Q&A with Nicholas Strohl, assistant director of admissions at Yale University
February 29, 2008
By: Michelle Hu <mhu@hilite.org>
What is your official title?
My title here is assistant director, and there are several of us, so not “the” assistant director, but we are kind of like any typical admissions officer in that the way it works here is we have a certain territory of the country, and I am responsible for being at least one of the readers on all of the applications that come from there, and then taking my applicants through the committee process where final decisions are made. So, my area includes Indiana, but it also includes the states of Michigan, Wisconsin, Minnesota, Kansas and most of Missouri.
How familiar are you with CHS?
Well, I visited in September, late September, and certainly talked to counselors and students then and had seen the school. The school also sends a score report with all the applications which lists some basic facts about the school, things like demographics, some academic information. You might ask your counselors to take a look at that score report, because that’s what all admissions officers at all the schools see and it’s something that all admissions officers use to get a sense of the rigor of the school and what types of students go there, things like that.
How do you think a student from here compares with another one from Indiana or the Midwest?
One of the reasons that I’m responsible for an area, one of the reasons we divide things up that way is so that we have people who are responsible for getting to be familiar with certain parts of the country and certain areas and regions and schools… The way it works is that all applicants are evaluated contextually, that’s kind of the official word we use, ‘in context,’ and what that means is for each student, we look to see how that student has used or taken advantage of the opportunities and resources that they’ve had available to them.
On some level, all Carmel High School students, because they go to the same school, they have the same opportunities and resources, but at the same time, we also look at their background, their family context, what they’ve done outside of school, in terms of growing up or kind of experience they’ve had, so a whole range of different contexts, the school being one of those.
So on the other side of the spectrum, how do you think Carmel compares with private, schools on the East or West coasts?
In terms of my area, Carmel is certainly a very strong school, public or private. And in fact, I can tell you from the applicants that we saw in the early action season, even though they were all deferred, it was certainly a very strong group. The fact that we didn’t accept the one in the early action process doesn’t really say anything about the school itself or the region, but certainly, as a group of students and certainly as a school context, it’s a very strong one. It’s just that in the early action round, it’s just about distinguishing oneself from a very tough and talented pool. It compares favorably to a number of schools, public or private, and I think nationally, as well.
The way the system works here is that applications are read by a couple of people. From Indiana, I would be one of them. And then what we do is, I take those reader comments to a committee of people, which includes the dean and some other senior officers here, and I present the reader comments and kind of summarize the application to the committee. And then the committee makes a decision to accept, defer or to reject in the early action round. So, the way the committee process tends to work is that I certainly have students that I think are strong and students that I might want to push for, but when you present those students to the committee, it’s really up to the group. The committee, the dean, is someone who’s going to see the whole national context, as are the other senior officers. So what it comes down to then is, ‘How does this student fit into the national context that we’re seeing in the early action pool?’
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