During their college search, prospective students and their families often look at numbers — a college’s rank, the number of majors  — and at things, like buildings and campus amenities. 

“And that’s important,” says Carl Steidel, senior associate dean of students. “You should pay some attention to those things.” 

But he says, prospective students should also try to suss out what the “experience is going to be like.”

In other words, when visiting a college — whether in person or poring over social media and — a prospective student should “try to picture yourself in that place,” Steidel says. 

“Not just the physical place, not just imagining the good food that you’ll eat there, but what it will be like actually interacting with the people who are there.”

This requires some imagination, introspection, and self-awareness, says Steidel. “Think about what has worked for you during your academic career so far. For example, do you have close mentors in your high school that you connect with?”

If yes, you might look at a college where you can have really close relationships with faculty and staff. “That might mean a smaller college where those faculty-student ratios are a little bit closer.” 

On the other hand, if you’ve had success walking a more solo path through high school, “maybe that means looking for a bigger institution where you don’t necessarily need to have those connections quite as much.”

Among Steidel’s responsibilities are Student Affairs programs that help students make connections between their academic lives and co-curricular opportunities. Success in college is “so often about the connections that students make once they get to campus.”

But there’s no hierarchy when it comes to the folks you can connect with. “Just try to make a connection with somebody during that first year, whether your peers in your residence, an academic advisor, the custodian in your hallway, or the person who drives the shuttle.” 

Steidel says that students should also think about their day-to-day lives, and the challenges they face and how they respond to them. To that end, “what does a college have in place to help you succeed? What kind of support team does the college have set up for you in advance?” Steidel asks.

“At ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, we have an academic advisor. We have a student support advisor. We have residential life staff. Colleges have lots of different ways of supporting students, so try to find the structure and the kind of support network that matches what you think is going to make sense for you.”

At ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, an admission program of early decision has been around since the 1960s, and it hasn’t changed all that much.

Back then, a student applied early decision in November and was notified by December, same as today. And same as today, the acceptance was binding for the student.

Using a courtship metaphor, “early decision is not a flirting game,” explains Leigh Weisenburger, vice president for enrollment and dean of admission and financial aid. “You’re getting married.”

The value proposition of early decision also has not changed in 60 years. As the late Dean of Admissions Milton Lindholm wrote in 1961, “for the student, early decision obviates the necessity of filing applications to more than one college; the advantage to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ is that it knows that the accepted student will matriculate.”

Existing alongside early decision for all these years has been another type of early program, early action, similar in its earliness, but not binding.

Weisenburger uses a touch of phonetics to help prospective students and families remember the difference between early action and early decision.

“The word ‘action’ starts with a vowel, with a softer sound. So think of it as an opportunity for a student to apply early, but without any binding element tied to that round of admission.”

A student applies early, and is notified early. If accepted, “they have that offer of admission in their back pocket” as they continue their applications to other colleges.

Early decision is a different sound and a whole different ball game. “It’s the letter D — a consonant with a harder sound. It’s binding.”

When a student applies early decision, they’re signing a contract, along with a family member and their school college counselor, that says if admitted, they will matriculate.

Then there’s the old standby, regular decision, an opportunity for a student to apply to a number of colleges during the fall and winter, then typically get decisions in the spring. “In regular decision, students can weigh pros and cons, compare financial aid packages and go from there,” says Weisenburger.

Not every college offers all of three options. Some colleges offer just one, some might offer two, and some might offer three. (ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ offers early decision and traditional regular decision.) Neither ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, Colby, nor Bowdoin offers early action.

“You, the student, get to do your research and see what the options are, what interests you, and what’s most suitable for you and your needs.”

The exponential growth of computing power has been a boon to the research that Assistant Professor of Physics Jeffrey Oishi and his students do every day at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝.

But supercomputers still can’t top the power of the human mind to ask the right research questions, he says.

Oishi recalls what one of his college professors, the famed computational scientist David Keyes, once said in class. “He said he’d rather have today’s algorithms on yesterday’s computers than yesterday’s algorithms on today’s computers.”

In other words, even with the exponential growth of computing power, “how we phrase our ideas and problems to the computer” is what matters, Oishi says. “How we phrase our questions can radically change results by a much larger factor” than any increase in computing power.

For example, just yesterday, Oishi and a , found a way to solve a problem 2,000 times faster — on the same computer — simply by changing the mathematical formula slightly.”

For Oishi and the , “that’s where the real excitement comes —in the ideas and ways of looking at problems.”

Oishi is a computational physicist. His lab, , seeks to understand highly complex systems “that are far from equilibrium,” meaning that “there’s a lot of energy flowing through them. The classic examples for me are fluid turbulence in the atmosphere, the oceans, and the stars and their stellar atmospheres.”

He’s also looked at smaller-scale problems, like the growth of bacterial biofilms that thrive on surfaces — such as industrial pipelines and medical devices.  “Biofilms grow and divide and exist in a fluid medium. It’s one of the biggest problems for hospitals, for example, in intravenous lines.”

The research involves “extremely large supercomputer simulations on national-class facilities at NASA and some of the National Science Foundation centers,” he says. In addition, his students have access to the college’s high-performance computing cluster. The HPCC is a “workhorse.”

Oishi earned bachelor’s and doctoral degrees at two universities, Columbia and the University of Virginia. Now he’s teaching and doing research at ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝, and he sees the benefits for his students when it comes to doing research at a small liberal arts college. 

“And, importantly, the students bring value to the research work,” he adds. Last January, a student in his lab, Morgan Baxter ’20, co-authored a scholarly article published in the highly regarded .

The ample opportunities to do research is partly a numbers game. “Particularly in STEM fields, there are fewer students, and no graduate students, to do the work,” Oishi says. “So a student can be in the thick of a project from an early stage.You can quickly see what it’s like to do scientific research and find out if it’s interesting to you because it’s so vastly different than coursework.”

There’s variety, too, in the work that undergrads do. “Undergrads in my research group play a variety of roles in computational and theoretical physics,” he says, “from software development to what you might think of as traditional theoretical physics — using a pencil and paper and trying to make sense of equations.”

Students also do data analysis, “which can be done with a minimal physics background,” Oishi adds. 

Doing research builds “practical skill, even if you’re doing something extremely theoretical and extremely abstract.”

Students learn the valuable, lifelong skill of searching for an answer when “you don’t know even if there’s an answer, let alone what that answer is. Learning to grapple with that, learning how to sit with that feeling, and move through it productively — that’s the single greatest benefit of doing research.”

Deeply invested in their students, high school educators strive to do their very best when writing college recommendation letters. 

But during stressful times — like a pandemic — it’s easy for anyone to feel they’re falling short of their best.

In offering tips to prospective recommenders, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Director of Admission Darryl Uy has one key message: Be easy on yourself.

High school counselors and teachers might worry that they can’t provide as good a recommendation as they have in the past, due to a year or more of limited contact with students. 

“But that’s OK,” Uy says. “Any context or stories are helpful, and we understand if you haven’t been able to connect with students as much as you might’ve in prior years. And if you don’t know a student that well, especially in the time of COVID, that is still helpful for us to know.”

On the flip side, remote learning means that some educators are being “invited” into students’ homes in unprecedented ways that might help them understand a student’s life. “That can provide a new level of insight into a recommendation for a student,” Uy says.

Recommenders might also feel that the “best” recommendation has dazzling prose. “However, a recommendation can be a series of bullet points. Given the volume of applications we review, we welcome recommendations that can summarize and highlight a student’s strengths succinctly. ”

“We are looking for recommendations that talk about the student, first and foremost, in the classroom,” Uy says. 

Words still matter, he says. “We value authenticity, genuineness, and honesty.”

ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ requests that teacher recommenders be from a student’s junior or senior year, in English, social sciences, mathematics, natural science, or a foreign language.

“We are looking for recommendations that talk about the student, first and foremost, in the classroom,” Uy says. 

“If a recommender knows the student in ways that highlight their personality, that’s helpful too. Is the student the glue of the class? Someone to whom everybody turns for support? Are they an unsung hero? Are they a leader in their school, even if they’re not in a specific leadership position? Do they go above and beyond to show compassion?”

When writing a recommendation, a recommender should do more than confirm that a student has talent. For an admission office, talent is pretty easy to identify, and something that every student applying to college will have.

Recommenders should also avoid simply restating a student’s activities since “we will get all that information from the student’s application.” Another recommender pitfall, for a teacher, is spending a tad too much time describing the goals of their class and their own teaching approach. 

Above all, recommenders should understand that letters alone are rarely the deciding factor in an admission decision. 

Try to avoid a cookie-cutter approach to recommendations. 

“We will always look at the transcript first,” Uy says. In that sense, a recommendation can help explain a trend of low grades in a certain subject on the transcript. Or we may discover how a student who doesn’t have a top grade adds to the classroom experience in a myriad of positive ways. Recommendations can inform us of other qualities a student can bring that we cannot glean from the transcript.”

The ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Admission team knows that though teachers and counselors are often overwhelmed with recommendation requests, they should try to avoid a cookie-cutter approach to recommendations. 

Every year, the Admission Office receives applications from multiple students who attend the same high school. Considering that the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Admission staff may read these applications together as a group, they will quickly know when a teacher is using a template with the same phrases and same text for different students. “That doesn’t help us nor does it help the students in the admission process,” says Uy.

And Uy has some advice for students, too: You don’t need to spend time gathering a  stack of “other” recommendations. 

“We once received 18 recommendations for one student,” recalls Uy. “But we don’t need to hear from your kindergarten teacher. We don’t need to hear from celebrities or politicians or the alum down the street who you barely know. We do want to know about you in the classroom.”

Last weekend, ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Admission took another step toward enrolling a new class, sending out Regular Decision acceptances to prospective members of the Class of 2025. 

Before long, Admission will be reviewing applications for the Class of 2026, from students whose high school experiences, since March of their sophomore year in college, have been mightily disrupted by the pandemic.

For those high schoolers who are worried that the activity section in their Common Application has taken a hit that might hurt their college-choice chances, the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Admission team has advice.

“The pandemic is going to affect how your activity section looks. It’s going to affect how everybody’s activities section looks,” says Assistant Dean of Admission Audrey Burns ’17. “And I think that that should be a sense of security, a sense of calm.”

Prospective students tend to believe that “the best application is going to have every single line packed. It’ll be full, with addendum. But that’s not true.” Indeed, the folks who work in ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Admission aren’t looking for an arm-length high school brag sheet — and that’s more true than ever now, during the pandemic. 

What’s true is that the Admission team will be “very understanding what our prospective students have endured because everyone, including the people reviewing your activities section and our families, have had their lives impacted. We know that it’s going to be different.”

Whether it’s a senior in high school applying to college, or a ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ student working with the Center for Purposeful Work to identify meaningful work interests, it’s important to communicate how one has navigated the pandemic. Actions and activities that show thoughtfulness, as opposed to quantity,  will make a strong impression.

In one’s application to college, Burns “absolutely recommends” including context about one’s activities — “how it has impacted, whether it simply did not exist this year, whether it’s changed platforms, what it looks like and how the pandemic has impacted you.”

“The activities page is not a survey. It’s where you can show your reflection and you can show your character.”

Burns’ own application to ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ included evidence of a growing interest in singing and theater — which she parlayed into four years with the a capella group The Merimanders and a double major in theater and rhetoric, including a senior thesis performance as Helena in Midsummer Night’s Dream.

“The activities page is not a survey. It’s where you can show your reflection and you can show your character. This is another place that you can really be an agent in your application.”

Burns and the ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ Admission team offer this takeaway:

“Everything that you’re doing, whether it’s an organized club or helping out at home with your family with additional responsibilities, is important.

“We’re looking to see someone who has reflected on their experiences. What have you gleaned from your activities that is important to you? Why does it feel impactful? And is it something that you’re going to want to continue when you’re in college?”

Kicking off Season 2 of the college’s hit web series Ask the College Experts is Associate Dean and Director for Global Education Darren Gallant, who offers tips for students looking to get the most out of study abroad.

included tips on writing a good college application essay and what to expect from the interview.

Here’s Gallant’s advice:

• Study abroad is a means to an end: learning about a place. “It’s not a vacation or trip or travel opportunity,” he says.
• While you will have lots of support as you plan your studies, you’re in the driver’s seat. “You’re the one who makes the decision of when you go, how you go, and where you go.”
• Expect an academically different semester, “steeped in learning a new culture, society and way of life.”
• Expect the need to be flexible.
• Expect to learn things about yourself that you’d never thought you’d learn.
• And finally: “Pack less! You don’t need as much as you think you need when you study abroad.”

Created to support ŔÖ˛Ą´«Ă˝ admission goals, Ask the (College) Experts won a Grand Gold award last year from the Council for the Advancement and Support of Education, the preeminent organization for higher education communications and advancement professionals.