The Ivy Insider features a panel of Hale students who have secured admissions into leading US universities, such as Stanford, Dartmouth, Brown, Cornell, Johns Hopkins, and UC Berkeley. Join the event, as they share their insight and experiences on the most challenging and selective application season on record. Hear directly from UAE students, as well as their counselors.
Register here for the event: https://bit.ly/3sZLR7y
The US admissions process is one of the most competitive in the world. Excellent grades and strong extracurricular involvements are no longer enough. At the Ivy Insider event, scheduled for Saturday, May 22 at 6pm, successful students speak about the US admissions process and what you need to do to make your profile stand out.
Vedant Khanna, a STEM student who secured admission into Stanford this year, reveals how attending the Ivy Insider event as a GCSE student helped him plan his academic future, and why he recommends it to all students who are preparing to study in the US.
You’ve attended the Ivy Insider regularly. Your views?
The Ivy Insider hosts a panel of successful students from the latest application cycle, and allows the audience to learn from their experiences and advice. It’s not every day that you get to talk to a bunch of students who’ll be attending Top 10 universities, so I’d highly recommend attending. Whether you are wondering what American university life is like or applying this autumn, the Ivy Insider will have useful info.
The Ivy Insider event takes advantage of the experiences of students who’ve spent the last year painstakingly compiling data from a thousand different sources for a myriad of facts, questions and quandaries that they came up with when they were applying. Therefore, they represent a collective wealth of information that anybody attending the event can tap into to simplify the process for themselves.
How has the Ivy Insider helped you?
Hearing the panelists talk was inspiring but also made the somewhat legendary names of MIT, Stanford and Harvard within the realm of possibility. The panelists were just students after all, and hearing their journey cleared some of the fog obscuring my own path.
Some important takeaways from your time at the Ivy Insider event?
1. You can never start too early.
2. There’s no set template for a good applicant, the best way to be unique is to be yourself.
3. You don’t need to know clearly what you want to do in the future to apply to American universities; you can always change your mind.
4. Carving out your own niche is one of the best ways to stand out.
5. Writing essays (SOPs) takes a long time!
What led you to choose STEM?
I like to find ways to apply logic to the real world and beyond, and it’s amazing how emergent macrosystems inevitably develop elegant patterns as they grow. The benefit of studying the British curriculum is that you can focus on the subjects that you like, so I’ve enjoyed exploring these fields through discussions with my teachers. However, I can’t discount the utility of YouTube as a teacher; the platform is one of the best ways to learn something new in any subject you can imagine, for free!
Three pieces of advice for students planning studies in the US?
1. Find something you’re interested in and dedicate time to it.
2. Don’t do things purely because it’s what "universities like to see". This will make your life miserable and won’t add much value to your application, as you won’t be able to progress far enough in these activities without enjoying them.
3. If you ever see a problem around you, always ask yourself, "Is there anything I can do to alleviate it?" Even if the solution is out of your scope, you can always pitch it to your parents, friends or teachers, and you never know if it could amount to something with their support.
This year’s Ivy Insider event is on May 22. Register here for free to receive a Zoom link to attend the session.
For more information, visit Haleeducation.com
