’24 BISV Senior College Application Interviews and Advice: Brandon Tsai

Disclaimer: This interview consists of opinions based on different experiences from different students. While this publication may be used to gain some insight into the college app process, please remember that there is no “perfect formula” for getting into college and college applications vary by person. What works for one person may not work for another! Use your best judgment when taking advice from these interviews.

All interviews with The Quill are done with permission from the students. In order to protect their privacy, they may opt to be anonymous or just use their initials.

Alina: Hi Brandon!

Brandon: Hi.

Alina: How are you involved with ASB [Associated Student Body]?

Brandon: I’m Co-President.

Alina: Ok, cool. What is being involved in ASB like?

Brandon: Yeah, so ASB does really run a bunch of the events that we see throughout school, so these would be your dances like HOCO, and even to an extent, Prom, and we also plan the Spirit Weeks and pep rallies. So, we do all of that be​​hind-the-scenes. And, additionally, this year, for ASB, or Leadership Club, this year we’re trying to really increase participation and the overall, like, connection between the student body, and yeah. So this year we added a bunch of polls and the ones we’ve kind of seen are for Winter Ball and like, class colors; that is definitely rolling out soon. Yeah, in general, we are trying to do the best we can to make people’s high school as memorable as possible.

Alina: How do you feel like your experience in ASB has helped your journey on college apps?

Brandon: ASB has definitely helped me a decent amount on college applications because throughout my four years, I’ve done a lot of planning proposals and offering different written statements on certain events and potential future events we can make. So a lot of that decision making and structure, definitely help me structure my own essays, and see where our current student body is and where we could potentially go.

Alina: Mhmm. Do you have anything you wanna say about college apps, like the process, anything like that?

Brandon: For me, I was actually about to finish my college apps relatively on time, like on pace with the college counselor’s internal deadlines, and I mainly attribute this to planning ahead. So during junior year, I didn’t really have a good idea of the college application process, so a bunch of that summer was spent catching up on how to apply, what certain things colleges were looking for, writing down activity descriptions, and just getting down initial drafts of your personal statement. Your personal statement you kind of use everywhere, it kind of gets you started on the writing process, so getting that done during summer was pretty helpful. And throughout the school year, like from August to December, I think a lot of the struggle was just staying on top of your Capstones, and just writing essays. So what I’d recommend with that is setting an internal goal, like every single week. I know the college counselors recommend that, and I think, like, it might seem strange to do at first, but just having a small goal or even big goals to accomplish for the week or month, can be really helpful to make some progress every single day.

Alina: How’s senioritis treating you?

Brandon: I have a bit of senioritis. I do find myself spending a couple hours [laughter], maybe, watching YouTube. But I think, kind of like how I was doing in winter/fall months, just setting a goal like every single week can help with senioritis and getting things done.

Alina: Cool thank you Brandon!