welcome to the secrets of college planning on your host anthony uva and today we're going to get some insight in admissions at the college level my guest today is shawn abbott he's the assistant vice president and dean of admissions to the university of new hampshire for my undergraduate work went to place called university of south carolina or graduate school and then ultimately finished the m b a and versity which is also here in new york city for my doctorate w fantastic so let's go back in time how did you get started when that all star for you going to college was a freshman your high school senior year how did it all start and how did you end up picking the so i'm sure like a lot of folks that you'll be on your show i was the first generation college student went to a large public high school in boston and i actually at some point i don't know what y probably somewhere in my junior year i fell in love with a place called syracuse university in new york i'm forty seven years old and i've never been to syracuse so you kind of know that story when applied to syracuse was not ultimately admitted and at the time my senior year my second choice was a place called university which is a university that is a lot like n y u where i am now  and it's a university that actually has been of years at the admissions committee but ultimately didn't go to be you either because i was not awarded the kind of financial aid that i would have needed to attend that university so i went to the university  time was my third choice it wasn't exactly where i wanted but it turned out to be four of the most magical years of my life i had an awesome experience i told in everything that i wanted to get wanted it it was definitely a great springboard for great things it wasn't really where i wanted to go i was a high school senior which you know i tell that story because i like students and parents to know that doesn't really matter what is your first choice was your second choice eventually get your doctrine and that's why you went on to the other schools oh no absolutely not i mean i want to be che in college i had i had an interest in journalism print journalism broadcast journalism i had interest in the entertainment industry my kind of career was almost an accident i think at some point i became really involved in the life of the university more of a student affairs and a perspective i got involved in a lot of does how does one go from graduating college to becoming the assistant vice president and then of admissions and why you yeah it's definitely not the typical path i don't know that anybody goes to a college or university to become a admissions but you know i would say as as i after i graduated my first position after i left university hampshire was at a community college in boston it vising other students an advisor in different clubs  experience in different areas of university administration and i found one wonderful graduate program at the university of south carolina that would not only pay my tuition but also a label me to get experience working for the universities or work full time for the universe or nearly full time for the university and not a degree in higher education administration and so there at the sea i started to really think wow you know this is kind of what miraculously plot admitted to that program went there and that's kind of where i went from there so after you graduated from columbia what happened to get through and why you know well i mean a doctoral a we have a mission officers that are getting their their masters in social work so people kind of come to college admissions and have interest in all different areas of possible careers but we're for folks that are thinking about a doctoral program really strongly encourage them to kind of step back a little bit and really think about whether or not there were a degree program is not something they would be able to complete in one or two year so i mean i worked on that program a clumpy a were pretty much fourteen years i went through working there i was able to get in a but down on my tuition by working at the university and going part time but i really didn't finish the program probably was into my fourth year at stanford and a wonderful place and i don't know all of anybody that has a broad bad word to say about stan i was very enamored with what was happening here at n students would have these kind of multiple wardle's of entry and exit the university in this kind of global network of campuses and i have really never heard of a university was trying or experimenting with this kind of structure where admissions how does the whole process work at n y u is it any different than any of the other admissions in the country much i mean obviously the you know at a place like in what you were the largest independent research university in the country so we deal probably in more high volume and a lot of other college university so we have to move probably faster and more efficiently than a lot of other college universities and how we review candidates for admission but i would say you know what i think about the way that  approach the review process here it why you would not a whole heck of a lot different then what process said university or columbia or at stanford for the most part it's the really comes down to your academic record so we spend a lot of time looking  extracurricular impact and what they're doing outside the classroom we look at letters of recommendation and we look at their writing ability you know whether they're applied or attended school of engineering or their plight or myers college of nursing writing is still a big part of what everyone does in college and after college so writing an essay isn't personal statements are still something that we're probably playing a lot of attention to in the process i would say the only thing that's really different about n y u is that we have two of a different component of what i've experienced here it why you as opposed to maybe some of the other institutions but it's remarkably consistent and over the course of a twenty year career i would say those kind of variables that i just spot for admission run why you if you're at a traditional high school that awards grades on those kind of letter letter then that letter or not and see most of the students that we have met pretty much have a mixture of a's and b s on their transcript obviously this means that rigorous courses you know maybe not every would be worse than a student can take or every ib course that a student can take but a rigorous selection of courses and how about the extra curricular activities for the student if they play sports or fine arts  or theater and they are you know yeah that's a that's big for me i mean i think i am to be of the personal opinion that if you are involved as a high school student in whatever it is that is important to you that's probably a pretty good predictor of what kind of community member you're going to be if you come to greenwich village or downtown brooklyn who are engineering school is if you are if we look at your resume or look at your common application activity chart  and i tend to be of the opinion that it's more about quality versus quantity so me my perception is that it's really hard i think for a high school student to do anything at any in depth level with more than three or four thing you know i really get worried about a student when they turn in a resume that's three in four pages long enough and years old my resumes age long lies seventeen year old have a three or four page resume so you know i think you know pick two or three things that you're really excited about sometimes it might only be one thing i mean if you're doing something that is is the kind of national or international caliber then you know if you're if you're totally committed i saw you if you're skating more something in the arts you have to do really really well the one thing really well but at the most you know two three maybe four things you just don't need a laundry list of ten fifteen twenty different things that you're doing outside the classroom it's just not not realistic now you said something about riff reference letters recommendation letters a lot of parents always say well the recommendation letters have become from the governor of a particular state or  what type of recommendation letters are you looking at yeah i mean we we we certainly get letters from but dinners from presidents from kings from queens from celebrities we get we get those letters of recommendation and i would say nine times out of ten those letters of recommendation pretty clearly illustrate the us that those folks know their parents but they don't necessarily know that you or they know the stoop through the parents and to us that's necessarily the kind of in for me you know we're looking to get in the evaluation process i mean that's a nice and thorson but i wouldn't say that that's something that really is helpful in the intel you ation process so we want to see we want to hear from you counselor we want to learn a little bit more about your school we want to be able to ascertain a little bit more about your curriculum at the senior classes like about what your town is like your city is like we want to just hear a little bit more about that kind of contextual information that we might not know there's your community and about n y u because you said that it's not just greenwich village area but it you also said that there's campuses in the shanghai is there a wide variety of campuses yeah so we have i mean are everything most people think a why you really in greenwich village in an integrated village you know that there's that park washington square park right in the middle of of greenwich village and now a new that's right into the park goes right up the empire state building in the central part that's really i think the more you have lots of different hospitals and a college of dentistry on the east side of manhattan and yes we do have a degree granting campus in the u a e and in china and then we have a live in different global academic centers that don't necessarily globe what type of kids are you looking for so we'll terms of what we're looking for and what we attract those might be two different things i mean there's no question that we can roll a pretty international student body we have technically the largest international student community of any public or private university in the united states and it's a very interactive and unity the roles here in terms of like what we're looking for i would say we want to attract to our confortable into urban like art college probably is not going to be looking at and why it was well because wherever you are while you are likely going to be somewhat of an urban university experience and you're going to want that kind or bane of characteristics hard it's hard for me to think of an academic area that we don't offer in some shape or form you know that's probably one of the beauties of being at the largest private university i'm sure we pretty much do offer everything that you can imagine i can't think of too many other universities that it has as many academic programs as we do that are of national international distinction so if you want to get business with the top five business schools in the country if you want to do education we've got one of the oldest scratch one of the oldest undergraduate school of education in the united states i mean it really runs the gamut from the arts to the sciences acknowledge to business to and you name it we pretty much offer everything now how about alumni that  alumni around the world they're definitely engaged in the life of of the university like most universities yeah i know you talked about interview process what's the stages that that the student goes through the  application is first and then an interview and what's what's the steps every university will approach this a little bit differently i don't know of i don't really any consistency across universities with record interviews there are some universities where you you actually inquire to get one and other universities like you know what you actually have to wait to be invited so you have to you submit your application we might call you or email you to set up something i would say the most interviews that we tend to do tend to be around the area of teaching english language proficiency since we have such a large international student body one of the things we want to make sure is that everyone invite to come to n y u has this rapid idiomatic and of the english language so the interviewing that we tend to do is  skype where each of their english language ability and then for our campuses abroad we do tend to interview students to really understand who they really are the challenge of going to college and the of the challenge of going to college and shall i and we try to gauge that that how big are usually in the classes at n y u our average class sizes you were thirty which is not what people expect you know what i mean my biggest rise when i came to n y u and it was a big university so i was sort of expecting that the classes with mirror the size of the student body and the reality is probably has a lot to do with our real estate in the york it's really the hard to build large lecture style halls in greenwich village so there are probably about a handful of classes a handful of classroom how does that all work you know that's another i think surprise when people on two minutes village they're not expecting that we could have residence halls but we we actually have twenty one different residence halls we guarantee housing for all four years though a lot of them kind of great in washington square park with two over in downtown brooklyn we've got a few just north of us about i mean it's way in union square but twenty one different homes and most of the students live on campus the majority of students live on campus it's so expensive to rent an apartment new york city that is actually more economically affordable at more efficient try to live on campus if you can yeah sure and how about pricing i mean a lot of families are looking at financial aid and things of that sort how does it all work at  u so i mean there's no question that we are expensive you know i don't know of a family who's not making some sort of sacrifice to send their kid to n y u it's definitely an expensive place you look at the total cost of attendance here you're looking at a jaw dropping seventy to seventy five thousand dollars each year now that's the result of attendance and that you know a lot of students i would say probably approaching a majority of students are not necessarily pain so the average scholarship that we awarded to a student last year was somewhere between thirty and thirty five thousand dollars which can bring that will cost of attendance down significantly and so i would say you know while virtually every student who's u is making some kind of sacrifice to be here and we probably have more students that work and why you know that any other college university i know of like i'll only i've got about fifty to twenty students that work right outside of my office right now and i guarantee that's just one of the jobs they hold most n y u students i would say do hold down one if not two jobs over the course of their their four years and that's not necessarily a really good turn chips are students work really hard now we typically don't have classes on fridays so that's a day where students can work and knock out a good eight hours and make some serious cash but it's definitely a place for students exactly faces my strongest recommendation for parents is let your kids focus on the college admission process you focus on making sure that you help them fill out the required financial aid forms and bras that mean the reallocation of federal student aid and the c s s financial aid profile that's our scholarship application and those are the two forms that you  parents need to focus on right now we're coming to the end of our show and usually ask my guess what advice you want to give to the parents out there that their sons and daughters want to come to n y u well i mean it's along these lines this this the these  financial lines i think during the month of april i after decisions go out i encounter a lot of a lot of moms and dads who probably spent too much time helping their son or daughter figure out how to get into n and didn't necessarily have to right conversations about the ability to pay for and more you and i encounter hundreds maybe even more than hundreds of moms and dads in the month of april who dropped the ball completing the fafsa in the c profile on time and if they are even one day late with leaving those forms we automatically do not consider them first because there are so many students that do meet our deadline so i would say really you know don't be reckless with financial component of looking at expensive college university s and be willing to engage in those very frank conversations about what you're willing to pay for really early with it's great well thank you very much for coming on my show i appreciate it thanks ant