407: Behind the Scenes of an Admission Office + Supplemental Essay Deep Dive w/ Rick Diaz

Ethan Sawyer  0:08  
Hey, friends, what's up? Ethan Sawyer here, welcome back to the College Essay Guy podcast, where, this time I got to sit down with Rick Diaz, the regional director of admission for Southern Methodist University, and someone I've known for, I think, more than like, 15 years, we have a pretty wide ranging discussion. He gives us a behind the scenes look at how SMU reads applications and how they shape a class and what that even means. Then we dive into the supplemental essays, in particular, the impacts of the Supreme Court's decision to ban race conscious admission and how that decision has led to a large number of selective schools, changing or adding new supplemental essay prompts. We nerd out a little bit on Rick's favorite supplemental essay. We talk a little bit about college majors, and then I think that Rick maybe has a little aha moment about when his interest in his own college major started. We play a little game I made up on the spot called What do students get wrong about and finally, we discussed some do's and don'ts for making a connection with your regional admission officer, including spoiler alert, why you maybe shouldn't show up at their house with a box of their favorite cookies. Who's Rick Diaz. He was a first generation college student raised by a single mom. Attended eight different schools, including three different high schools. He attended Claremont Men's College, now known as Claremont McKenna College, on a full need based financial aid. He later worked in the office of admissions at Claremont McKenna and then at Harvey Mudd College for six years, and then he worked in the USC admission office for seven years. For the past 32 years, though he's been the regional director of admissions for SMU. I hope you enjoyed this conversation as much as I did.


Hi, Rick, welcome to the podcast. Hi. I'm so glad you're here. This feels like, in some ways, a long time coming. Given how long we've known each other. It really


Rick Diaz  2:01  
seems like yesterday, but also forever, when people can understand my jokes of You've Got Mail, then you know you've been around for a while,


Ethan Sawyer  2:11  
totally. So one of the things I'd love to just give folks a sense of, just for context, is, what's your role at SMU? And another way that I like to ask this is, what do you spend most of your time doing? I was hired


Rick Diaz  2:25  
with the sole purpose of, we think SMU is a great place. We need to get the word out there go. And so my time is spent working with parents, working with students, one on one, doing a ton of presentation, traveling all over the place, getting the word there out about SMU. What was interesting is when the whole world shut down to work from home, I thought, Okay, I've done this before. I think I know how to do this. And there was not even a hesitation in switching over to this remote model. And I


Ethan Sawyer  2:56  
love it. I'm curious to know a little bit about your background in terms of what you were told about college growing up, and what your relationship to potentially going to college and then going to college was like, and I'm curious how that informed you ending up in this world. What a great


Rick Diaz  3:13  
question. I am a first generation student. English was not my first language, and I actually spoke Spanish first, and had to learn English in school because my mother was very adamant about, you're going to be competitive. Hello, yes, we embraced your Hispanic Mexican culture, but you live in a world where people speak English, and you've got to be able to speak English. And so it went cold turkey into speaking English. And when I got to that college decision night, I don't know what I'm doing with myself in high school, all of my relatives were so shocked that she was so adamant about Rick is going to college, and they thought that no, no, send him to a trade school, etc. And so when it came time to apply to colleges, a friend of my mother's at where she worked, was a professor at Claremont, where he said, You know what your son sounds like, a great kid for CMC, so he should apply visit a college. And I had that reaction that I tell students to look for when they visit a college, that this is where I belong. I already imagined myself because it was a world completely different from the high school that I went to when I got to college. I was one of the few brown faces there, which was eye opening to begin with, but my circle of friends looked like the United Nations. My roommate was from England. I had kids from all over the country, and literally, we could, you know, there was a Japanese heritage, Korean heritage, Filipino heritage, student from Nigeria, my roommate from England, and then me, it was just, it was eye opening. Four years later, I'm graduating, trying to figure out what the heck I was going to do with my life. And at that time, I was a student. Work or work study, working in the admission office, giving tours. And the dean said, Hey, Rick, you know, I don't know what your plans are, but we have a position opening up, which interesting because of SCOTUS, it was the Bucha decision had just come across, and so they had to decentralize how they did admissions for students of color, and they were looking for students admission officers with a wide variety of diversity, and they say, Hey, Rick, we got the position open up. What do you think about working in the admission office? Because everyone comes back raving about your tours, and you're so friendly. I said, Okay, I'll give it a shot. And almost 50 years later, I'm still doing that with the same level of is there any better job in the world kind of thing, because of that feeling that while working with kids,


Ethan Sawyer  5:46  
take us behind the scenes at SMU. How does SMU read applications and shape a class? It is such an


Rick Diaz  5:53  
amazing process with SMU, and that I get to read the application and I look through all my notes as I review every one of those like, I remember seeing that kid at my visit to that school, and oh, my god, awesome. Kid was so excited and really got enthused throughout the application process, and so at the admissions committee time after I read the application, basically I'm like an orchestra leader in that the students application appears on this big screen. And I say, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, I present to you Ethan Sawyer, an amazing kid from Los Angeles, and these are his pluses. And this is the part that I'm a little worried about. And then, okay, and then I look in everyone's eyes as they're making their notes and ready to vote yay or nay, and we purposely have an odd number of people, not that though we're odd, but we are but an odd number of people in the room to make sure that if there ever was a tie, that it would be, never be a tie. And so I say, Okay, all in favor admitting and everyone in the room is responsible, like when I'm not presenting my students, I'm responsible for a particular part of the student's application. I always like getting the essays, because I like to read them and get the gist of what those kids are all about. And so when I say, Okay, ladies and gentlemen of the committee, how do you vote? And then they all vote, and that's how they decide. After we're all done, that was just my perspective of the application of my kids, it goes to some number crunching gurus who say we admitted way too many kids. And so we've got to pull some kids back. Or, Wow, we don't have enough kids from North Dakota. We better go see what we can go back and find out from there. Or, Wow, the entire class is going to be, you know, business students. And so then we have to go back, and that's where the shaping comes into play, and that's where I typically will get a list of students say, Hey, Rick, you know, we've over admitted. Which of these students do we think we need to pull back on? And that's when I dig even deeper to see, yeah, let me go back and read their essay again, or their letters of recommendation, or just any kind of interaction I may have had with the student. And then eventually we get the Okay last call, we're releasing. And that happens every single cycle that we go through, from early action, early decision, regular and depending upon where we are in, the number of applications we received, how many admitted students we think we're gonna we're having, will dictate what that profile will look like.


Ethan Sawyer  8:26  
How long do you typically spend on an application? Or maybe give us a range of from x minutes to y minutes. What's the range that you'll typically spend?


Rick Diaz  8:35  
The most common answer you'll get from every single admission person you get asked this that gets asked this question is, it depends if the student is clearly in our profile, and there are no red flags anywhere I can fly through that pretty liquidy split kids who are not at that end, who are the Wow. Then I'm digging for reasons of what why should present this kid to the committee about why I believe this kid should be admitted, and that's where the whole test optional thing comes into play. The family background there may be first gen, and maybe their application is not as sophisticated, or they go to school in an area that doesn't have money for the arts, and so they their activity looks list, looks a little on the shaky side. This is where I'm looking for, why should we? Because we're called the Office of Admission, not the office of rejection. And so I'm looking for kids to admit. The hardest ones are in the middle where, oh, I'm really torn, because there's some good things, but it's fairly competitive at SMU, so they're really not in the running. And so this is where I remind myself my the very first time I voted in my first admission cycle, back in the early days of my life, where I actually had to deny a student I cried the entire time like that could have been me. Oh my gosh. And so I'm looking for reasons to admit this student. And this is where, when I'm on the road talking to kids of give me something to work with. So when I'm reading your application, it's not just generic, it's not just fluff, it's meaty stuff that I can really get behind. And that's the hardest part for a kid to understand. Yeah, it's the it can be fast, it could be slow, and it all depends.


Ethan Sawyer  10:23  
One of the things you were talking about earlier is something that we've been sharing out on the blog recently and through our YouTube videos, is talking about institutional priorities for folks who aren't aware. What are institutional priorities and how do they shape the decisions that we could say SMU makes, or just colleges in general make, when it comes to shaping a class,


Rick Diaz  10:49  
that's a huge, huge question. And colleges, I believe, look at institutional priorities like a stool. You have to have all three to maintain the balance in the university, if you focus on one thing, say a particular major, you may hurt your profile. You may hurt your academic standing in terms of research and so forth. So it's a very precarious balance that you're in of trying to make sure that you meet on all three cylinders, and you're always constantly adjusting if things get out of kilter. There's some very specific goals that SMU has. We believe, and I believe that SMU is a world class university, but still, we live in the world of rankings, and there are certain criteria that have to be met in turn to move yourself up to match where we believe we are, and so we're focusing on things like more research than the PhD level. Becoming an r1 research institution. We value diversity, but how do you represent that now, in light of SCOTUS, how do you identify that, and how do you make sure that you achieve that in a fair and equitable way through the admission process. How do we get the word out? How do we become a university that meets full need? We offer scholarships, we don't offer full need currently, and that's one of our goals eventually, to do so so that it never is again. Thinking back to when I was a kid, if I didn't have a full need scholarship, there's no way in the world, I could have gone to college, and there are a lot of kids out there that we would love to have, but because of need, we just can't meet need of all kids, and that means a development fundraising campaign to help build that up. And it just is all these three tiers of things that come into play. But that's big, loaded question. I


Ethan Sawyer  12:41  
know, I know I'm here for the big, loaded questions, and I think you gave a great answer, like you that was pretty forthcoming. I want to talk about supplemental essays with you, sure, something that just casually in the past, we've talked about just at conferences and the like, what's the relationship between supplemental essay questions and institutional priorities?


Rick Diaz  12:58  
The way that I describe supplemental essays to kids, and I'll take it from that perspective, is that imagine you're going on a date, and your parents give you this big stack of questions that you want to ask your person that you're asking on a date. So what is your political philosophy? What is your financial plan for the next 10 years, and how will you vote in the next election? And your stack of questions for the person you want to take on the date are, do you like sushi? Do you like watching, you know, Star Trek movies, and do you like to go bowling? And kids parent questions are the common app questions get to I had no choice at all in any of those questions. They never said, Hey, Rick, what do you think we should ask these kids? I was never asked. However, institutions have an opportunity to build an understanding of the population by how they craft their supplemental essay questions, which leads into institutional priorities. For example, if a college is looking for we want kids who actually show heart and giving back to others. So the question might be about community service, or how do you see the world, which might be a loaded way of saying, What do you think about diversity? And so those supplemental questions can help shape the class. Can help give me something to latch on to. But the one that gets asked the most is the why us? And it get asked in a variety of ways, and kids blow it probably, I think 95% is probably under counting it because they're superficial. I want to go to your school because it's pretty Wow. We're the only pretty school in the country. Or they don't really realize that they're not saying enough about the why? The question is, why not tell me what? You know, I want to go to your school because Mr. Sawyer, because you have small classes. Okay, that's great, but why? Well, I go to a really small school now, and I have a chance to interact with. Interact with my professor, and he or she knows when I'm struggling or excited and I will get lost in a school that has 300,000 kids in my intro English class, and so I need a smallest that has small classes, and your school, Mr. Sawyer, has small classes, and that's one of the things that kids talk about when they come back from their visit, that's why. Now you've turned it around. Kids never get to below the why. And what's really funny about the why? Question is that you could tell where they have this Can I say brain fart? Brain fart when they're writing it because they forgot what school they're writing about. Do you know how many kids write about they want to go to my school because they really want to go to the beach. Have you been to Dallas lately? There's no beach, I'm sorry. Or they forget what school they're writing about, and they've always dreamed of being a USC, Trojan, oh my god, lovely. But thanks for sharing. And what happens when you when you read that? What happens? I just shake my head and hope the committee didn't see it. But that will not get a kid denied. But if a kid is applying for a merit scholarship for faculty members who are like, how dare they not mention our school correctly, they don't get a scholarship. And unfortunately, kids don't realize their essays, their entire packet goes from the admission office to a scholarship committee to an honors program committee to selection for a major and any little tipping point could be the signal of doom, where, for me, I understand these are 17 year old kids, and they're just barely able to tie their shoes sometimes, and They're trying to balance all these different schools they're trying to do, and they have all these voices in their head, and they don't really read it and press Submit without even really reading it. And I don't hold it against a kid. I will give them grief when I see them like, so welcome to TCU. They're like, wait, what? Um, well, you said you've always wanted to go there. TCU is a great school, by the way.


Ethan Sawyer  17:03  
Talk to me about this year as it relates to the supplemental prompts from SMU, and then maybe we can talk a little bit about what's happening nationally. So many schools are changing their prompts. So take us a little behind the scenes of what was the process of working on the supplemental essays this year, but as I mean,


Rick Diaz  17:21  
we have two one of them is the why are you applying and why SMU will be a good fit for you. But the other one is a bigger picture of what unique qualities you will bring to the university as it relates to a diverse perspective. And that's our take on the diversity question that's out there. And because of the decision by the Supreme Court on the use of race and ethnicity, colleges need to find ways to elicit responses from students that will allow them, rather give them permission to talk about their own diversity. And I've been doing a lot of workshops on this and and it scares me that there are students out there who are afraid to mention their diversity because the Supreme Court decided it's not you're not allowed to do this, and they hear it in a way that they don't want to express it for fear of doing something wrong. And that's what kids have about this entire application process of I don't want to do something to mess up my application and put me in the negative. I also had another student come up and said, I don't want to talk about my diversity, my particular ethnic background, because I'll be competing in a silo against other kids who look like me, and that's not fair and and so I rather not talk about it. So I'm not competing against them, which we know is the hardest group to compete against, and and I just she was literally in tears as she was telling me these things. And I said, No, colleges will not pitch you. Okay, we have all the left handed players go over there. You're gonna compete against each other, all the kids who have blue eyes. Mr. Sawyer, you're gonna be in that group, and you're going to be competing as each other for the it's not like Hunger Games. It really is. Everyone has put what you bring to the table. And if your background, if your upbringing, if your whatever, is part of your identity, you should never be afraid to discuss it, because in the long run, if the university is and I don't say, think they will, but if that's something that's a negative, better to find out now and not get admitted and not go to a place where you're not going to be happy. If they say, I'm sorry, you're left handed. We only have right handed utensils and right handed desks, and you're left handed. Better to know that now and not even struggle with that. So I tell kids, I want you to express what that means to you and and I do this exercise, and I will give you 1,000% credit, Mr. S, I gay guy, and that is, you have this exercise where you ask students. The list qualities about yourself. And I tell kids, okay, go ahead and write down five things that you feel are the best descriptors of yourself. And when they're all done, I ask them to cross off all the ones that I can visually see. So for me, if I were doing it, I might have put I'm Hispanic, brown hair, brown skin, I'm old, all these kinds of things. And then most kids will cross off almost all of them. They're so tuned in on the outside. And then I go show this graphic of an iceberg. If you only judge an iceberg based upon what you can see, you're missing the majority of what an iceberg is all about. You're no different. You are more than just what we can see. It's your upbringing, it's your beliefs, it's your talents, your skills, your opinions, your imagination. No one in the world has the above and the below just like you, and that's what's going to be diversity, and that's what colleges are hoping that you will express. And it is more than just being I'm not the only brown person in the world. How do you narrow that down? I'm not the only brown person who from Los Angeles. Narrow that down. I'm not the only first generation single parent, mom, Brown family in LA narrow that down, and so suddenly you're really seeing yourself as as diverse as you can be. One student, and I will never forget her essay. She started her essay, I'm a white girl with blonde hair and blue eyes from Orange County. Get over it, and I loved it because she was not afraid to say, You know what you think you may know me, but you don't. The minute I was born, I was different from every single person on this planet, including my twin sister. I loved it. And when I tell that story, I tell kids, you will you will never be pigeonholed of you or just this, you bring a whole bunch of things, and that's why we're asking these diversity questions, because we want to be as inclusive as possible, and we can't define what diversity is, but we want you to explore what you believe it means to you. It's


Ethan Sawyer  22:14  
been interesting to see the way other colleges have responded and created prompts around this issue, and I'd just be curious to zoom back, you know, 35,000 foot view, if you had to say, like, what are colleges wrestling with right now? What are they thinking about? What are the some of the conversations that are happening in college admission offices right now? Probably


Rick Diaz  22:36  
the number one question is, has legal affairs looked over our question to make sure that we're not in violation of federal law, and we're going to next be in the next Supreme court docket of using inappropriate metrics to decide which who's going to be admitted after that, it goes back to your earlier question about mission statement framing the culture of the university, institutional priorities. How will the question we ask help us determine fit? And if the student talks about, no, I don't like sharing, I don't like giving back to the world, then guess what? If that's our mission statement, then you probably are not going to be admitted, regardless of your grades. And so they're they're trying to wrestle with how they glean this information out of kids. Because again, these are 17 year, 18 year old kids who have not had the chance to go to college to learn to be that critical. So they're relying a lot of people to help them to understand what that question is. So colleges are trying to wrestle with the language, what exactly it's like the old teacher in me, you know, I can't test you unless I know what it is I want to test you on, and then I frame the test to match what it is that I hopefully you will learn red. So what question do we come up with in our supplemental essay to get the answers we're seeking to find? And so I think they're really wrestling with, how does it match with their mission statement, the ability to use the information they get in admissions committee to see how self critical and self aware kids are when they answer those questions. But when you look now at all the different variations of what diversity, it would be great if they all said, Okay, we're looking for diversity. What do you think we would never none of them are that simple. Some of them, I have to read over and over. Like, what the heck are they really asking? I'm not sure. So I just, I have empathy for these students who are going through this process themselves. Well,


Ethan Sawyer  24:37  
let's look at a few. I want to, I want to just, we're gonna do, like, a live react, where I'm just gonna, like, read a couple of these ones to you, and you tell me what you think they're looking for. Don't tell the name of the school. Oops. Okay, okay. The the theme of the prompt is being different, and it says the prompt says we recognize that fitting in in all the contexts we live in can sometimes be difficult. Yeah. A blank name of school values all kinds of differences and believes they make our community better. Feel free to tell us any ways in which you're different and how that has affected you or what it means to you.


Rick Diaz  25:13  
That's a great question, and I would be terrified if I were student trying to answer that. Would


Ethan Sawyer  25:19  
you what advice would you give to 17 year old you when it comes to a prompt like this,


Rick Diaz  25:24  
start making a list and give a scale of one to five of okay, this is safe versus Whoa. That really is out there and depends upon the feedback you get. Like, yeah, you cannot share that with the admissions committee versus, okay, you just shared something that 80% of all the boys are going to share as well. So you're not helping your your case at all. You've it's a wasted question, but yeah, that would terrify me.


Ethan Sawyer  25:52  
There's a there's an exercise that we have that we lead students through, that is essentially, we call it the 10 plus things I want colleges to know about me, and it's got a whole bunch of different categories that students can answer. We'll put in the show notes. But the thing that you're saying to me is reminding me of this exercise. And for students who are listening and going, I have no idea what I would put for this. Check out the show notes. There will be a whole thing there. Okay, new prompt. Tell us about an aspect of your identity, eg, race, gender, sexuality, religion, community, etc, or a life experience that has shaped you as an individual, and how that influenced what you'd like to pursue in college at insert name of university, could be a future goal or experience that's either academic, extracurricular or social.


Rick Diaz  26:40  
Again, another great question, and me, as a 17 year old, would be terrified, because then I'd have to pick the one that had the most impact. And for me, growing up, they were all impactful. And by picking one, I'm not putting value on the other aspects of it. It you can't separate one thing of those different qualities I would be I would spend forever trying to answer that particular prompt and okay, it's due tomorrow. Oh, man, okay, just pick something, and I will be so stressed out that I picked Man, I should have picked the other one, because that would have given me a better shot for admission, or, wow, I didn't get admitted. I should have picked the other one, because that would, I would be so second guessing what I think the college is looking


Ethan Sawyer  27:30  
for. Yeah, it's part of what also, side note to students who are working on this stuff, part of what's challenging it seems like about these prompts is that there's sort of a different approach that you could potentially take to the you know, pick one aspect of yourself versus the you know. What are you going to contribute to the university versus the as we just saw here, how has what you've you know, this aspect of your identity informed, for example, your major one of the things tell me what you think about this approach, one of the things I'll sometimes tell students to do is to think about okay, given x major that you're interested in, or given y particular opportunity available at the school track backwards. So kind of reverse engineer it and go, Okay, well, what are the experiences? What are the identities, or aspects of my identity? That led me to this conclusion, how does that sound? That's


Rick Diaz  28:21  
great. And I always pull back to the thought that. And I always ask kids, how old are you 17? How in the world are you supposed to know what you want to do for the rest of your life? And I'm an old guy still trying to figure that out. So looking back at my own working backwards, I thought for sure I was going to be a diplomat to a Spanish speaking country. So obviously you must major it again with no guidance. Obviously major in Spanish. Hated it, hated it, hated it. Hated it because I hated doing literary analysis, because the grass is green and it represents man's inhumanity. I was too literal. The grass is green, and that's as far as I took it. So I don't know why I thought I would love to do it in Spanish when I didn't like doing it in English. And it wasn't until I took a psychology class so that when I came back every day from class, telling my roommate what I did in class, and finally he said, Rick, I love you, dude, but I don't care. And so I still majored in psychology, and it had nothing to do with any of the actually, I take that back. Growing up, I was really interested in learning about why people behave the way they do, and because I spoke English and Spanish, and now I speak more than one two languages, the use of language and how it becomes cultural and impactful, and that's why I eventually majored in what I eventually did, and as a 17 year old, I wouldn't even know that that was who I was. It wasn't until I got to college that I figured that out, and so I've completely lost train of thought of what your question was, but


Ethan Sawyer  29:59  
I. Yeah. Well, there was a funny moment, because I was asking you about, like, reverse engineering and essay, yeah, based on where you ended up. And it seemed like, did you just have like, an aha moment in


Rick Diaz  30:10  
Yeah, I did. I really did, like, it was there all along, and I would never have known that. That's what I maybe I did, like literary analysis, why you choose that one word over another and but not because the grass is green, representing man's and humanity, but, but, yeah, that truly was an aha moment.


Ethan Sawyer  30:30  
There was, seems like there was something around psychology about the ways that the brain works, or the ways that people think, or something. Yeah, cool. Let's do another 111. School. This is an interesting one. One school decided to drop one of a prompt that I've always loved, and instead they included a different prompt. You might know what the school is, but they used to have a prompt that said, tell us about something that's meaningful to you and why. And I loved it because it allowed students to share maybe a little bit of vulnerability, or some something that's core of core importance to them, that wasn't in the personal statement, and they've replaced it with this question, please describe what aspects of your life, experiences, interests and character would help you make a distinctive contribution as an undergraduate to blank University. It seems to me that it's sort of trending in the direction of encouraging students to, quote, unquote, demonstrate interest. So I'd love to talk about demonstrated interest for just a couple minutes. Maybe you can tell folks what it means first of all, and then I want to know how important is it. Let's say at SMU. And then, just in general, when students are applying


Rick Diaz  31:43  
absolutely and I and again, it goes back to that big answer of it depends on the school and how they define it, but it's out there, whether kids know it or not, the simplest definition of demonstrated interest is, okay, we have two kids. Which kid wants us more, and how have they shown this? Have they been to campus? Have they been to every one of our programs? How many times did they write to me? Did they send me get Okay, no, that wouldn't be right, but did they click on the email that we sent? Did they go to the did they just did they call eight times? Did they did mommy also call? Did Daddy also call? And we have all kinds of ways of tracking this, and students don't realize that big brother, again, I've dated myself, not the current version of Big Brother on TV, but the old 1984 big brother, where we know a lot more than students realize. And so when a kid gets an email from colleges, we track that we send it out, obviously, because we don't want to send it out more than once. Oh, but we can tell whether you opened it or not. We can tell not only if you opened it, but if you clicked in the link that's embedded in the email, which takes you to our website and how much time you spent on our website. So in the admissions committee, someone could say, well, this kid obviously wants us more because they spent three hours after they clicked on the link to get to our website and learned all about our phenomenal basket weaving program that we have. This other kid, yeah, didn't even open our email, etc, etc, etc. So there's a biased judgment about the time that kids actually have available to do all this stuff. I always throw in that thing of, what if it's the wrong email and they're using another email to actually respond to things? What if it's ending up because you send so many emails, it's in their spam folder, so they never even got it. And then the converse of, what about this kids, it looks like they're really interested in they have hired a professional link clicker who sits at home clicking on the links. And you know, as they're watching, you know, their TV, they're just clicking on the link, spending all this time, and it looks really good for the kid. All of that is so biased. And I'm a firm believer that kids have to be allowed to be kids, and that means that, you know, do not do things that you feel like you have to, just to show that you're worthy. Thinking back to my own background, we didn't have the money for me to go out fly all over the country. Of course, I didn't apply to colleges all over the country because I didn't even know that was even a possibility. And I applied to a school within 40 miles from where I lived, and I thought that was the boundary. And so kids don't have the money, they don't have the time. This is all this pressure of, oh my goodness, if you miss your practice, you're off the team, you're in, you're gonna lose your opportunity to win your gold award. You are losing your data. All this goes on and on and on, and kids are so pressured to do all of that. But and colleges have to be really upfront and honest and say, we don't track it. We should track it, but it doesn't make a difference. At SMU, I'm never asked the question, so what's the kids demonstrated interest? Because it's not a fair indication of whether or not a student will actually enroll at the University, I like to use the term demonstrated awareness, and the way that I gage that is in their y SMU statement. How aware are they if they're talking about the beast mountains, they are not aware about SMU because we have neither. But are they aware of the opportunities that they have when I was at their school, I make notes about the kids that I saw if they asked specific questions, etc, just so I have a fuller appreciation for the fact that they, you know, skipped AP Spanish and came to my particular session. And so every school will do it differently, and it varies again, from the admission process to scholarships. I mean, we only have so much money. I'm thinking, I'm speaking hypothetically. Not SMU, we only have so much money for this program. So we're going to give it to the kid who's actually spent time on our psychology website for a psychology scholarship that they're going to get, and so they may use that as their deciding factor. And so it's admission, scholarships, admission to programs, and maybe honors programs. And you can't tell faculty what to use, what not to use. They come up with their own rubric for making these decisions, if it's outside the admissions office, but every school will use quote demonstrated interest in their own ways, either as a it's not a non factor, but that technology is there for us to gage that if we were to come up with some magic algorithm that determines all these things, and


Ethan Sawyer  36:59  
for Those listening who may not know. Why do colleges care between two students, which one is more likely to enroll? Why does that even matter to the college?


Rick Diaz  37:08  
And that is in the secret mathematical formula, something called yield. Colleges like to say they don't want to waste quote, admission decisions of if I have these two kids, and if I do it to Kid A and we know they want to come, then the likelihood that they will enroll is going to be awesome. But if we admit it all these other kids, then we really don't know who's actually coming, so we're going to have to spread that net even further, which means that our acceptance rate goes up and it just, it's, it's a whole Sudoku puzzle and tugging and pulling. And some colleges care about yield, because that puts them in higher rankings in certain guide books, and which generates applications, because kids feel they can only apply to certain schools that are ranked in the top 10 in the world like, guess what? That's yeah, it's not going to happen. And so they colleges are mindful of where their admit rate will put them in terms of other schools in the pecking order of obviously, if you have a lower admit rate, you must be better. And one of the ways they can get to that is by only admitting kids who really want to come and they've demonstrated it, and hurts the kid who didn't do any of that, that would be me. I wouldn't have done any of those and so I wouldn't have been admitted any of these goals. So I want to go back to an interaction


Ethan Sawyer  38:34  
that you may not remember, that we had years ago. It's been more than 10 years. We were at a college fair, and we were talking, and a student came up and reintroduced himself, because you'd gone to his school, and you had been a, you know, special guest speaker, and he had been the student who was in charge of, like, touring around the school. And, you know, he came up and introduced himself. He was dressed in like, you know, a suit and stuff. And I asked if you'd remembered him when he went away. And he said, Oh, yeah, absolutely. Do interactions like that matter? And I guess this is a bigger question of like, what are some ways that students can, if it feels appropriate, begin to develop a relationship, as it were, with their admission officer. So give me some, some do's and don'ts real quick when it comes to reaching out to an admission officer.


Rick Diaz  39:23  
Well, the obvious great dues are after you've met someone at a high school visit after a college fair, and it was impactful, send that person an email giving context, hey, Mr. Diaz, and even though I tell kids it's okay to call me Rick. Your parents are like no call in, Mr. Diaz, and please put the my correct name. I'm not Mr. Gomez, but dear Mr. Diaz, it was really a pleasure to meet you the other day when you came to visit my school, you got me really excited about applying. I look forward to continuing this conversation with you as I progress. Through the admission process sincerely, and then please put your name and give me context, etc. And I love those, and don't expect a response, because I get a lot of those, and those are really wonderful ways to show your appreciation. On the other hand, there's the Hey Rick, Hey, yo, bro, it was really nice chatting with you, and I can't wait to have more conversations like this, but I had a couple of questions for you. Please get back to me next day. Yo, are you like? Too busy to respond? I wrote to you and I said, I like talking to you, and you haven't responded yet. Maybe your school is not the right place for me. Well, it just you just need to be mindful that there's only one of me and 1000s and 1000s of you. And going back to my mother's advice, of you, better do your research before you ask the why. If you're asking me, so where are you located? You've not done your research, and that's not the purpose of establishing a relationship with students and counselors, meaning admission counselors through this whole process. Other ways that kids can be appropriate or rather inappropriate is is saying hi. Remember me at a college fair where I'm lucky enough to even know where I'm at, let alone at what college fair enough I've seen you before, so hi was It's nice seeing you again, etc, those are a much better graceful way to go into it. Sometimes students get it in their head that I really need to stand out, because Mr. Diaz is looking at 1000s of applications, and I want him to remember me. So I'm going to either send him stuff or yet or better, I will show up and surprise him with a personal gift. So I actually had a student show up to where I live because I put my address at the time, my actual mailing address, which was my home address, on all my correspondence. And a student showed up one morning and had a basket full of my favorite cookies, which in itself may seem like, Oh how sweet. There was no way in the world that she would have known what my favorite cookies are, because nobody knows outside of a few people. So that completely freaked me out and made me switch to a PO box, but, and I don't remember kids are kids, and I can understand how innocent they can be. If you happen to see us at the supermarket, or it's Starbucks or or whatever, you know, it's okay to say hey, you know those kinds of things, which is, which is okay, but don't expect to have an interview right there in the middle of the produce aisle at Albertsons. I want to


Ethan Sawyer  42:44  
do a little section with you called what students get wrong about x I'm just gonna, I'm gonna list a few of these. Maybe we can do some rapid fire. But let's start with what do students what do students get wrong about extracurriculars and summer planning? Obviously,


Rick Diaz  43:00  
I've read in these guide books that if you learn how to play the pandemic flute, your chances for admissions skyrocket over oh my god, learning to play just the piano or the cello. So pick something really obscure and then spend all your time on it, and that way on your list of resident of activities, it will really shine that you really look for the different and the unusual. No, I don't want you picking up a Pandey and hand flute if you are not musical. I don't want you signing it to be the practice dummy on the football team, because you can then list that you were in varsity football, don't do things just to make yourself look good. You're going to be so burnt out if you try and do everything. That's quote recommended. There's no magic checklist. There really isn't. And, yeah, you can't go back in time. And, wow, I should have joined the Boy Scouts of the Girl Scouts, so that right about now I'm completing my Gold Award or my Eagle Scout. Yeah, it's do what makes sense for you in terms of your own mental health and spending time with your family, because they're going to be going through a lot of changes coming year, and just do the things that are genuine. And hopefully colleges will see that. What


Ethan Sawyer  44:23  
do students get wrong about the personal statement they


Rick Diaz  44:26  
have too many people read it and give advice, because it's like making a soup where everyone has their own ingredients. Suddenly this wonderful, flavorful, unique soup suddenly becomes a mixture of every can of Campbell soup in the cupboard. Number one. Number two is okay. I'm sure there are English teachers listening to this, and I'm going to probably alienate all of them right now, English teachers are awesome. They teach you how to write. This is a different kind of writing. We're. We don't want to necessarily know how the smell of formaldehyde burned your nostrils and the flickering light sucked the life out of you as you were contemplating your future careers. Which English teachers want you to get in that moment? Admission, people want to get to know the content of who you are, and that means more details of why. How are you feeling, and they the stories that sometimes kids share are very heavy, laden with every single possible plethora and Cornucopia word you can imagine, and every verb has an adverb, and every noun has an adjective. We want it to be genuine. And the way that I kill tell kids to get past that hurdle is Have someone read the prompt to you and just start talking into a recording device, and you have a much more genuine, authentic essay, and then you clean it up. Then when you're done, copy and paste it into Google Translate and listen to it again. This goes to my passion for language and learning in that your brain will stop auto correcting when it's just listening. If you're following along, you're doing AutoCorrect and will not catch a lot of mistakes, evidenced by the number of papers that you've turned in already in your high school career that you thought were perfect, and come back with red marks all over the place looking like something died on it with huh and what? And your essays will be much more genuine. Your papers will be much more genuine if you listen to the content. Is it true


Ethan Sawyer  46:47  
that the personal statement of the supplemental essays matter more for some students than others when it comes to impacting their admission chances?


Rick Diaz  46:57  
Yes, in that if I am looking for content that is expressed in the essays, the why they want to come to SMU, what they will contribute to our sense of community. If there's nothing there, you've you're on the border, you're on the fence, you've just the committee is left flat. But for those kids, and because kids never know where they are in the admission process in terms of, Wow, this is the I'm on the fence of getting this scholarship or not, or Wow. I'm on the fence of whether I'll be admitted or not, or Yeah, I don't even have a chance, since kids don't know. You should write as if it matters to everybody and spend quality time making sure that it conveys who you are and and should matter to everybody. But since you don't know for whom it really is the most important deciding factor, then you got to write it as if it matters. There are kids who get admitted with the worst essays. Yeah, you gotta admit it anyway, but you didn't get a scholarship, you didn't get to the honors program because of the essay. There are other kids who, Oh, I love this essay. I love this kid, but clearly the academics don't support it and admit decisions. So I will congratulate the student on being brave and honest and sharing a terrific essay, and hope they'll transfer later on. And that gives me some opportunities to work on students, realizing that life is not a straight line and they can transfer later on. So since kids really don't know for whom it matters the most, they should tell themselves it matters the most to me, knowing that I've done my best.


Ethan Sawyer  48:40  
Let's do one more. What do students get wrong about standardized testing?


Rick Diaz  48:46  
Wow, oh. I got to make sure that I am not standing in my soapbox. I am not a big believer in testing, because looking back at my own life experiences, I can see why people would have thought I belonged in ESL because I over analyzed. I was not a good test taker because I didn't know how to take the test. I was told growing up, if this is the correct answer, you better be able to defend why the other answers are not correct. So taking a standardized test, I spent way too much time justifying why the other answers were wrong. So my test scores were not very good whatsoever. And so there are, naturally, some students who are not very good test takers, either because of their learning differences, their learning style, their approach to testing, or they never had the opportunity to do any kind of test prep, of practice taking the test. This is where the whole concept of test optional comes into play, and where students have to be really honest with themselves and say, You know what, I'm not a good test taker. I don't test well, though my grades would contradict that particular assessment. Assumption that I am not a good student, and then reach out to those schools and ask them where testing comes into play. There's just a whole big conversation about testing alone is not the ultimate indicator of how well a student will do in college, and if I'm the example of living by that statement, then I definitely live by that statement. So where students get it wrong is that they feel like they must test to prove themselves. And I'm just glad we're going in the direction of testing. For some schools, yes, and they will make it very clear, and that's part of their mission statement. And you know, more power to them. And that's where students have to make a decision. Is that where I want to


Ethan Sawyer  50:43  
be, Rick, I'd love to know what do you love about this work?


Rick Diaz  50:46  
Every kid I see is the kid that could have been me. And I want to make sure that every kid has opportunities and possibilities. They're valued, that you can make a mistake in the ninth grade and your life is forever, not oh my gosh, I'll be working at drive through window asking if they'd like fries for their with their order, just because they made a mistake. And I want to make sure that every kid has every possibility that they can get. And I love meeting with kids and watching those you know, I'm often called the essay whisper. When I sit down with kids and we just start talking, and they develop, it's like, okay, you just wrote the most amazing essay, and there's your opening sentence. You said it. I didn't. That's where you go. And they and they get this look in their eyes of, wow, it's not as hard as I thought it was going to be. And because college is an exciting place to be, and whatever journey that means it just is a very personal enriching thing, because I was first gen, and I want to see every kid take that opportunity if it's appropriate for them, in whatever form it takes. In terms of, do I go to community college? Do I go to whatever kind of college make it the right place for you. And I love that aspect of my job of helping kids make good decisions for


Ethan Sawyer  52:08  
themselves. Well, we could use an essay whisper over here. So when you retire, will you? Will you reach out to me? And because we've got some students that I think would would benefit from your


Rick Diaz  52:20  
whispers. Oh, you're so great. Thank you. What would you like families


Ethan Sawyer  52:24  
to keep in mind? And let's, let's speak to you know parents, as well as they're going through this process. What advice would you give to families? What's interesting


Rick Diaz  52:34  
is, I tell students, when all the workshops I do is I tell them to get a t shirt that says, Yes, it is all about me. Parents, I know you want to live vicariously through your students journey and the overcoming the Coulda, Woulda, shouldas. It really is their journey. It may not be the one that you would take, but you're the phenomenal safety net that's there. Students, I want to remind you that for parents, this is exhausting. They have been taking you to every single club meeting and event, and they've been there for you, and now suddenly you're leaving, and their lives are forever going to be different. And if you're the first, they will practice you had, they had great practice on you, and we'll get better as it goes along with the other siblings. Your other siblings are already looking to see how, Oh, my goodness, who's going to drive me to wherever? What's going to happen, and who's my confidant? Or sweet, I'm already knocking off the wall and I'm making this big old game room. Or parents are looking thinking that you're the last in the family to go to college, thinking, Okay, I am now old, and they look to their spouse thinking, Okay, I'm stuck with you for the rest of my life. Wow, this is going to be different, because we had the kids to banter and play and be a part of the whole community. Or wait. Are you leaving tomorrow? No, Mom, I'm leaving in a year from now. Are you sure you're not leaving now? It's like they're all going through the same emotions that you are. And so my favorite word to tell kids to say to their friends is no, oh, come on, Ethan, we're gonna go out no and spend some quality time, because the moment you go away to college, you are forever different, and when you come back, you're going to be that adult trying to fit your college. Complete autonomy of your time with these are the parent rules, and it's just a little bit different, and it gets even harder as you get older and older. I remember the first time I came home from college, which was Thanksgiving. Even though I live 40 minutes away, I came home for Thanksgiving, took my roommate with me, and we had the most phenomenal my mom probably spent weeks working on the thing. Giving dinner, ate stomach looking like that proverbial lion just who just ate a herd of gazelle. Okay, it's time to go back home now, not realizing what I had just said, my mom heard me kind of excuse herself and went crying in the bedroom, because it now hit her that my home was not where it was. My home was not there anymore. I felt so horrible, but it wasn't until later than my sister said, Dude, did you know what you just did? No, I had I did the dishes, what mom heard, what you said, and she was really upset. And home will always be where it is, but it's going to be different. And so students spend time with your parents, and parents give them the freedom. And if I ever hear that we where are we gonna live? Oh yeah, that red flag goes way up. I actually had a mom want to know where she was gonna live, and wanted to be her room her daughter's suite mate, and like, yeah, not gonna happen,


Ethan Sawyer  56:00  
not the strangest thing I've heard, but also I can totally believe it. And also I hope that I have that sort of like distance or willingness to let go. When my daughter 17 in whatever, nine years or so,


Rick Diaz  56:15  
I'm gonna read her essay, and I'll tell you,


Ethan Sawyer  56:20  
she could let me know. Rick, thanks so much. I'm so grateful for the time today, and just really appreciate you and appreciate your work.


Rick Diaz  56:27  
Well, I am a big fan of yours, and if I could be half as insightful as I talk with all these kids about the importance of all that they bring to the table and how you get them to say these things, I would consider it a day well spent. Thanks Rick,


Ethan Sawyer  56:49  
thanks friends for listening. On the show notes page, you'll find links to other recent podcast episodes exploring the impacts of the Supreme Court decision, including an analysis of the decision itself with legal expert Jay Rosner, including some advice for students applying to college and counselors advising them. We also get into seven things Latinx families need to know about preparing for college. With Lorenzo Gamboa, who is in admissions at Santa Clara, we do a Spanish and English version there. Then with Tina young, I recently talked about why you don't have to write about trauma in your college essay to stand out and what you can do instead most of these resources you're gonna find on a page we created specifically for basically college admission resources following the SCOTUS decision to ban race conscious admission, and that includes things like a guide to answering those quote, unquote diversity supplemental essay prompts, some of The ones we talked about with Rick on this episode. There's also a blog that addresses, should you even write about race in your college application? And if so, how do you do it? And then there's a guide for counselors on how and why to up level your school profile. You'll find all those links at college essay guide.com/podcast Are you on our email list? If not, that's the best place to find out about upcoming events like webinars, all of our YouTube videos and all of our courses that are pay what you can for students and college counselors as ever. Be well friends and stay curious. You.


Transcribed by https://otter.ai