equivocator peters township high school i'm going to start you with a series called there is a future and it is coming oftentimes we have students who come to my office who summer identified as gifted and many who are not and they have a lot of questions for myself and for their guidance counselors concerning college preparation college applications college and tree essays financial aid any number of questions and so this morning we've invited mr matt sure wind from my college to come and talk with us about the process if you will so matt is a former peters township graduate he graduated in two thousand and one at the top of his class he was the valedictorian while he high school matt went on to get his education you know university where he graduated in two thousand and five while you know math studied economics history and politics during that time he also ran a scholarship organization and nouriel ship competition after graduating from yale matt went on to pursue employment opportunities all around the world he was fortunate to have worked in the silicon valley asia europe and new york city to name a few so without further ado i want to introduce you to match sure when and then matt and i are going to talk about like some of the early things that we do to prepare we know that our students are taking the classes they have the level of rigor that we offer is diverse they have those classes that they take but i wanted to get into some of the other things that matt might be able to share some of his experience with us like what helped you what help prepare you to get india for example lots of things to a to begin with i was lucky and students here are lucky to have the resources that peter's township you know it's obviously a well to do community with great teachers and great programs  so you know focusing on the classroom is that sort of silly and easy to say but it's the most important thing take tough classes do well at the more card find things that you love go out and work at them i think one of the things that  schools are looking for is students that are really passionate about something and find avenues to pursue that passion so whether it's dance or soccer or public speaking or science or fishing or whatever you know have something that you love and go and do it and what schools want to see is students that are interesting and hardworking and care about things because there's a million things that you can do in life and school and universities are looking to build diverse student bodies that bring kids that have all different types of backgrounds and strengths ok so i know that you're working with my college operate now and i know that i know some of what you do with my college up and i'm thinking in terms of the kids who come to my door and they ask me questions and one of the more the major themes is how do you get into a tear one school and then i have a larger group of students who are interested in getting into a very good school  and sometimes kids will kids will come in they have no idea where they want to go or perhaps not what they want to study what can you tell us about that process yes sure so for us we begin the whole process of advising for the transition to college with a very simple question of who are you so we don't even talk about colleges universities majors we talk about you know tell us about yourself what are you interested in what are you good at where do you come from where do you want to go because it's ultimately it's your life right this is about your you and your life and college ought to be a way to help you take it to the next level of where you want to go so we start with with that conversation and that becomes increasingly specific right so as we discover that a student may be interested in science for instance then we'll talk about ok so you happen to like you know blowing stuff up and can lab what can that turn into go and in the future right and then we'll talk about different options for paths of study and careers and all these things and the conversation sort of just starts from this general it gets increasingly narrow and focused in a different direction depending on again on you and who you are ok so it's kind of along the lines what i tell kids and find something you like be passionate about it make a discernible impact somewhere take the rigorous courses that you need to take in high school so that you have all of the options that are available to you and i am in favor of looking at paths and kind of narrowing it down and saying ok i'm taking the proper level of rigor in my academic coursework i am taking these electives to kind of figure out who i am what i like what i don't like because i think it's also important to know what you don't like so then i offer i often tell kids well then you should take a look at not only elective but then extracurricular activities and you mentioned that as well the other thing that i wanted to mention is that on november twentieth we are hosting a career fair and this year it's going to be held at the bible chapel and so we will have panelists come and talk with our students about a number of different opportunities and they're going to share with them their expertise in a given field so that is another thing that we do to help prepare students so you prepare their you you help prepare them by looking at their backgrounds who they are how they feel what they want where they think they want to go so oftentimes i have kids at a come say i want to do this to your one school and it may not be the right fit for them do you do you have any thing that you could share with us about like going to the best school that everybody says is the best school versus going to the school that is the best fit for you yeah listen in this past year and see double a basketball march madness the wall street journal put out a one of these brackets that wasn't picked which college is going to win the basketball tournament but it was let's look at the alumni from these universities and who was going on to do what and it was a really cool piece that little cartoon drawing is a different people from different schools and there are schools on here that people have never heard of with people that have graduated from them and you say wow that's a really amazing person in their field  and the point is that people can do lots of great things coming from lots of great places so it's not just about the name of the university but it's about going to a place what you're well suited for because again you are looking to get something out of the university which is academics executive ities and network location all of these things and ultimately it's four years of your life that you want to enjoy and that you want to suck the marrow out as much as you can and that can be done in a lot of different places and different schools are really different in the nature of the experience and different students really do belong at different schools a big part of our process and i'm sure part of the process and the guidance office here is doing you know not not so much to show me the label on your say this is like such a busy time for seniors right now from you know september one until probably the end of december they're scrambling to get their essays written how important is that essay to the process and how does it how do you how do you work with students with that so the essays are really critical and the reason is that college admissions in america is vastly more competitive today than it was five ten twenty years ago it will be a lot harder for me to get into yale today than it was when i applied ten or fifteen years ago so you know lots of students are applying as valedictorian as you know greatest eighty scores as the captain of this as the winner of that so the challenge is to differentiate yourself and one of the ways that you really can differentiate yourself is through essays and what you do is you basically show that you have really thought in depth about this particular school and why you think you belong there so it's really important not to just write one cookie cutter essay that you write out the and paste but to do a you know an investigation of the school and you say hey i'm interested in women's studies and you say ok well i know that at this university  smith teaches the freshman class in the one nine hundred twenty s women's movement and you know if you walk over to j f k street you know there's the women's center over there and they do all this stuff and i can't wait to get involved in that stuff you've got to take that knowledge and put it in your essay to show that you you know the school then why they're different than anybody else and why you individually belong at that school so you know we at our company we work a lot on that sort of matching process as well as of course good content good structure good style of the essay but there are also things that you can do in the essay to give yourself a bit of an edge and you know the matching is one of those the research is really important  again it goes back to what is the best fit for you rather than having the name brand you mention the s a t s score and i know that you know we're we're very fortunate that we have some pretty high flyers here in our district and we've had some students score perfect mention at this time is that october is a big month for s a t in p s a t it's being offered here at peters township high school please check with the guidance web page because there are many dates of upcoming events that you're going to be interested in as students and as parents to be informed about what's going to be happening in the school in terms of the month of october so please look at the guides web page they've gone through a lot of trouble to put information on there for your benefit so we get we get the kid he writes the essay he he kind of has the school that he thinks the big said he applies and oh my gosh i've been accepted and now it is one hundred thousand dollars a year to go to school  so i know that through research in some of our records that we've had a number of kids have been accepted to the tier one schools and sometimes they choose not to go and my guess is that part of that decision making might come down to finances what can you tell us about post secondary xin financial aid so the financing of a student's college education is every bit as big of a question as the financing of your house or your car or any other major expense like college is  very much a way to a child's future and it's a huge decision and so it's a it's a big conversation it's an important conversation and one of the things that we try to do in our company is to to to to try to alleviate some of the stress around all of this because there's a lot of unknowns there's a lot of stressors a lot of complications and we sort of work with the families to talk about you know the specific aspects of the stress and most of them can be it can be reduced to one thing we begin with almost all the time is when you look at what you see in the headlines in the newspapers northwestern university sixty one thousand dollars that that's a sticker price the number of families that actually pay that price is i think twenty five percent or less of the families that go to northwestern pay that giant headline price and there's lots of financial aid that is out there i believe that last year there was one hundred eighty five billion dollars of financial aid pair of jeans but based on sort of the way you go about getting it totally different prices so what we try to do at our company is help families sort of go from the name and marcus to door to the t j maxx store to get the same quality outcome but via grants and loans to get a better price so i think you know sort of the the sticker shock factor is one of the first things that we say in our experience in dealing with customers is that the vast majority if not all of our customers that have that if we work with have been able to get a high quality education at a reasonable price and it's possible it's a matter of again research work investigation applications but there is money out there folks it's good to know that the sticker price is just that the sticker price like when you buy a car i'm always amazed when you see this is what they're putting on the car window that you're often able to come out with a lot less if you do some homework world and the experiences that you have while you're at college are hugely impactful and beneficial for your future and you know when you compare that to not the sixty thousand dollar but you know maybe it's a forty thousand dollars or a twenty five thousand dollar were you know or whatever depending on where you go you look at what you get is worth what you pay so there are some intangibles for college for sure you know there are many there are many things that i learned while i was there outside of the classroom many networking opportunities if you will how have those types of experiences helped you while i am working for the company i'm working for now because of networking it's my my freshman year ne two is my partner in this business and if i hadn't gone the school where i went i never would have met the guy and most of the jobs that i've had between college and where i am now have been network based so obviously you have to be compet you have to have a field you know then what you do good work you know but humans are a social bunch and particularly pittsburghers pittsburghers are very very it's very much about the network yeah and and yes you know one of the main things advise the students is obviously do your work in the classroom but you know focus on the people that are there one of the guys that i work i work in new york that i work for in new york went to yale law school and he said that what he spent his time doing it yale law school was playing poker and i said oh that seems like a great waste than eighty thousand dollars a year tell me about that and what he said was that i know i'm smart i work hard but what matters for my career is meeting people and getting to know people and he is he is now running a business that's a one billion dollars plus business and it's based entirely on relationships so yeah go to school and have some fun and make some friends and so how did you get involved with my college app you said do through networking yeah right so so this company was founded in irvine california by classmate of mine and he has done a lot of work in student counseling and a lot of work in computer programming so we actually do a lot of the work now with clients over an online model that was developed by my my partner talk and my involvement with this is a lot more of the things like this sort of public facing going on talking to people building  networking we where we're doing increasing amounts of work in korea and china and india we've got a developer from the rizvi rhode island school of design we have a counsellor who's advising us on the growth of our company has actually was introduced to me by a peter such a classmate of mine who is now running an entrepreneurship networking organization out of atlanta so you know my my business now is growing frank the peters township classmates so i've got involved with this business  for you essays are going to be paramount and that you write the best essay to meet the needs of the college that you're seeking to get into so know your audience what do you what does your organization do with with essays so student comes to you and they have written an essay do you read them for them to so you know you they haven't written the essays before they come to us usually and usually they don't even know what schools are applying to so we do have customers that commit various stages of the process but if we start all the way at the beginning we work with the students first help them pick which schools to apply to based on this fit analysis and then once we know the essays for those schools we talk to the kid and so k let's try to figure out what content is the best for this particular question and then we work through content structure and style and we have a team of essay advisors that are folks that when i've worked for the yale university press fortune magazine the publisher farrar straus euro which has published a lot of great books and we have we do really sort of in depth work with the student to help them to develop their essay as far as they can you know with with  the essays are going to be crucial and that may be the pivotal point when students come to mean they'll say well who should i ask to write me a letter of recommendation and you know i tell them first you need to go to your god counselor guidance counselors will write letters of recommendation and if i have a kid who comes and says well i'm thinking of pursuing a career in business i'll generally recommend one of their business teachers or somebody who's thinking science is science teacher how important is that let recommendation and from whom should they get that letter so schools read those letters and the reason they read them is again you know when i'm an admissions officer i get a packet of information about a student and i sit down i've got this this this paper in front of me and there's test scores and there's grades and there's resumes you know and frankly those usually look pretty much the same across a lot of kids and so as an admissions officer when you can only elect ten percent of this giant stack to get into your school how do you do that well one of the key things that admissions officers do is trying to figure out who is this applicant not on paper but as a person and that can come through via an s a t score like that can come through via is an essay that you write and a letter recommendation that comes from a teacher so whenever you as a student are picking who writes my letter and what they talk about the thing that we generally advise is find teachers who know you the best and who have seen you in the classroom and who have can comment on the things that don't come across in a number they can comment on your discipline on your ethics on your character on your humor all of these things that are important you know as a being a person of being part of  class of students because universities are looking to craft a class of students that are interesting and that are hardworking that are going to be successful in that are going to have fun along the way so you know so yeah if you want to go into science yeah find your science teacher but also  you know find a teacher who can you know as you well and who can talk to those intangibles and if animals as well if they can talk about your past through high school so that you know if the teacher knows you in ninth versus tenth of her sister twelfth grade it can comment about things that have happened and how you've dealt with them and how you've grown because everybody grows and changes between one thousand twelfth grade oh sure and if a teacher can speak to that you know that that adds great value as well ok so it's not you you're not necessarily locked into if i'm going to be a physician i think i want to go to school to study medicine i'm not locked into i have to have that math and science teacher it would be great if they knew me very well yes and so oftentimes students will come and they'll say well i haven't had a teacher since once grade i really liked her i really clicked with her i really you know we had a relationship but that relationship hasn't really carried over to twelfth grade they haven't even since nine so that is not necessarily a good match for somebody they should probably seek somebody who's at least a current teacher or some person who has seen them and sometimes it could be an extracurricular would you agree so if i play a sport tourer and i played a spy and i've played soccer for example for five six seven years and i've played in i've been referee and i've done you know any number of things that person would also be a great i mean you have to look at the requirements of the school to so we might say we only allow a teacher to send in a letter so you have to make sure that you're fitting those  requirements right that's issue number one is do what they tell you to do but within that space you know if there is the opportunity for extracurricular advisors to advise them you know great be a talking about the ninth versus twelfth think about the student in fifth grade versus eighth  grade let's say your fifth grade teacher is going to write you a letter of recommendation with your eighth grade teacher agree with everything the fifth grade teacher says that's right and the reason is because you're changing over the time it's the same thing between one twelfth grade and the rules schools are ad adults not old kids so you know i have have the letter of recommendation come from the person who knows you as a young adult so matt i know that on monday september twenty ninth you're going to be at the upper st clair rec  center and i'm not familiar with that place but i know it's not very far from here and so you're going to be there representing my college app and then you're going to be talking to people about what tell me a little bit about that yes so my college app focuses on two things we know we're a coach essentially for the admissions application process and for the financial aid application process and we've been able to have some pretty good results the last number of years i think on average our clients get into one of their top three schools and they've averaged sixty thousand dollars in financial aid and we have a really in depth process that we go through that takes work you know that takes work on a lot of work on our side and work on the family side hopefully less work than they would without us but there is work involved and so on monday i'm going to be describing the process that we use to to work with students and families to hopefully produce the same kind of outcomes from peter's so great and so i think claire and lee bowen right right so if you are ok pool party there right we'll see what happens so so i think the first thing to tell students is the first place to start is with your guidance counselor guidance counselor tremendous asset should go to your guidance counselor you should do it before twelfth grade you should develop a relationship with that person and ask your guidance counselor for some tips on things that you could do while you're still in high school to enhance your experience here such as the level of rigor what your career goals might be how could you explore those what electives are available for you to explore your interests what correct extracurricular activities are available  internships other mentorships that you might be able to participate in that would give you that experience as well your guidance counselor is a tremendous resource so i would strongly encourage students please stop in and see your guidance counselor make an appointment send them an email to get in touch with them please check the guide's web page because there are a number of activities that are coming up through the next few months i know there are the s a t in the p s a t or in october the career fairs in november we're in november and then in february there will be a other activity that guides is sponsoring it's going be a college night please check the web page for this upcoming activities that will help support if you're a junior or you're a freshman or you're a soft more it's ok for you to come to those events as well you don't have to wait until you're a senior in fact i would encourage you not to wait until you're a senior kind of get the information as you can we help you do many things here at the high school to prepare you appropriately for  best options places like my college app will work with you during your senior year during the process outside of school they're there their role is very different than our role here in the high school so if you have any further questions  regarding my college app you can reach matt at my college or dot com through my college dot com or i think we're going to put up something with your phone number at the end of it if you have any questions concerning the content of today please feel free to reach me mrs alexander at extension five six one zero and i'll be happy to discuss those things with you is there anything else you'd like to add to what we've done and i was just you know just that where you know we're here working with with families and students in the community and i'm happy to talk to anybody anytime about what we're doing so i do think that my email and phone number will be up here on this program and should mean e mail give me a call i'm here to help ok great so that wraps up this session of my future and look forward to having future i know this sounds silly we're going to have future opportunities for you to learn about things we're going to be interviewing some folks from guidance and having them come in and share some of their vast knowledge about the process with students and hopefully clarify some of the mysteries for students with college application process is so stay tuned this is the first of what we have to be many future installments thank you i'm judy alexander the gift to coordinate or peter township high school in today with us with matt share went from my college