various things that people might want to check out. Yes, absolutely, So you can sign up for those webinars, which I mentioned on my website, which is Clark Collegeinsight dot com. And that's Clark with an E at the end, so like imagine yield Clark with an E at the end. So you can sign up there for either one on one sessions or for these seminars. I know everyone's sick of zoom, but I do think it's a pretty effective way to convey some of this information. So I run those seminars four nights a week, and I'm offering a discount for listeners of the show. If you use the code best of you can get a fifteen percent discount on those seminars. So I hope to see some of you on zoom sounds good. Well, thanks so much for joining us, Laura. We really appreciate it. Oh, thank you for having me. All right, well that was great. We learned a lot about applying to college in that interview there with Laura Clark. So the question for this episode comes from a listener who says that she and her husband originally wanted three children. They both have two siblings and love having slightly bigger families, but after her first I felt like the second would be such a challenge. Then she had a second, and the second was so much easier. So she is actually thinking of jumping the gun and having the third one, saying, I know there are no guarantees on whether the new baby will be you know, easier, more challenging, but at least she's not a first time mom anymore, so she sort of understands what can go on. She says, we'd like to start, you know, having more big kids stuff. You know, they want to move on to that stage pretty soon, which would be the argument for having a third kid relatively close. So she thinks, what do we think. Should she go ahead and dive in fairly soon and this is when she has a four month old baby, or should she try to have the same three years apart. Sarah, what do you think? I thought this was a really fun question, and I feel like the stock answer is like, there's no right answer. They both have their benefits. But I actually think if you have the inkling that you feel ready now, that you might as well go for it sooner rather than later. I mean, maybe not when you have a four month old, but maybe, you know, keeping them less than two years apart, just because there are times when I wish that Cameron and Genevieve were a little bit closer together. There's some efficiency need to be gained, and you know, I love efficiency, like more time with kids at the same schools. For example, I definitely get frustrated when we're playing a family game and I know I could have such a nice time with Annabelle and Cameron, but then I have this like adorable but totally convenient little kaboos who like messes it up, and then I feel like by the time she's old enough to play the game, I might have teenagers who like don't want to play the game, and that applies to many other types of activities. I love what I have. I was not ready to have a third the way you are describing. Until I was ready to have a third. It didn't actually take me that long to have Jenevie, but I just wasn't mentally in that space. So I was different from you, and how it panned out was more based on how I felt at the time. But since that doesn't sound like it's as much as a factor for you, I say, jump in, Hey, sounds good. Yeah. No, I'm always amazed with people have babies sort of crazy close together. This one person I follow on Twitter was talking about rocking her baby to sleep and her in utero baby kept kicking the other baby as she was trying to rack them to sleep. Was like, yep, well, when you get them that close, they do that, but there's some obvious efficiencies and then you will get to the big kid years earlier. If you have desired to have three, if they are spread out over say eight years, you were going to have a longer time to get that big kid stage than if they are spread out over four or five, which is what it looks like you are considering with this. So yeah, I mean, if you're writing this question, like if you're looking for permission to go ahead and have another baby, I mean, we're we love babies, so go for it. My closest age gap is about two years, and the first three are within four and a half years, and then we have quite longer spans of time. The five year gap between Alex and Henry is really something to be plunged back into all of it. So you know, if you're planning out life perfectly, probably it would be better to have them closer together. But you know you can't plan out life perfectly, and this is what wound up happening, so you know, it is what it is. But if you know that three is the number you want and you are ready to sort of move them all into the big kids stage, then yeah, it sounds like if she's asking for permission, we we're excited for her. Not that you should ever ask us for permission on whether you should have a baby or not. We are just two people who are podcasting. You should do whatever you want that goes for everyone anyway. This has been best of both worlds. We've been talking with Laura Clark about strategies for applying to college. We will be back next week with more on making work and life fit together. Thanks for listening. You can find me Sarah at the shoebox dot com or at the Underscore Shoebox on Instagram, and you can find me Laura at Laura vandercam dot com. This has been the best of both worlds podcasts. Please join us next time for more on making work and life work together.