Alright we're going to go and get started. Welcome to how to get
accepted by Duke University. I'm Dan Lee and I'm here with Vitaly Borishan and
we are the co-founders and senior admissions consultants at Solomon Admissions Consultant.
At Solomon Admissions Consultant all of our consultants are former Ivy League
and other top 20 admissions officers so we have people who are formerly on
the admissions committees at places like MIT, Columbia, Cornell, Dartmouth,
and pretty much all the top schools a lot of the top schools in the in the top 20.
So the first question to ask is why care? Selectivity at Duke
really varies based on the undergraduate school in question that you're applying
to so the important thing to keep in mind is that you should adjust
your application strategy to fit the school that you are applying to at Duke.
So how does Duke evaluate applicants?
Here's kind of a list of things that the Duke really looks for in applicants who are applying.
For the first thing that do really looks for is students who have taken an academically rigorous
course load and who have excelled so they're really looking for students who have taken a
lot of AP courses and who have excelled in those AP courses. Duke also looks for students who are
specialists not for students who are well-rounded and so as Duke is one of those schools is very
similar to the Ivy's in that they are really looking for students who are the best of one thing
as opposed to students or the jack-of-all-trades with a master of none and so you're much better
off focusing your extracurricular activities in one or two specialized areas as opposed to
being a rope while rod a student who does five or six different things. Duke also looks for students
who have garnered national awards so Duke in the last decade to decade and a half has really made
a push to become a much more national school that's kind of on par with Harvard, Yale,
and Princeton and so because of that they've really geared their admissions criteria towards
looking for students who have won national awards in different disciplines and areas.
Duke also looks for students who will make an impact on campus both inside and outside the classroom.
So here are some of the differences between how Duke evaluates applicants and how the other
how the Ivy League schools evaluate applicants so unlike the Ivy's Duke has a strict numerical
point system in which applicants are rated on six distinct criteria as opposed to the two ratings
given by the Ivy's. So that when you apply to an Ivy League school they give you an academic rating
and a personal rating those the two ratings. When you apply to do because they have six different
distinct ratings that they give you and depending on whether you're applying to the Pratt School of
Engineering or whether your pundit the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences it can be either on
a sixty point scale overall or a 100 point scale overall. The other thing to keep in mind is that at
Duke the engineering faculty are heavily involved in the selection of engineering applicants to the
Pratt School of Engineering and so this will mean by default that numbers will be more important and
there will be more of a focus on STEM research and interest in engineering. The last thing to keep in
mind is that Duke has a vastly different rating system for engineering applicants to the Pratt
School of Engineering compared to the writing system for applicants the Trinity College of
Arts and Sciences and so for those of you who are really debating whether you should apply
to Pratt or Trinity you should really look at the criteria for the for Pratt versus Trinity they're
completely different and they emphasize different aspects of what an applicant brings to the table
so here's the Duke applicant rating system for the Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and the
College of Arts and Sciences really includes a lot of majors in the humanities as well as the
Natural Sciences and it's everything basically everything about engineering. So for applicants
the Trinity applicants are rated on six different criteria and each criteria is weighted ten points
for a total of sixty points maximum. So that means that each of these six factors are given assigned
ten points each and the overall score is 60 points and then 60 is kind of the maximum number points
you can get. Applicants generally need to have a composite score above 45 out of 60 points in order
to have a serious shot of getting into Trinity College of Arts and Sciences and so generally
you know you want your overall composite score for these six different criteria to be over
45 to really have a serious shot at getting in. So the first criteria that that Trinity
looks at is the strength of the curriculum and that's way to 10 points and so by strength of
the curriculum they're looking at the number of AP courses you've taken the number of honors courses
you've taken and they're really looking to see that you you've challenged yourself and really
maximize the resources that your high school has to offer you. The second criteria that the Trinity
looks for is grades and class rank and so that's weighted another ten points equally and grace
and class rank I mean I realize that a lot of high schools don't rank, rank you in your class
but I that that's not to say that colleges don't know where you're ranked so most colleges get a
print out spreadsheet of all the GPAs in your high school class so based on that and it's distributed
from high to low so they can really tell even even if your high school doesn't rank they can
tell where you are relative to your peers in your high school class. So classwork is important and
obviously your grades are important. The third criteria the Trinity looks at is your SAT or
ACT scores and that's also weighted ten points. The fourth criteria that Trinity looks at is
your extracurricular achievement with a focus on national awards and as another ten points and so typically
students who score high in this, in this particular rating have national awards within the context of
their extracurricular activities whether it be an Intel Science Talent Search finalist award or
whether you qualify for the U.S. Math Olympiad team they're really looking for students who
who have done extraordinary things outside the classroom. The fifth criteria that the Duke looks
at are your essays and so that that is also weighted ten points and the six criteria that
Trinity looks at is your letters of recommendation and that's weighted the ten points as well. So
there are six different ratings for Trinity each weighted 10 points the 60 points total maximum is 60
points is the maximum score you can get and you really need to be at at a composite score of 45
or higher out of 60 points to be competitive for Trinity. Now let's talk about the applicant
evaluation system at the Pratt School of Engineering at Duke. So this is completely
different from Trinity so for admissions the press will engineering the weighting of the criteria
is skewed more heavily towards numbers and test scores and away from soft factors so that's very
important to keep in mind engineering faculty are on the missions committee which means that there
is a focus on STEM research, grades, and test scores. Pratt engineering admins have a higher SAT and ACT
scores than admits to Trinity and that's typically the case of a lot of universities you'll find that
the applicants who get into engineering have higher test scores in the applicants to get and
Arts and Sciences also underrepresented applicants to engineering such as female applicants are given
an admissions boost and the reason for that is they want diversity in their incoming class most
engineering departments at elite colleges really want to have a 50 50 male/female ratio and you
know obviously engineering is a predominantly male-dominated field and so there you're doing
as much as they can to to promote more diversity within their incoming class. Applicants generally
need to have a composite score above 75 out of 100 points in order to have a shot of getting
into Pratt and that's important to keep in mind because unlike Trinity which is on a sixty-point
scale Pratt uses the same criteria but it weights some of the criteria more heavily and
so the overall score the Maximus where you could get applying to Pratt would be a hundred points
and you need to over seventy-five points to be a competitive applicant. So the criteria that
Pratt looks at is identical to the criteria that Trinity looks at but like I said the weight the
weighting of each criteria is different. So for Pratt your SAT/ACT scores are weighted thirty
points instead of 10 points for Trinity you know and so engineering faculty they're they're drawn
to numbers and they really like students who have high test scores and high grades. The second
criteria for Pratt is your grades in your class rank that's also weighted more heavily, it's weighted
twenty points. The third criteria that Pratt looks at is the strength of your curriculum
i.e. the number of AP courses you've taken etc and that's weighted 20 points which which is double
what it's weighted in for Trinity. The fourth criteria that Pratt looks at is your extra
curricular achievement with a focus on national awards that's weighted 10 points which is the
same as for Trinity. The fifth criteria that Pratt looks at is your essays that's way to 10 points
which is the same as for Trinity, and the six criteria the proud looks that is your letters of
recommendation and that's also weighted ten points which is the same as for Trinity and so really
Pratt what Pratt says is they triple the value of your SAT and ACT scores and they double the
value and weighting of both your grades and class rank as well as the strength of your curriculum.
So Pratt evaluates engineering applicants differently than Trinity and in that you know
Pratt like I said really looks for higher grades and SAT or ACT scores Pratt also has a greater
focus on academic, on the academic components of your application engineering faculty are
involved on the missions committee which means there's a focus on numbers engineering research
and really you're interested in engineering and there's an admission boost for female applicants
simply because they're looking for greater diversity and these, these last two points
are very very important to keep in mind so if you're applying to Pratt there's less of an
emphasis on a compelling narrative and that's important because a lot of applicants have really
high numbers but they're not necessarily the most interesting applicants from the point
of view of the reader on admissions committee. I mean it did they're not going to entertain
the reader or really stand out a lot of ways so Pratt is definitely more forgiving of a dry and
an unentertaining application. That's not to say you should write a dry and un-entertaining application but
they are more forgiving of that then Trinity is. If you're applying to Trinity you really
need to write a great application that's entertaining and it really is compelling.
So the strongest academic applicants at Duke are typically the top one to two percent of
their high school class. They've taken the most challenging course load of AP courses we have
SAT/ACT and SAT two scores in the 99th percentile basically have glowing letters
of recommendation indicating that the student is the best set of applicants from the past several
years from his or her high school. They show an intense love of learning as evidenced by
academic research outside the classroom with a college professor often leading to publication
in a journal and they have the potential to be a leader in the academic field in the future.
A good academic applicant but not necessarily strongest Duke is an applicant who is in the top
5% of his or her high school class, has taken the most challenging course load of AP courses, has SAT
ACT and SAT two scores above the 95th percentile, strong but unexceptional letters of recommendation,
lacking intense love of learning of students who are really at the highest academic rating scale,
but with some independent reading outside the classroom, but no published research with a college
professor, and driven to treat by competition more so than by true love of learning. So an applicant
would be with the strongest extracurricular profile at Duke would be somebody who is like I
said the best at one thing with national awards. So we're talking in this category would be published
authors Intel STS finalists which is the top 40 in the country Olympic medalists soloists at Carnegie
Hall, US Math Olympiad Qualifiers, Awards at the national level, and students who have patents
pending obviously without parental involvement. An applicant with a good extracurricular rating
but not necessarily the strongest at Duke would be somebody who has awards at the regional level
who has significant commitment at a high level to a few activities examples of these activities
would be Student Body President, All-state Orchestra, Captain of a varsity sports team,
and a nationally ranked debater and somebody who's well rounded involved but not the most passionate
about anything so once again students who are well-rounded the jack-of-all-trades the master
of none and these students typically have a much harder time getting into places like Duke.
Let's talk about strategic positioning for Duke University.
So what is strategic positioning? So strategic positioning is simply a fancy way of coming up
with a strategy to really make you stand out. So you're basically in a nutshell your positioning
ones with strength against an institution's weaknesses so if any of you follow tennis,
the tennis analogy would be Rafael Nadal's lefty forehand going to Roger Federer's weaker
one-handed backhand and underdog really a lot of spin on that lefty forehand and he tries to
really break down Federer's one-handed backhand and so you're pitting your strengths against
someone's weaknesses and it is for the purpose of making you stand out. So an example of that would
be it's more advantageous for an engineering whiz with science Awards to market is strong
engineering background to Yale we're not as many entering and majors apply versus marketing at
the MIT where he would blended into the crowd. So here's an example of strategic positioning
at Duke University so the case study is there's a female applicant ranked in the top two percent of
her class with 99 percentile SAT scores and she wants to apply to Computer Science at Duke and
it's but is open to majoring in the humanities and is unsure whether to apply to Trinity or to
Pratt because you can major in Computer Science in both Trinity College of Arts and Sciences as
well as the Pratt School of Engineering so you have a choice to make there. So this applicant
participates in the Robotics Club but has it has a subpar extracurricular profile and really
no compelling story to tell. So this applicants strengths are her numbers and so this strategy
for an applicant like this would be to apply to the Pratt School of Engineering to study Computer Science
and not to Trinity and the reason for that is that Pratt is more accepting of students with
high numbers but a subpar story to tell and so in addition Pratt also gives an admissions boost
to female applicants, because remember they're looking for diversity and another thing keep in
mind that internal transfer at Duke from Pratt to Trinity College of Arts and Sciences is very
easy to do and so the epic strategy would be to focus on stem activities and interest
in the essay to really appeal to mentoring faculty on the Admissions committee because as
like I said Admissions faculty are drawn to essays that talk about engineering and technical things.
So at Solomon Admissions Consulting we provide one-on-one private college admissions counseling
from former Ivy League and other top 20 school admissions officers as like I said these are
people who get on the missions committees at the top schools who read thousands of applications and
evaluated them and we help you you know we work one-on-one with applicants to help them on every
aspect of the college application process so we we help you out with your personal statement and
includes picking out a topic to talk about and up to three edits the personal statement from
former admissions officers as well as we have a separate editing team so that the editing team is
actually composed of Ivy League graduates who are professional writers and so that's a separate
team and they are people written books people have written for the New York Times and they are
the ones who are editing your essays and the former admissions officers are the ones giving
you feedback on what to write about in the essays. We also provide strategic positioning
consulting we advise you on how to stand out from the rest of the class and that is done by
former admissions officers. We help you out with your supplemental essays and that includes two
edits per essay. We provide insider information on college preferences you know for instance if
you're applying to Brown, you know Brown looks for students who are very independent and who
can take a lot of risks because they have an open curriculum whereas if you're probably
Columbia; Columbia is looking for students who like structure because they have the core so
every college looks for different things and we can tell you what every single school looks for
and how to tailor your essays to those preferences. We help you with shoring up weaknesses a lot of
scenes have weaknesses in their application and we can we can help you shore those up we help
you write we help you with recommendation letters and so you know there are certain things you need
to tell your recommender in order to support your overall positioning strategy and to
really you know augment your application and so there's very specific things that we tell
you to tell your recommender before they write their letter extra corrective 'ti consulting we
come up with summer research plans for students, summer activities for
students, and we really guide students on how to best brand themselves to get into the top
Universities and so that's very important. We also help with mock interview coaching and we
also help out with financial aid issues. So if you have any other questions about Duke
or questions about the application process or about getting consulting feel free
to call or email us you can reach Vitaly at Vitaly.Borishan@SolomonAdmissions.com. You
can reach me at Dan.Lee@SolomonAdmissions.com or you can call us at 646-470-1096