What are your greatest strengths? What are your weaknesses? Why do you want to attend TJ? Why should you attend TJ? Why should TJ accept you? What contributions would you make to the TJ community?
These are all questions that both you and the admission officer evaluating your application will be asking as a litmus test for determining whether you are the type of student that they are looking for. With this, I have two pieces of broad advice that could be very useful but is also not very well known, especially among applicants for these high schools.
First, admission officers are not trying to fill a class with students who have accomplished x, y, and z. Rather, they are trying to fill a class with students who have skills/traits of x, y, and z. This difference may seem trivial but in reality the distinction is quite important. Numerous applications that highlight the activities that a student has accomplished don’t necessarily showcase what the student has gained from the experience. And while winning numerous competitions or being involved in many activities is incredibly impressive, it doesn’t in and of itself demonstrate traits that TJ is looking for. If you were on your school Mathcounts team, what did you gain out of that experience, and how do you think you’ll apply those skills/experiences in the future? If you were involved in debate, how did you impact your organization and what skillsets improved after your participation? These are important questions to answer in your SIS in order to make your application seem more human and genuine.
Second, admission officers in almost any capacity make the same types of decisions when they are deciding what types of students to select. If an admission officer had a choice between the smartest student in the country but who would be incredibly uncomfortable in the environment of the school versus a person who was decently smart and driven and would fit very well in the school, an admission officer will choose the latter 9 times out of 10. This is because admission officers inherently are looking for students who would be a good fit for their school and take advantage of all resources that the environment provides as well as benefit the school’s culture and overall personality.
Now with those two pieces of advice, what should you do to improve your SIS answers?
What can you do to improve answers?
There are a few brainstorming techniques and drills you could employ:
1) Write down a list of about 5 qualities and make a bubble chart, trying to connect qualities and traits until you have at least 20 characteristics that you think may be descriptive of you. Try to think of your life experiences and activities and connect them and branch out with those qualities and experiences, until you feel that you can portray an accurate story of your skills, personality traits, and formative experiences that make you a good candidate.
2) Peruse through the TJ/AOS/AET website and look for the type of students that they would look for, based on the information that they publish. What type of qualities would you look for if you were an admission officer? How do you think your experiences have made you sufficiently qualified in those skill sets, and how do you think you can benefit from an education in these schools?
That’s it for now! Let us know if you have any questions, and we’ll be happy to answer! We also run these drills and skillsets workshops in our courses, so be sure to check out our website if this is something that interests you.
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