College applications are meticulously designed to understand who a student is academically and interpersonally. In recent years, applications have included new prompts for students to talk about people they’re grateful for and instances that have positively impacted their lives. For college admission offices, the responsibility of building community on campus relies heavily on these responses. In this conversation, we talk with two college admissions experts about the research, science, and multifaceted results of adding a gratitude question to their college applications.
Guests: Whitney Soule, Vice Provost and Dean of Admissions at University of Pennsylvania, and Scott Anderson, Senior Director of Association Engagement at Common App. Moderated by NACAC member Eddie Pickett, a senior associate dean of admissions and the director of recruitment at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Eddie Pickett: Hello and welcome to the College Admissions Decoded podcast, an occasional series in the National Association for College Admission Counseling or NACAC. NACAC is an association of more than 26,000 professionals at high schools, colleges, universities, and nonprofit organizations, as well as independent counselors who support and advise students and families through the college admissions process. I'm your host, Eddie Pickett, and my pronouns are he, him, and his. I'm a NACAC board member and a senior associate dean of admissions and the director of recruitment at Pomona College in Claremont, California.
Today I'm here with two experts on college admissions. They share their views on the role of gratitude in the college application process. With me today, Whitney Soule, vice provost, dean of admissions at University of Pennsylvania. Whitney is a national leader in envisioning the future of college admissions. She has implemented a wide range of innovative admission resources to better serve students and families in the school to college transition.
Whitney Soule: Thank you very much for having me.
Eddie Pickett: Thank you for joining us. And we have Scott Anderson. Scott joined the Common App team in 2009 as its fifth employee with the goal of building bridges with the counseling community. Currently, he serves as the organization's senior director for association engagement.
Scott Anderson: Hey, good to be here.
Eddie Pickett: So today's topic is actually very interesting to me and a fun one as well. So I've been writing these thank you, I'm sorry, and I love you letters, which are fascinating but also really hard to do. But they make you think about, "Hmm, what's been going on in my life? How have I gotten here and why?" So as we start the topic today, I'm really excited to pull you both into this conversation. So we'll just jump in with the first question, I would say. And so last year the Common App added an essay prompt about gratitude in the admission cycle. The University of Pennsylvania added a short answer prompt asking students to, in quotes, "Write a brief thank-you note to someone you have not yet thanked and would like to acknowledge," end quote, as one of your 2022, '23 supplemental questions. So Whitney, what led to Penn's decision?
Whitney Soule: Thank you. It is fun to talk about this because we almost backed into this particular supplemental prompt and one of the things that we were thinking about in the application is the questions that we ask and the design of an application often has the student answering, centering themselves, "I have done this, I enjoy this, I want this, I aspire to do this thing, I see myself at your school because..." And all of those responses are important. We are trying to understand the particular individual. But what we realized is that when we're talking about applicants as we're reviewing them, we are interested in what they have done, and what they appreciate, and what they aspire to do. But we're also talking about them as who will they be in our community, and what might they be like as a friend, or a roommate, or collaborating on a lab project.
And we're not asking a lot of questions around how they think about other people necessarily. So we thought, "How can we introduce space for a student to show how they think about interacting with others?" Because it's meaningful to us. We talk about that, and we search for it in the application, which led us to thinking about inviting them to explain, in the application in a short answer, something about which they're grateful and that that would be a nice way of getting insight. We would enjoy reading it. And that is where we started with the question. We had the opportunity to speak to two really wonderful experts in this area, both Angela Duckworth and Adam Grant, who are both faculty members at Penn and have done a lot of work. Angela Duckworth has done a lot of work that you might be familiar with around grit. Adam Grant on organizational psychology.
And we were sharing with them our interest in this question and why. And they were really excited that we were taking this approach, and they gave us some good feedback that expressing gratitude and talking about something that you recognize as gratitude is really good, but it's even better if you express the gratitude, if you express things. And the activity of actually saying thank you is different than talking about being grateful for something. And with that in mind, connected to Professor Seligman, also at Penn, who has for decades worked on positive psychology, who agreed with this approach. And all three of them helped us redesign the prompt to have been one in telling us about something that they're thankful for into the act of expressing gratitude, which we really hope will elicit the good feelings while writing the note, while also providing us some insight in an application where those signals really matter.
Eddie Pickett: Students, also you should send that thank-you letter to the person you're thanking. They would actually appreciate to see it and read it from you. So if you do that answer prompt, I would highly advise you to send it forward. Why not? Also Adam Grant’s, that book, Think Again, was absolutely amazing. I read it twice this past year. We at Pomona College send a book to students who are admitted, and so that was added to our book list this year. So a lot of people got Think Again from us. So Adam Grant, thank you for your work. I appreciate it. I'm a little jealous you get to work with him daily. Thinking about that at Penn, can you tell us a little more about the research I was conducted at Penn about gratitude?
Whitney Soule: I can. I can tell you how the research has informed that question a little bit more. As I said, Professor Martin Seligman has done decades of work in the area of positive psychology, which was really looking at what is it that influences how people find agency and feel good about their experiences as they navigate the world when there had been so much research around behaviors that are negative, how to understand depression, for instance. And so he really flipped that story into what do we need to look at to understand that influences positive movement in somebody's life. And gratitude is one really important aspect of this and he's had decades to work on this.
And what was really meaningful in the conversations we had with each of these faculty members was that the writing of the thank-you note, as I said, really does elicit good feelings in the person doing the thanking. And the point you just made was really important because in the prompt it does say, "Please write a brief thank-you note to someone you would like to thank who you’ve not yet acknowledged." And then parenthetically, it invites the student to share it with that person and to reflect on what that was like. Because the other part of the science is not just the writing of it, but it is actually doing the expression face-to-face, if possible, live with the person you're thanking and that that experience is another dimension of really important emotion and feeling.
Now we know what the question that we have asked. The research is really about writing a letter. We've asked a short answer prompt, so it doesn't go into the depth that the research has really designed this thing for, but it does introduce for students in a brief way, an opportunity to feel what we're talking about and provide insight. Now students may choose to write to somebody whom they cannot speak. That person may have passed away, they may not have access to that person. They may interpret the question in a way that the thank-you is not going to a human being that they could interact with. But if they can, your recommendation that a student share it with that person is absolutely spot on. And we really hope that they do and extend the experience to that level.
Eddie Pickett: And I can vouch for sharing it. The first one I wrote was to my grandparents. And I'm one of the lucky people who, a couple years ago, in my mid-30s still had five grandparents still alive. And so I wrote a thank-you letter to my grandparents because they raised me and got to play it for them because I had a friend that hosted a podcast and he recorded it. And so I brought it to them and just had a discussion about what it was like and it was just me and my grandparents in the room. And then I went to another set of grandparents, and then I went to my grandpa who lives by himself and just had that experience with them. And it's a powerful moment, students. So I would highly, highly advise to continue on with that letter. It will actually mean something for you. And now that I've lost two of them, even more powerful that I got to have that experience.
So we're going to switch up a little bit. So we've been talking about the individual supplement for one particular school, and now we're going to switch it over to Scott at the Common App because they're a bigger prompt and more people who could potentially write this. So Scott, what was the thinking behind the Common App's decision to add a gratitude prompt?
Scott Anderson: Yeah. Sure. Well, I'll take you back a few years because I think there was a bit of a journey to getting to this point. As we were, four or five years ago, undertaking a strategic planning process, we convened groups of member colleges, admission officers from member colleges, counselors, students, and parents, asking them questions. And one of the questions that we asked was, "What one word would you never use to describe the college admission process?" And across all groups there were words that consistently came up; simple, logical, joyful. Those were three of the top ones. And that last one, joyful, was something that really got our CEO Jenny Rickard put a lump in her throat almost because you think about the hope and optimism that comes with education and to have people say that this was not a joyful process was something that we thought we might be able to take a step toward fixing.
And Whitney has already mentioned Professor Angela Duckworth at Penn. Angela has been a friend of the Common App as well as we have tried to think through how we transform the application to allow students to tell their stories. And in one of the conversations that Jenny was having with Professor Duckworth, she mentioned this assignment of giving her classroom students the assignment of writing a thank-you letter. And that was something that really resonated with Jenny, and we decided to pursue that as an option within our essay prompts. We approached it a little bit differently though because the concept of writing a letter wasn't necessarily expansive enough. We felt for the entirety of the million students that used the Common App, but we wanted to give an opportunity for that.
So we brought this concept of gratitude and writing about gratitude in some way to some advisory committees we have, advisory committees of counselors, of admission officers from member colleges. And they really helped us think through and wordsmith a prompt that they felt would help students get at what we were trying to get at. Now gratitude and joy are two very different things, of course, although one can lead to the other, but that's how we arrived at it. And when we rolled it out and tested some final language with our advisory committees, I remember in particular some people from our member colleges said, "I'm going to be really excited to read these essays."
Eddie Pickett: That sounds exciting. On the opposite end, was there any pushback or any resistance from the Common App?
Scott Anderson: There really wasn't. And I think that's largely because this is not an essay prompt that everybody needs to answer. We have seven essay prompts. Students can choose which of the seven they would like to answer. And so for people who may have read this prompt and thought, "Well, I don't know if that's a good idea." They could just move past it. And so I think it really didn't garner any particularly strong reactions when we rolled it out other than from people who thought, "Wow, this is going to be a really good opportunity for students who are drawn to this prompt to talk about themselves in this distinct way."
Eddie Pickett: What about for you, Whitney? Any resistance?
Whitney Soule: We did get feedback, and there are a couple ways to think about it. We did hear a lot of appreciation for the reasoning behind the prompt and trying to bring an opportunity within an application process, which as Scott just said, I think students experience with a lot of anxiety and can feel its fraught with precision and to put in an opportunity that allows them to hopefully relax a little bit and enjoy this part of it. People appreciated the approach there.
There was concern about asking for yet another thing for a student to do in an application process that is already complicated, which we appreciate. And while this doesn't solve that problem, I can say that one of the approaches we took was to look at the supplemental questions that were already present in Penn's application, and there were two. One was about why the student is applying to Penn, which is a common supplemental question and really important in our school because there are four undergraduate schools and we need students to be specific about which school, why that school, and the program. So that question needs to stay. There is another question that had been one of our supplemental prompts, and remains one, around how a student sees their own identity, and how they see that being a part of the Penn experience, and how for what they believe they understand about Penn, how being at Penn may influence their identity in some way over time. That question is still there.
What we did was shorten the responses for those two questions to limit the amount of extra writing students had to do while knowing that we are now asking for them to think about a third thing. We do know that that's additive and we're asking them to do more. All three of those supplemental questions are limited to 200 words. So they are intended to be brief. And we reordered the questions. So previously, with the two prompts, the first one had been the why Penn question, the second one around a student's identity. We've reordered them to lead with the thank-you note prompt. Secondarily, for their reflections on identity, which could be however the student interprets that question of course. And then the third one, the less introspective perhaps question around why Penn? There is introspection there, but building from that place first of gratitude, secondarily, from a personal view, and then third, bringing Penn into it.
Eddie Pickett: I like that. So I was a high school counselor the last five years. I just came back into admissions this year, and I've definitely helped lots of students through that application. And I think what you said there is actually really important. It was intentionally designed. And so for students, we want you to look at the supplement and the supplement also reflects the things that the school cares about. Their values are sometimes seen there, but what they care about are definitely there. So pay attention to those questions that are there. And as Whitney just pointed out, they put the thank-you question first. That means something.
So for us, I'm at Pomona now and we have three questions and there's an academic intro statement.here's a fun personal question. You talk about some quirky personality things or a time you felt on top of the world. And so you're seeing those questions, "Do these questions vibe with me?" That'll tell you something about the school but also tell you, "Do I belong here? Are these my people?" So pay attention to that intentionally designed piece and thank you for saying it that way as well. I always tell students that when I was in the high school side, they didn't always believe me. Here you have, the top person at the University of Pennsylvania, UPenn, saying this student. So pay attention.
Whitney Soule: I appreciate that. Thank you.
Eddie Pickett: I was thinking about this topic as well. So why is this an important addition to a student's application, this idea of gratitude?
Scott Anderson: Well, when you think about the work that we all do in the college admission counseling profession, it's about education. And inherent in education and the idea of studying, there's hope, and there's joy, and there's opportunity. Whitney and I were just in a meeting together yesterday and we were talking about this. What does it mean to be in education? What does it mean to work in the college admissions profession? And what responsibilities come along with that? Not just institutional responsibilities of making a class because those are clearly important, but what messages can we collectively send to students and to families about not just this process but the journey of education, the journey of getting to college. And so I would say the reason a prompt like the gratitude prompt is important is because it helps students understand that there are colleges out there that want to hear this stuff.
They want to hear these stories of gratitude and appreciation. And again, while it's not explicit in the prompt, the joy and happiness that generally comes along with that. And so to the extent that we at Common App, because again, we've got over a million students each year who are using the Common App to apply to any of our 1,000 plus member colleges, to the extent that we can reinforce that hope and that optimism and help students see beyond, I'll use the word drudgery of just the pieces of applying to college. And I say that partly as the parent of a high school senior right now. I'm watching it play out in real life in my household. To the extent that we can help reinforce that there's hope and optimism in this and joy in the process. That's why I think it's important.
Eddie Pickett: And students should learn something about yourself during this process too. So that's why I love this question. It's like you're going to learn something about yourself, and you don't always get the chance to think about that.
Whitney Soule: I'll add a little bit. I think that higher ed has not always done a very good job of equally representing how important it is for our students to be interested in the influence of others and noticing with curiosity all the things that happen around them and where they may have their own influence with a point of view or a question. And that's our expectation in educational communities, particularly the ones that we create by admitting and enrolling classes. But I think we have over-emphasized the academic work, the involvement that students have around categorizing what that looks like and not having done as good a job over time of also equally representing how important it is for students to not only participate in their academic endeavors and their extracurricular endeavors, including those that are not an activity sponsored by school or athletics. And I'm talking about activities of having a job, of looking out for family members, all the things that take students time outside of their academic work that we haven't emphasized that as much as we have emphasized the academic background, which is important.
And so by really focusing this question, by putting it where we put it, by looking at the questions that are designed in the Common Application and where gratitude fits in, we hope that students see that prompt in the Common Application as a very legitimate question, equally valued as an application essay response as the other prompts that are there because we are talking about building communities and we are responsive to these characteristics and attributes among students. And it's time for us to be really framing that with intention instead of allowing it to be present where we can find it and responding to it that way.
Eddie Pickett: So Whitney, I have a question for you. Thinking about Common App's question which say it's in quotes, "Reflect on something that someone has done for you that has made you happier, thankful in a surprising way, how has this gratitude affected or motivated you?" So thinking about their question, how are students going to differentiate their answers for your question versus theirs if they answer both?
Whitney Soule: That is a really good question. And we did think about this in designing our questions since the Common App already had their gratitude prompt when we were designing our short answer prompt for this year's application cycle. And they're in the same neighborhood, they're both addressing gratitude. They're both asking the students to think about something about which they're grateful. They are a little bit different where the Common Application is inviting students to take a deeper dive into describing that experience and going as far as how has it motivated you or influenced you, that allows the student to tell a story around an incident or an experience for which they're really grateful and the person or people that are involved in that. Our short answer prompt is brief, and while it may invite the student to think about all of those things, what they're asked to do is to write a thank-you note to a person.
So it's really limited in what the activity is and the insight they might provide because it becomes between that student and the person they would like to thank where the essay allows them to tell a much bigger story. Now they may choose to write about the same experience in our prompt and the Common Application essay, and if they did, that would not be repetitive. Those are still two different expressions of gratitude that would be really valuable. There are so many things to be grateful for and so many people to thank that we're hoping students don't feel stuck if they're choosing to do both the gratitude essay prompt from the Common Application while answering our short answer prompt. I do think that students may stop and wonder... I mean, the applicant pool likes to think very strategically, "What's the best way to go about this?"
What we wouldn't want is for students to feel they need to avoid the gratitude essay question because they need to answer the thank-you prompt in Penn's application, and they wouldn't want to duplicate the essay in the Common Application is going to go to every school that that student is applying to through the Common Application. And it's a really valuable essay prompt. So I want students to understand if you're applying to Penn with the Common Application and you choose the Common Application gratitude prompt, and you'll be answering our thank-you note prompt, they will go together and we will appreciate it.
Eddie Pickett: Thank you. Because I know students are going to ask that. So you heard it here first, folks. And pulling Scott into this as well, I'm sure Common App has done some thinking about this. Common App does a bunch of research. Can you tell us about your thoughts on that question and then maybe some research behind it?
Scott Anderson: Absolutely. It's interesting to hear you read the prompt out loud because honestly, it's been a little while since I've looked at it myself and it makes me remember that we had... I talked about the advisory committees that we have worked with on this. And there's a certain anatomy to an essay prompt, any essay prompt. If you look at any of the ones that we've got on the Common App and at other places as well, there's sort of a what happened and then what did you do with that? And that's what we were aiming for in crafting this essay prompt in the way that we did.
The other piece that I think is different or something that distinguishes it from the letter concept that Penn is utilizing is this idea of something that surprised you or gratitude in a surprising way. And Eddie, you mentioned a few minutes ago the idea of students learning about themselves as they're going through this process, not just of writing essays but applying to college and looking for colleges. That idea of how was this surprising to you is helping students reflect on the aha moment that they might have had. That was an idea that really resonated with the counselors and the admission officers that we spoke with. And that's one of the reasons that it made its way into the final prompt. So that's another way I think in which the two are different.
As Whitney said, our essay prompt has been there for a full cycle. So we can take a look back at last year's class to see what we've learned, if anything. And I'll say a couple things. One, about 35,000 of our million applicants chose to write on this essay prompt. Now as a percentage, it's not huge, but 35,000 is not a number to sneeze at in any way, shape, or form. But the other thing that's really interesting is that when we look at who the students are who are choosing that prompt, even though it is one of the least chosen of the prompts, it's number six or seven on the list, the students who are answering it are actually overrepresented in terms of underrepresented minority status, first generation status, fee waiver requests. So there's a richer diversity, if you will, of students in that prompt pool, which was not something that we were particularly aiming for, but certainly something, no pun intended, for which we are grateful because clearly we've got an opportunity here to offer something that's resonating to a group of students that are really important.
Eddie Pickett: Was that expected or just randomly happened?
Scott Anderson: It was not expected. We did not sit around trying to think how can we put a prompt together that will specifically attract certain categories of students or appeal to certain categories of students, and yet it evolved in that way. And for that reason, I think... Every couple of years, we review the essay prompts, try to understand how effective they are, not just for the students who are writing them, but also for admission officers like Whitney and her colleagues who are reading them. Are they doing the job? Are they providing good information? We've always looked at the raw numbers of students that are choosing particular prompts. We've never dug that deeply into who is choosing this prompt and how does the representation of the choice of one prompt over another factor into our choices to make any changes. So not expected, but definitely very pleasantly surprising. And it has informed our thinking of how we will evaluate essay prompts going forward because it's not just about the percentage of students that are choosing, it's about who is making up that percentage.
Eddie Pickett: I like that idea just brought up about the equity lens, but also the intentional design. Whitney talked about the intentional design of their supplement earlier. And so I love these questions because any applicant regardless of resources and support can answer these questions. And so can you both tell us about the equity lens that you use when building supplemental essays or the Common App essay prompts?
Whitney Soule: So we really do take the time to think about what is it that we're asking, what are the materials we have to evaluate, and do they serve to answer the questions that we're asking and building the community? And the truth is none of them are fully adequate. So when we are facing making changes or looking to make changes in the application process, we are looking to make changes for the purpose of equity so that we are asking for information that is important for how we understand each individual student and what that experience might be like for them in the Penn community. But also being really mindful of what are the resources or access to information that any applicant may or may not have when reading the questions, thinking about the material that we're asking them to present. Can every student do this and have the opportunity to represent themselves fully?
And that requires constant attention. We will never be finished with that. So the adaptation of our supplemental prompts is an effort toward that this year. And we're anxious to see what students write of course, and really looking forward to it, but we'll see how did that work. And we'll look for feedback on what that experience was like for students. And it's meant to be useful. As I said, we redesigned how we asked that prompt so that it would actually be something that could elicit joy and good feelings for students while they were answering this question. And if that turns out not to be the case, then we'll rethink the intent of what we're asking and how to ask it. If it turns out that that is really valuable and the experience is as we intended, then that's good information for us as we evaluate other pieces of the application.
Scott Anderson: Nine years ago, we made some waves when we decided to completely revamp all of the essay prompts and the Common App that had been around for a really long time, but we hadn't really taken a lot of time to evaluate. And we went through a process, again, working with counselors, working with member colleges, trying to come up with a group of prompts that would be as broadly appealing as possible to all of the students who were using the Common App. And I remember distinctly, we'd done a lot of work, a lot of wordsmithing gone back and forth. We had some ideas, we toss them out, we came back to them. And sitting with a group of counselors, and we'd reached the point where we all felt really good about what we had put together. And I asked the group, I said, "Before we sign off on this, I want you to think really hard. Think about the students that you counseled this past year. Do you think there's any one of your students who could not find a home in any of these prompts?"
And there was silence and they all said, "No. Every student I can think of could find a home here." And that has been our MO ever since. Can students find a home in these prompts? We've also tinkered with some prompts over time with the language. There was one in that initial revamping of the prompts, there was one about failure. And failure is a big scary word to a 17-year-old kid. We didn't really want students to write necessarily about failure. We didn't want to get them to reflect on how much they had failed, but it was really broader than that. It's more about obstacles that they might have faced and maybe it was failure of some sort.
And so we changed the wording. And again, that prompt I talked a moment ago about how the gratitude prompt overrepresents some of those subgroups that we care a lot about. The first-generation students, the lower-income students, for example. That failure/obstacle prompt does exactly the same thing. What is always foremost in our mind is making sure that all students can find a home, like I said, but also are there ways that we can make sure these prompts are crafted so that the students who have historically been disadvantaged in this process can really find a way to honestly and authentically and safely share the stories that they want to share?
Eddie Pickett: The idea of finding a home in a question, that's a new one for me. We on the college campuses are always saying, "We want students to feel like home here. We want to build a community." But thinking about that in an essay prompt, that's mind-blowing for me sitting here right now as a person who's just helped students the last five years go through this process. I like that. Thank you.
Scott Anderson: You bet.
Eddie Pickett: So this has been a fun conversation today. So thank you both for joining, but I feel that, we're asking questions to students and putting them on the spot, I want to put you on the spot. So I'm going to ask you who would you like to thank or someone important to you right now, but instead of putting you on a spot and making you speak, I'll give you mine to give you a second to think, and then it's your turn. And I'm going to have you both finish the podcast that way. Think for me, the person I want to thank is Karen Richardson. Karen Richardson was my first supervisor in admissions. And let's just say I was not always the easiest person to manage, we'll say, but she has a swift backhand, and you didn't know it was coming, but it's so calm and loving that Karen has actually been a really good friend to me.
It's been one of the most loving people I look up to like no other. It didn't always start that way because I caused a little problems, we'll say, but she was so patient with me. And so now that I manage people, I think about the patients that she showed me, how supportive she was for me, that I want to make sure that I manage people in the same way now. And so now that Karen's a big shot over at Princeton as the VP over there, more power to you, really happy for you and proud of you as well. But thank you, Karen Richardson, for being the person that I needed as a first-gen person coming into this field and not having people to look up to. You are always that person, so thank you. I'm going to kick over to Whitney first.
Scott Anderson: Who would you like to thank?
Whitney Soule: Well, I wish you had kept talking because there are so many people that I would like to thank, and I know I cannot get through them all and should not get through them all the discipline of choosing one I know is the job here. I'm going to go with my parents, I'm going to lump them together because both of them had prioritized education above everything else in our family. And every time we moved and looking for a place to live, the first thing that they looked for was where would I be in school. And that mattered to them more than anything else about where we might land. And that priority of education and the belief, and that was the most important thing for us to consider when we were moving and settling, I think, led me to a place where I appreciated the education that I have had in schooling, but certainly the education I have had in my work over the last 30 years.
Obviously, staying very close to education, but I learn every day. The example of how our question came to be and changing how we wrote it from asking a student to talk about being gratitude to actually writing thank you was learning in the moment from faculty members at Penn who taught me something right then in that conversation about how to do something better. And so I'm very grateful for the education leadership I had from my parents and over time.
Scott Anderson: I cannot record a conversation that has a NACAC label on it without thinking of my gratitude for Bill McClintick, who is the former director of college counseling at Mercersburg Academy in Pennsylvania. Bill hired me into my first college counseling job. I had done admissions work prior to that, and I learned a tremendous amount from him. First of all, because I was learning the ropes of being on the other side of the desk, so that was always going to come. But he was very active in NACAC and Pennsylvania ACAC and encouraged me to get involved deeply as well. Very supportive of my professional development, not just in the office where we worked, but in the profession as a whole.
In the other thing... Well, there are many other things, but one thing I'll say is one of the things that I learned from him was how important it is to treat or was to treat everybody, every college rep who walked into our office exactly the same way, no matter where they were from, we would spend time with them. It didn't matter if there were students who were showing up or not to see those college reps, we would spend time. And when I got my own director job several years later and would spend some one-on-one time with a college rep who came into my office, I can remember one person being really surprised like, "Wow, I can't believe you spent time with me in that way." My thought was, "Well, that's how I was raised professionally." So I would thank Bill McClintick for everything he's done for me personally and professionally.
Eddie Pickett: Well, thank you both for sharing your vulnerable moment there. I appreciate it. I know our audience will appreciate it. Sadly, that's all the time that we have today. So many thanks to Whitney and to Scott for a great conversation. And thanks to you, my friends, and our audience for joining us for this episode.
College Admissions Decoded is a podcast from NACAC, the National Association for College Admission Counseling. It is produced by LWC Studios, Kojin Tashiro produced this episode. If you'd like to learn more about NACAC's guests, our organization, and the college admissions process, visit our website at nacacnet.org. That's N-A-C-A-C-N-E-T.O-R-G. Please leave a review and rate us on Apple Podcast. See you next time on College Admissions Decoded.
CITATION: National Association for College Admission Counseling. “Why Gratitude Matters in the College Application Process.” NACAC College Admissions Decoded, National Association for College Admissions Counseling, February 13, 2023.