I want to start here by laying out a few terms and using them to introduce some of the key parts of the college application process. A lot of these words sound like pure jargon the first time you hear them, but once you put them back into the actual application process and understand them in context, you realize that each one maps onto a different person, system, or evaluation mechanism. If you get these basic concepts straight first, then later, when you move on to more concrete topics like building a college list, essays, and recommendation letters, everything becomes much easier.
Admission Officer
Abbreviation: AO
An admissions officer is the person at a university who is responsible for admissions. They read your application materials, evaluate your academic ability, personal experiences, and potential, and ultimately decide whether to admit you.
Beyond that, an AO’s responsibilities usually also include:
- Hosting information sessions: giving talks on campus or traveling to different places to introduce the school’s distinctive features and application process.
- School visits: personally visiting Target Schools and meeting with students and college counselors.
- Relationship management: staying in close contact with college counselors at key high schools in order to understand that school’s curriculum and the overall quality of its students.
The work of an admissions officer sounds very formal and professional, but as applicants, the most direct experience we usually have is through our actual interactions with them, and through how they end up interpreting your application materials. What follows is more my own observations and thoughts about admissions officers’ work style and depth of expertise.
I’ve always felt that the role admissions officers play in a university is pretty similar to the role HR plays in a company — both are just workers sifting through stacks of material doing screening. That said, when it comes to professional judgment, AOs and HR are actually a bit different. A lot of company HR or recruiters may in fact be more familiar with a relatively specialized field, because they look at resumes in that area every day and deal constantly with hiring managers in that area. Over time, they at least develop an experience-based sense of the common backgrounds, common projects, and rough level within that field. By contrast, AOs have to deal with applicants from every discipline and every type, from humanities to STEM to the arts, so it’s hard for them to have especially deep expertise in any one specific area. Precisely because of that, unless you have one of those top-tier awards that even an outsider can recognize at a glance, what gets you admitted often isn’t just technical depth. It’s whether you can communicate your story, motivation, and potential in a way that’s compelling enough (and of course the story needs to be backed by real, relevant experiences, not built on thin air). I’ve heard that quite a few schools ask professors to help review applications, but logically speaking, many professors are already overwhelmed with their own work, so they may not have that much energy to invest in this kind of thing over the long term. Still, I don’t know that side particularly well, so readers who do are very welcome to correct me. Looking ahead, as AI-assisted tools gradually enter the admissions process, this may slowly change as well.
One more thing worth knowing: most AOs don’t get applications assigned to them at random; they’re divided up by geographic region. A university will often have someone specifically responsible for applications from China, and many universities even have an AO dedicated to UWC students. That means while they may not be able to make deep judgments on specific subjects like CS, physics, or economics, they tend to be very familiar with the UWC curriculum (IB), its grading standards, and the weight of different activities. This also helps explain why we as UWC students enjoy a kind of insider advantage when applying. This is because this environment is already recognized, understood, and to a large extent trusted by AOs. So for applicants, you don’t need to keep explaining in your essays what IB is, what the EE is, or what CAS means, which means you can save that limited space for content that better reflects who you are as a person.
College Counselor
Abbreviation: counselor
If AOs are the HR of a company, then counselors are more like your agent, the ones who “sell” you to universities. At a school like UWC, the counselor’s role is crucial, because they are the first bridge through which universities get to know you.
Their core responsibilities mainly include:
- Writing the School Profile: explaining to universities what kind of school UWC is — for example, how strict our grading is and what a 40 in the IB system actually represents.
- Serving as your primary contact for college applications: throughout the application season, your counselor is your first point of contact for everything college-application-related — from school-selection strategy, recommendation coordination, and essay direction discussions, to official document submissions and deadline tracking, they stay involved throughout the entire process.
- Relationship management: they stay in touch year after year with the AOs at various universities. Sometimes an AO will pick up the phone and directly ask your counselor: “This student’s grades are only so-so, but what’s their actual impact in the community like?” (Of course, when this happens it means the AO is willing to spend time on you, which is a pretty clear sign they’re interested.)
How to Work with Your Counselor
I’ve noticed that people tend to swing to one of two extremes when dealing with counselors: either they over-ingratiate themselves, thinking that winning over the counselor is the key to everything; or they stay completely transparent and only show up at the last minute to get forms filled out. A few things worth keeping in mind:
- They are not your essay editor: a good counselor will give you suggestions, but they have no obligation to polish every sentence of your grammar. What they care about more is whether the big picture of your application makes sense.
- They need material: remember, recommendation letters need material. If you never show your counselor your distinctive thinking, the letter they end up writing will just be a pile of “this student performs excellently” fluff.
- Professionalism matters more than a personal connection: a counselor’s work is highly professional. Rather than trying to get special treatment through a personal relationship, you’ll earn their respect with your professionalism, punctuality (meeting deadlines), and a clear sense of self-awareness. A student who can clearly articulate their own motivation and passion is exactly the kind of student every counselor most wants to endorse. That said, professionalism is only the foundation, not the upper bound. Once you’ve established yourself as someone reliable to work with, a good counselor will be willing to see you as a whole person. And that ability — to see a student as a whole person — is really what separates a great counselor from an average one. This deeper kind of connection can’t be engineered on purpose, and it can only take root on top of a professional foundation.
An Important Nuance About Recommendation Letters
Among the three required recommendations, the counselor’s letter is the single most important one, bar none. (I’ll go into detail about which three letters those are in the Letters of Recommendation section below.) The reason is that counselors tend to have much more philosophical conversations with you than your subject teachers do. Compared with the other two teacher recommendations, the counselor understands best who you are as a person, how you think about high-level questions, and where you are in terms of maturity — which happen to be exactly the things U.S. universities care about the most.
Common Application
Abbreviation: CA
Common App is the most widely used online application system for undergraduate admissions in the United States. Through Common App, students can fill in their basic information and core essay once, then send those materials to multiple partner schools, which greatly simplifies the application process.
Still, Common App is more like a unified entry point than something that turns every school into the same exact task. Many schools add their own supplemental essays, supplemental questions, or extra material requirements on top of Common App. So the best way to understand CA is not to treat it as “fill out one form and you’re done,” but to see it as the most basic and most commonly used underlying platform in the application process.
Essays
Essays are the part of the application that best captures the human side of you. Unlike grades and standardized tests, they aren’t a hard metric; and unlike recommendation letters, they aren’t written by someone else.
In terms of composition, essays fall into two main categories:
- Personal Statement (also called the Common App Essay): up to 650 words, shared across all schools you apply to through Common App. Each year Common App provides 7 prompts, and the last one is always “topic of your choice.” In practice, most people pick the last one, since the prompts function more as writing directions than as real constraints.
- Supplemental Essays: each school writes its own prompts, ranging from 100 to 650 words in length. Classic prompts include “Why us?”, “Why major?”, and the “Community essay.” Some schools throw four or five prompts at you in one go, and for schools like these, the supplements end up being far more work than the Personal Statement itself.
Essays deserve an entire guide of their own. Here I just want to flag a few of the most common pitfalls:
- Don’t turn your essay into a narrated version of your resume: the AO can already see what you’ve done in your Activity List. What essays need to answer is why you are who you are, not what you’ve done.
- Don’t chase grand narratives: a 650-word essay about small moments at home can easily be more moving than one about your grand ambitions. Small subjects are fine. What matters is that it’s real and specific.
- Don’t repeat your Personal Statement in your supplements: the AO reads all of your materials as a single whole, and every essay should reveal a new side of you.
Letters of Recommendation
Abbreviation: rec letter or LoR
Common App requires three recommendations total: one from your counselor and two from subject teachers (usually two of your DP1 or DP2 teachers). On top of that, many schools allow — and sometimes encourage — an optional additional letter (for example, from your EE supervisor, a CAS mentor, or a research mentor).
Of the three, the counselor’s letter is the most distinctive one, and I’ve already gone into it above. The two teacher recommendations are more about endorsing you academically: what you’re like in class, how you think through problems, and whether you have curiosity that goes beyond the textbook in your subject.
A few pieces of advice about choosing which teachers to ask:
- Pick teachers who know you: even at UWC, not every teacher is good at writing recommendations. A teacher who can write a specific anecdote about you is far better than one who can only write “this student works hard.”
- Subject-relevant ≠ the best choice: if you’re applying for CS, asking your math teacher isn’t automatically better than asking your philosophy teacher — as long as the philosophy teacher really remembers you vividly. What the AO wants to see is a three-dimensional version of you, not just you within a single subject. So ideally, the two recommendations should balance humanities and STEM.
- Talk to teachers early and feed them material early: a good approach is to align with your two recommenders before DP1 ends, and then put together a “brag sheet” (a self-summary) to help them remember your standout moments. How good a rec letter ends up being depends heavily on how much material there is to work with.
Early Decision / Early Action / Regular Decision
Abbreviation: ED / EA / RD
These three are the three application timelines in U.S. college admissions:
- Early Decision (ED): a binding early round. Applications are usually due on November 1st or 15th, with results in mid-December. If you’re admitted, you must enroll — which means you can only pick one school as your ED target. Some schools also offer ED II (January deadline, February results), which gives you a second shot at another school if your first ED doesn’t work out.
- Early Action (EA): a non-binding early round. The timeline is similar to ED’s, but if you’re admitted, you don’t have to enroll, and you can apply EA to multiple schools at once. For most people, an early batch looks like one ED school plus a few EA schools. One thing to note is that EA also has a special variant — Restrictive / Single-Choice EA (REA / SCEA) — used by schools like Harvard, Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. It isn’t binding, but it doesn’t let you apply ED/EA to other private schools at the same time (the specific restrictions vary slightly by school, so check the official admissions page).
- Regular Decision (RD): the regular round. Typically due on January 1st, with results from late March to early April.
ED admit rates are usually noticeably higher than RD, but there are a lot of confounding factors: the ED pool often includes recruited athletes, legacy applicants, and some very strong students who’ve long since made up their minds about where they want to go, so the surface-level number doesn’t mean ED is that much “safer.” I think the question actually worth asking is: is there a school you’d 100% want to attend if admitted, one that’s truly a good fit for you? And on how to pick a school that’s a good fit, you’re welcome to read On Choosing Colleges.
One more UWC-internal rule worth mentioning here: UWC Changshu China caps the number of college applications each student can submit at 10. The official policy explains that applying itself is very time-consuming and that submitting too many drags down both your academics and the quality of each application — so the school wants you to focus on choices that actually fit you. The UK’s UCAS system, the U.S.’s University of California system, and Canada’s Ontario Universities system each count as 1 application rather than having each school within the system count separately, so if you’re applying to these systems your actual reach is a bit broader than the number 10 would suggest. It’s worth factoring this cap into how you plan out your ED, EA, and RD slots early on.
Liberal Arts Colleges / Research Universities
Abbreviation: LAC
In U.S. undergraduate admissions, the single biggest structural divide is between Liberal Arts Colleges (LACs) and Research Universities. Both types of schools grant a Bachelor’s Degree, but their underlying philosophy and campus experience are very different.
- Liberal Arts Colleges: small in size (usually between 1,000 and 3,000 students), almost exclusively focused on undergraduates, with no or very few graduate programs. The curriculum covers the broad liberal arts — humanities, social sciences, natural sciences — and emphasizes small classes and deep interaction between students and faculty. The vast majority of LACs are residential, with tight-knit campus communities.
- Research Universities: large (anywhere from a few thousand to tens of thousands of students), offering undergraduate, master’s, and doctoral programs, plus various professional schools (business, law, medicine, and so on). Professors typically have to balance their energy between research and teaching, but the research resources, course breadth, and alumni networks are something LACs simply can’t match.
For UWC students, there are a few things about these two categories worth noting in particular:
- Don’t let the word “college” in the name fool you: many research universities also call their undergraduate divisions “colleges” — for example, Harvard College and Columbia College. The “college” here just refers to the undergraduate school inside that university, and is a completely different thing from a standalone Liberal Arts College. Beyond that, there are also research universities whose entire institutional name happens to include “college” — like Boston College and Dartmouth College. Those aren’t liberal arts colleges either.
- LACs feel closer to UWC in atmosphere: small, tight-knit, residential, emphasizing whole-person education, with close relationships between classmates. These are all things you’ve already gotten used to during your two or three years at UWC. Many UWC students find that arriving at a LAC feels like an upgraded version of UWC, and the transition is very natural.
- The Davis network is heavy on LACs: the Davis Partner network discussed later in the Davis Scholars section includes a disproportionate number of LACs. If you need financial aid, LACs are well worth serious consideration.
Which side you pick ultimately comes down to what you want: if you want deep faculty-student interaction, a tight-knit community, and undergrad-centric resources, a LAC will suit you better; if you want richer research opportunities, a wider range of courses, and a more diverse campus environment, a research university has the advantage. There’s no better or worse — just whether it fits.
IB Grade
Related term: Predicted Grade (PG)
As a UWC student, your IB grade is the single most important academic metric in your college applications. Here’s a quick explanation of how it’s calculated and how it’s used in applications.
Grade structure: the IB Diploma is out of 45 points total, made up of two parts:
- Six subjects: each scored from 1 to 7, for a maximum of 42 points across the six. You pick one subject from each of the six subject groups (Language A, Language B, Humanities, Sciences, Math, and Arts or an elective), with 3 at HL (Higher Level) and 3 at SL (Standard Level). HL is more demanding.
- Core: three required components — TOK (Theory of Knowledge), EE (Extended Essay), and CAS (Creativity, Activity, Service). TOK and EE together contribute up to 3 bonus points; CAS doesn’t count toward the score but must be completed.
The threshold for earning the IB Diploma is a total of at least 24 points, plus passing all core components.
Predicted Grade (PG): what U.S. universities see when reviewing your application isn’t your final IB grade (at the time of application, you’re still in DP2, and the actual exams don’t happen until May). What they see is UWC’s predicted grade. Your PG is set by your subject teachers based on your DP1 results and your performance in the first month of DP2, and it gets submitted together with the rest of your application through Common App. For UWC students, the PG is the single most important academic metric in your application season.
Standardized Tests
For international students, the common standardized tests fall into two categories:
- Academic aptitude tests: SAT and ACT. You can pick either one — the vast majority of U.S. universities accept both. The SAT is now digital (Digital SAT), out of 1600; the ACT is out of 36.
- Language tests: TOEFL and IELTS. These are for applicants whose first language isn’t English.
One big change in the last few years has been the Test-Optional policy. During the pandemic, nearly every U.S. university went Test-Optional, letting you choose not to submit SAT/ACT scores. But over the most recent application cycles, a number of schools have started reinstating their testing requirements. This policy shifts every year, so always check the latest information on the school’s website for the specific year you’re applying.
Concrete advice for UWC students:
- IB predicted grades matter more: for UWC students, standardized tests are just a basic threshold. What actually decides your academic competitiveness is your IB predicted grades and DP1 results.
- Test-Optional doesn’t mean “don’t submit”: even if a school is Test-Optional, if your score is above the school’s middle 50%, submitting it can only help. Where it actually makes sense not to submit is when your score is clearly below that school’s admitted average. But check with your counselor for your specific situation.
Financial Aid
U.S. financial aid mainly falls into two categories:
- Need-based Aid: the school decides how much support to give you based on your family’s financial situation. This is the dominant model at most top U.S. private universities. Note that when people just say “financial aid,” they usually mean need-based aid.
- Merit-based Aid: awarded based on academic achievement or other talents, independent of family income.
For international students, the most important distinction is between Need-blind and Need-aware:
- Need-blind: admissions decisions don’t consider whether you’re applying for financial aid at all. This policy is common for domestic U.S. students, but very few schools are Need-blind for international students.
- Need-aware: admissions decisions take the amount of aid you’re requesting into account as one factor. Most schools are Need-aware for international students. In other words, all else being equal, an international student asking for less aid will have an easier time being admitted.
Applying for financial aid requires submitting additional forms like the CSS Profile (required by most private universities) or ISFAA. These forms ask you to disclose family income, assets, property, and so on in detail — it’s a nontrivial amount of work, so it pays to start on them early.
UWC Davis Scholars Program
This is a program exclusively for UWC students, founded by American philanthropist Shelby M.C. Davis. The Davis Foundation provides funding to many U.S. partner schools specifically to support UWC students who are admitted. For us, that means:
- Partner schools are more friendly toward UWC students on financial aid: even if a school is technically Need-aware for international students, because of the Davis subsidy, admissions and aid decisions typically don’t treat UWC students as “high-cost” applicants. In practice, the experience tends to be noticeably more favorable than a typical international applicant’s.
- Not every school is a Davis partner: the partner list covers many top U.S. liberal arts colleges and research universities, but plenty of schools are not on it. The list changes a bit each year, so refer to the official Davis UWC Scholars website for the current roster.
- Davis isn’t a separate scholarship stacked on top of your aid: you don’t apply to be a Davis Scholar on your own. At most partner schools, once you’ve completed the IBDP and enrolled, you’re automatically designated a Davis UWC Scholar. But that’s only the designation — to actually benefit from Davis funding, you still have to go through the school’s need-based aid process and demonstrate need. Davis money reaches schools as an institutional grant and is embedded into the aid package the school assembles for you, so how much aid you end up with each year is ultimately determined by that package and doesn’t add a separate line on top of it. For specifics, check with your counselor.
Holistic Review
Holistic review is a phrase top U.S. universities have on the tip of their tongues. Put simply, AOs don’t just look at your scores — they evaluate you as a whole person. That means your academic grades, extracurricular activities, personal qualities, essays, recommendation letters, and background all get considered together.
This kind of review uses a completely different logic from East Asia’s gaokao-style “one test decides everything.” Under a holistic framework:
- Two students with the same 1500 SAT can end up one admitted and one rejected, because the persuasiveness of their stories is different.
- Admissions outcomes often feel quite random, because there’s no quantifiable formula behind them.
Holistic review tends to work in UWC students’ favor. The way UWC develops students is inherently whole-person — IB, CAS, all kinds of committees, community work — which lines up naturally with what holistic review is looking for. Which also means the reverse is true: if you spent your two years at UWC only grinding for scores, without building out the story of a whole person, you’re actually competing hardest on the track that suits you least.
Activity List / Honors
Common App has two related sections:
- Activities: up to 10 entries, each with 150 characters of description.
- Honors: up to 5 entries, each with 100 characters.
These two sections are where the AO reads, in a very short window, who you are. Because the character limits are so tight, every word has to earn its place. A few common practices:
- Start with a verb: for example, “Led,” “Founded,” “Designed,” “Researched.” Avoid things like “I was responsible for…” (the subject is already wasting characters).
- Quantify impact: if you can use a number, use a number. “Organized 3 workshops for 120+ students” is far stronger than “Organized workshops for students.”
- Order by importance: the AO will definitely read the first entry; the last entry might only get a quick glance. Put the things that represent you best at the top.
- Only put Honors that come with a clear selection process: things like being on the IMO national team, RSI, or Coca-Cola Scholar, where there’s a formal selection process. Participation-type honors from CAS don’t belong here.
Interview
U.S. college application interviews are overwhelmingly conducted by alumni, not by AOs. They usually happen after you submit your application but before decisions come out, in the form of a Zoom call or a local coffee meeting, and typically last 30–60 minutes.
A few things that might not match what you’d expect:
- Interviews usually aren’t decisive: for the vast majority of schools, alumni interviews are informational only. Even if the interviewer sings your praises, it’s very hard to turn a reject into an admit just based on the interview. Conversely, interviews really only hurt you when you do something clearly bad (for example, coming off as obviously arrogant, or showing you know nothing about the school).
- LAC interviews are worth taking more seriously than research-university ones: while alumni interviews at research universities are usually informational only, many LACs run evaluative interviews that go directly into the application file; interviewers are also more likely to be AOs themselves or admissions-trained senior students (senior interviewer / ambassador) rather than alumni. That said, policies vary widely across LACs, so it’s worth checking each target school’s specifics before applying.
- Not everyone offered an interview gets in, and not everyone who gets in was offered an interview: the availability of alumni interviews depends on whether there are active alumni in your region. Not being offered an interview doesn’t mean you’re done for.
- What actually matters is what you observe: while they’re interviewing you, you’re also observing them. You’ll likely find that alumni from these halo-wrapped schools are, for the most part, ordinary people themselves — they get nervous, show up late, ramble, get stuck on a question — just like the alumni interviewer you met back when you were applying to UWC.
Waitlist / Deferral
In addition to Admit and Reject/Deny, there are two intermediate outcomes you might receive:
- Waitlist: the school puts you into a pool, and only if some admitted students choose not to enroll — freeing up spots — will they pull people from that pool. Waitlist admit rates fluctuate year to year: some schools pull 20%, some pull 0%. It depends heavily on that year’s yield. After being waitlisted, you can usually submit a Letter of Continued Interest (LOCI), expressing that you’re still committed to attending and providing a few new updates.
- Deferral: only happens in the ED / EA round. If you’re not admitted in ED / EA but the school thinks you’re worth another look, they’ll push your application into the RD pool to be reviewed again. After a deferral, you can (and should) submit an update letter covering anything new you’ve done between your ED submission and now.
Both outcomes can easily drag you into long-term mental anguish. A healthier mindset is that once you’ve submitted your LOCI or update, turn your attention back to the other schools still pending, or to doing DP2 well — not to refreshing your inbox every day.
Closely tied to the waitlist is a less-talked-about phenomenon called Yield Protection (sometimes half-jokingly referred to as Tufts Syndrome): some schools will waitlist — or even outright reject — applicants they judge to be too strong to actually enroll there, in order to protect their yield rate. This helps explain the occasionally counterintuitive pattern where a student gets waitlisted by a supposed match / safety school while being admitted to a more reach-y one.
A Closing Note: Demystifying the Mindset
Having walked through all of these terms, the one thing I most want to flag is: don’t mythologize AOs, and don’t mythologize the application system. At the end of the day, even the most complex systems are made up of people, and admissions officers are, at their core, just ordinary workers standing at a particular post. Like HR at a big company, they’re filters running themselves ragged through an enormous amount of information — which means they have their own aesthetic fatigue, their own cognitive limits, and, yes, their own mood swings too.
The same logic applies elsewhere in the process: Common App isn’t some kind of tribunal — it’s just an underlying platform for self-modeling, testing how well you can compress information within a limited character count. And your counselor is the agent standing next to you — they need to see the real, vivid, even occasionally clumsy version of you in order to write a recommendation with any soul to it.
The reason I want to break down this jargon so plainly is that this demystified perspective is exactly the kind of mental preparation every applicant needs most.
Once you stop blindly worshipping these roles and systems, you’ll realize that the core contest of application season isn’t about how perfectly you perform, but about whether you have the courage to face what’s actually true about yourself. An acceptance doesn’t mean you’re a genius, and a rejection doesn’t mean you’re mediocre. Once you bring these people back down to the level of professionals who need to be convinced, you’ll find that communicating from a place of equality and honesty is usually far more effective than scheming to engineer a perfect persona. After all, amid the noise of engineered personas, an un-alienated authenticity is the rarest signal of all. (Recommended reading: Victims of the System.)