College/Highschool Advice

How To Get Into Good Schools -Conan Gray

"Focus on your grades but the thing that really gets you into a school is when you have something that really differentiates you from other students. You have to have something that gives you a really specific purpose to get accepted. This really only applies to REALLY hard schools to get into, though you really have to have something that really shines. Its kind of hard to explain but Im going to use a weird analogy to explain it. A lot of these bigggest schools would much rather accept the worlds best chess player, who has good grades, not amazing grades, but good grades—than accept someone who has great grades, all across the board, but doesn't really have a massive passion, doesn't really have something that really shines. They want a kid who really excels in one thing like is AMAZING in art or AMAZING at math than a kid who's kind of like ehhh, like mid-A grades all across the board but not really, clearly exemplifying some kind of massive passion. For me my passion was music and I wrote about music in ALL my essays...my life in all my essays because I had a pretty rocky childhood."
"You just really have to show the school why YOU specifically are goig to have a very important role in college."
"...but completely aside from that, I know for a fact the only reason why that I was able to get into this school was down to two things: location and my insane essays."
Essays:
"...but UCLA gives you the opportunity to submit in a supplemental essay which is basically like an extra application that you can fill out. It was just like, "tell us about your life. tell us about how life has changed in the past four months. just tell us about anything." I in particular had a very very rough experience, kind of the last leg of my senior year. Its something really personal. Definitely the hardest thing that Ive ever ha to go through in my whole entire life and so I wrote about that in my essay. And Im so sure that thats the essay that got my into UCLA. In order to get into a really amazing school, you kind of have to shock these people. I was very fortunate enough to have a very shocking story that really caught the attention of these people"
Location:
Something that a lot of people don't really know is that when colleges accept students, location is actually a very important player in this game. When a college accepts a student, that students acceptance is supposed to represent the entire community that they live in. Meaning that they're not going to accept like 35 students from the same small town because they don't need to. Because they need to accept one student from this town, one student from a town over there and one student from a town over there. Because these colleges are trying to spread their influence and spread their impact as far across the globe as they possibly can."