S3E24: Managing Stress in College Admissions
Today's question of the week: "How do I avoid burning out during college admissions?”
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Today's question of the week: “How do I avoid burning out during college admissions?"
SHOW NOTES
Episode Summary:
In this episode of The Admittedly Podcast, Thomas Caleel addresses the growing pressures high school students feel during the college admissions process. Exploring the sources of this stress—whether self-imposed or external—Thomas emphasizes the importance of intentionality and clarity of purpose. He offers insights into balancing extracurricular activities, maintaining mental health, and avoiding the trap of overloading schedules to "keep up" with others. With a focus on authenticity and depth over breadth, this episode provides actionable advice for students and parents alike.
Key Takeaways:
The Danger of Comparison: Students often model their activities after peers who gained admission to selective schools, leading to unnecessary pressure and burnout.
Quality Over Quantity: Admissions committees value meaningful, sustained engagement in a few areas over a laundry list of shallow commitments.
Intentional Engagement: Focus on activities that genuinely align with your interests and passions, rather than attempting to "do it all."
Mental Health Matters: Both parents and students need to prioritize balance and well-being. Frazzled and overworked students are not what admissions officers are looking for.
Dispel Myths About Admissions: Many stressors stem from misunderstandings or rumors about what colleges expect. Focus on facts and clarity.
Conclusion:
More is not always better in the college admissions process. By focusing on intentionality, authenticity, and personal well-being, students can present a compelling and balanced profile without overwhelming themselves. For more guidance on navigating this journey, follow Thomas on Instagram and TikTok at @admittedlyco.
Have your own question you want answered? Leave us a comment on social media for a chance to be featured.
About Thomas Caleel:
Thomas is an alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School of Business in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was Director of MBA Admissions and Financial Aid at Wharton. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to curate the best possible MBA class. Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities LLC, he works as a high-level admissions advisor to help families and students achieve their education goals. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for all parents and applicants.
Related Links
Apply to be a guest: www.thomascaleel.com/apply-for-podcast
Follow Admittedly on Social Media
TikTok: @admittedlypodcast
Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
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Hello and welcome to The Admittedly Podcast. Today, we're going to talk about how I am personally and single-handedly responsible for the destruction of childhood in the United States. Well, at least if you read the comments on my social media, you'd think that that was the case.
I get a lot of heat about the fact that children—high school students today—are frantic. They're running around. They can't be, and I'm quoting here, "kids anymore," and it is 100% my fault, and also the fault of the universities. I want to take a few minutes and talk about this and break this down because they are not incorrect, these commenters, that the high school students who are aiming at highly selective and selective schools have really become frantic. They are stressed, they are tired, they are run down.
I want to put this in a little bit of perspective. An interesting comment the other day came in, and it was from a parent saying, "We actually don't push our child, but our child pushes themselves, and I don't understand it, and I don't know how to dial that down." I think that this is a really interesting point, because we do have, certainly, parents—you know, the classic tiger parent—who is pushing, pushing, pushing: "Do this, do more. Do this, do more." And then we have the students who are putting the pressure on themselves: "I have to do another club. I have to do another leadership opportunity. This, that, more, more, more, more."
I’m here to, I hope, take some pressure off, because a lot of the blame gets placed on the schools. A lot of the blame gets placed on consultants, particularly consultants who are pushing this narrative of "do more, do more, do more." To me, I'm 100% against this, just for the record, okay? This is something that we talked about at length in our Early Edge kickoff webinar. It's something I talk about at length on social media. The answer here is quality, not quantity.
I really, really want to make this point. What happens is, and I think a lot of the stress that comes—this self-imposed pressure that the students put on themselves—is they’re in their school. They're on Naviance. They're looking. They see the senior class ahead of them, and they say, "Oh my gosh, Susan got into Yale. She did this. I need to do the same thing," right? Or they look at Brad, who got into Harvard or Stanford, and they start modeling their own experience on what these other students have done.
The danger there is that it becomes this arms race, right? "Well, they did five activities. I need to do six. They did this, this, I need to do exactly the same thing." These students are just running, running, running. The workload—the academic workload—is super intense. Parents, you see this as your child goes from freshman year to sophomore year, then sophomore year to junior year. Just the workload, the intensity, the time that they're spending studying, ratchets up.
Especially when you're listening to somebody like me say, "Hey, listen, rigor matters. You can't just take easy courses. You have to push yourself in the areas you're interested in and get good grades." So I understand that, in some ways, yes, I am part of the problem, but that is something that the schools are absolutely looking for.
Where it gets tricky is in the extracurricular activities. Why? Because the schools are pretty consistent about saying they’re looking for engagement. They're looking for students that are doing interesting things, doing them well, and doing them for a good reason, and there's authenticity there. This is a word you hear me use a lot. But students often mistake authenticity and depth of engagement for breadth of engagement, and so they're frantically stacking up all these things that they're doing in high school without really being thoughtful and intentional in that process.
When I talk to students on a certain level, I get it, and I understand them, because they're saying, "Well, you know, I don't really know what I like. So I like doing this, I like sports, I like being on the paper, I like doing, you know, mock trial, I like being involved in this and being involved in this." I get that, right? It's part of the maturation. It's part of the growing process, because as adults, there are a million things I would like to do every day, and I'm not able to, right?
I need to be self-selective. I need to be disciplined. I need to understand, "Okay, here’s my bandwidth, here’s my available time, here’s what matters to me." I have to allocate time to spend with my family, time to spend with my wife, time to focus on myself. These are really important things. Then what I do is I look at what my other priorities are, and I allocate accordingly. Many days, I'm not able to do all the things that I want to do.
One of the things I talk to students about is we need to be clear-eyed about what you can do and what you enjoy doing, right? Focusing there. Sometimes we have to let go of some of our extracurricular activities that don't serve us and don’t serve our purpose.
Now, I do work with students who say, "Listen, I want to go to a state school. I've got the GPA. I'm in the top 9 or 10% of my school academically. I've got an automatic in. That's what I want to do." Great. Fantastic. If that's the case, go nuts. Do whatever it is you want to do. But for the students that are looking at highly selective schools, more is not always more. More can oftentimes be less.
So, A, we want to be very, very disciplined about the number of activities we're engaging in. But, B, we want to be very, very disciplined about the type of activities, right? This is, I think, where a lot of students really get themselves stressed out, because they're trying to do all these school-related activities. I talk about this often. There are 20,000 high schools in the United States—that doesn’t include thousands of high schools around the world. If you're trying to compete by doing more than other people, that's a very, very hard game to win. It's very, very hard.
If you are editor of the school paper, there are literally at least 20,000 other editors of high school papers. That alone is not distinguishing yourself. What happens a lot of times is that these students, instead of stepping back and saying, "Okay, you know what, I really love journalism. I love the paper. I’m going to dig in. I’m going to see how I can elevate this. How can I increase circulation, increase ad revenue, look at online modalities, make an impact in my reporting?" they say, "Okay, well, this is just running the way it’s going to run. So I’m going to add something else."
That, I think, is where a lot of the burnout occurs. That’s where they fail, ultimately, to distinguish themselves and set themselves apart. I understand the frustration from parents, because they're looking at their children just run around at 100 miles an hour constantly. For those of us with, let’s say, younger students who don’t have their driver’s licenses yet, we’re full-time Uber drivers, running from this practice to that practice. Heaven forbid you have a child in athletics, and now you’re spending the weekend three hours away in a Motel 6 for a four-day tournament. It’s madness. It’s bedlam.
So I get the frustration. I think it’s really, really important for us to step back and say, "Okay, intentionality matters." As we’re looking at other students who got admitted, we can be admitted because of something or despite something. I talk about this often because I really, really believe it. There are certainly cases—many cases every year—where the admissions committee says, "You know what? We don’t really like this thing that person did; it’s not our favorite, but we love this aspect of them, and so we’re going to admit them."
The danger there is that other students look at this externally, and they say, "Well, all of those things mattered. All of those things are what got them into that school." It gives you a very, very biased perspective and a very, very skewed perspective in terms of why you need to do the things you do.
I’ve talked often about mental health, which I think is critically important in high school. This is becoming a very fraught area where these students are putting themselves under immense pressure. Sometimes the parents are adding to that pressure. Sometimes the parents are turning to me and saying, "How do we slow them down? How do we back these students off a little bit?" It’s hard because, then, when you talk to the students, they have these really compelling stories about why they’re doing this. They have great reasons for why they’re pushing themselves so hard and why they love all these things that they’re involved with.
So, I think giving them—and students, I’m talking directly to you here now—giving you the permission to step away from some of these things, to really kind of balance your portfolio, balance your life, balance what it is that you’re doing, is so important. We really do want you to be human beings. We want you to go out. We want you to engage with your friends. We want you to engage with the community around you. We want you to have fun. Nobody wants a pre-programmed, overworked, exhausted, frazzled student. Admissions committees don’t want that. Parents don’t want that. Students themselves don’t want that.
A lot of this, I think, is driven by misperceptions. There are so many rumors about what admissions is, about what admissions wants. It’s very interesting because, even when I go back to when I was running admissions, I was the director of admissions for Wharton’s MBA program. I was the one that set the policy. I was the one that was signing all the letters, reading every single file that went through in conjunction with my team. I would stand up and say, "Here’s how we do this. I’m trying to get in front of you all and remove stress and anxiety. This is exactly how the process works. This is what we look at. This is how we look at it."
Yet, people would still stand up in presentations and say, "You’re wrong. I heard that..." Usually, "I heard that" is one of my favorite openings to a question because it really allows me to get in and dispel misperceptions, dispel rumor, innuendo, and myth. There’s a lot of that around the admissions process.
The takeaway is this: more is not always more. Let’s be honest with ourselves, and let’s get some clarity of purpose here to streamline things and reduce the pressure that you’re feeling.
Thank you.
