Even with the hundreds of college support organizations and companies advertising their guarantee to get you into the best colleges by hiring ex-admissions officials, alumni, and test-taking experts, it is still one of the most difficult endeavors to pin down exactly what colleges are looking for.

The “holistic” approach to college admission has in equal parts brought joy and confusion to applicants. Applicants are more hopeful now that college admissions does not rely on just empirical data such as gpa or standardized test scores. And for good reason too: a purely mathematical approach to admissions could neither possibly account for the value that a student could bring to a college nor the quality and difficulty of pre-college education. Alternatively, sometimes, it can feel like there is no clear-cut path to studying at the best colleges: it is difficult to tell how much a certain part will affect the application as a whole.

Usually, all we get from the college as applicants is the admissions rate and an questionable college ranking done by third party (or are they?) organizations. And we hold these pieces of information more closely than we might imagine. We take these numbers at face value, and plan our applications around them.

What else can we understand about the university admissions process through statistics? In this particular case, we are focusing on what has generally been considered to be one number: the admissions rate. But what if we decided that there are multiple admissions rate. Surely, the admissions rate of one area can be vastly difference from that of another. If we can find more information through the number that influences students so much in their college decisions, perhaps we can begin to understand more deeply, the nature of how the college education system functions.

The idea here is to find a distribution of percentile differences for a specific county to the overall admissions rate. Once that statistic is clear, we are then able to dig deeper into the socio-economic status of a particular area to determine whether the admissions process favors one group of individuals over another.

We can break this down in more detail. For example, we know already that the admissions rate for Emory undergraduate is 25.2% in 2016 (gotten through a simple google search). This number by itself is quite meaningless to us because it encompasses an application pool with applicants from all over the world. It would be too difficult to break up the applicant pool from every part of the world: without a consistent scale on which to compare the socioeconomic status of one region with another, the resulting data would be vastly skewed. Instead, the project would be much more manageable if concentrated our focus to a specific area. We chose to look at several counties that are within the greater Atlanta area that are known to have differences in economic status. For example, Buckhead has a noticeably higher wealth than College Park, one of the poorest areas around Atlanta. For these two areas, we would find the acceptance rate into Emory from the number of people who applied from a permanent address in these two areas.

The final part would be to compile the acceptance rates from all of the areas that we chose to look at. Separately, the average general acceptance rate for Emory and the acceptance rate for a specific area may not reveal much. But when we look closely at the difference in percentages, the statistics become meaningful. If, let’s say, the acceptance rate from the Buckhead area is much higher than 25.2%, then there might be an association between being wealthy and having a greater chance of acceptance into Emory. This would show that Emory favors this particular wealthy area for potential students. However, if the reverse was true, and Emory had a much higher acceptance rate in College Park, then it may suggest that Emory is trying to pull in students from lower economic classes.

Conclusions from this form of data analysis are not easy to form. There are potentially thousands of variables that could shape the admission’s decision of one individual. The dangers of making broad, sweeping conclusions include not giving enough credit to the consistency and sanctity of the admissions process, which takes into account student attributes that may not be easily translated into pure numbers. The benefit of this kind of analysis is that it gives us a general trend to work with. Unequal opportunities in education is a long term issue that requires long term, fundamental solutions. Understanding the admissions process can be imperative to creating such a solution.

The idea here is to find a distribution of percentile differences for a specific county to the overall admissions rate. Once that statistic is clear, we are then able to dig deeper into the socio-economic status of a particular area to determine whether the admissions process favors one group of individuals over another.

We can break this down in more detail. For example, we know already that the admissions rate for Emory undergraduate is 25.2% in 2016 (gotten through a simple google search). This number by itself is quite meaningless to us because it encompasses an application pool with applicants from all over the world. It would be too difficult to break up the applicant pool from every part of the world: without a consistent scale on which to compare the socioeconomic status of one region with another, the resulting data would be vastly skewed. Instead, the project would be much more manageable if concentrated our focus to a specific area. We chose to look at several counties that are within the greater Atlanta area that are known to have differences in economic status. For example, Buckhead has a noticeably higher wealth than College Park, one of the poorest areas around Atlanta. For these two areas, we would find the acceptance rate into Emory from the number of people who applied from a permanent address in these two areas.

The final part would be to compile the acceptance rates from all of the areas that we chose to look at. Separately, the average general acceptance rate for Emory and the acceptance rate for a specific area may not reveal much. But when we look closely at the difference in percentages, the statistics become meaningful. If, let’s say, the acceptance rate from the Buckhead area is much higher than 25.2%, then there might be an association between being wealthy and having a greater chance of acceptance into Emory. This would show that Emory favors this particular wealthy area for potential students. However, if the reverse was true, and Emory had a much higher acceptance rate in College Park, then it may suggest that Emory is trying to pull in students from lower economic classes.

Conclusions from this form of data analysis are not easy to form. There are potentially thousands of variables that could shape the admission’s decision of one individual. The dangers of making broad, sweeping conclusions include not giving enough credit to the consistency and sanctity of the admissions process, which takes into account student attributes that may not be easily translated into pure numbers. The benefit of this kind of analysis is that it gives us a general trend to work with. Unequal opportunities in education is a long term issue that requires long term, fundamental solutions. Understanding the admissions process can be imperative to creating such a solution.

With regards to information literacy, there was an aspect of laziness that prevented me from sharing the news that I read on sites like facebook. As a result, when I later found pieces of contradicting news, I was safe from the backlash of spreading false news. That’s how I liked my role on the internet – purely observational.

Of course, this doesn’t mean that the material I read on the internet doesn’t greatly affect my personal values, but as time went on, it become more and more difficult for a singular piece of news or a single article to heavily sway my opinion. As with a lot of others, my first large influx of information came from social media sites such as Facebook. I actually joined the social media bandwagon quite late; it just didn’t seem necessary for me to be continuously updated on aspects of my friend’s life I didn’t care about. Plus, I saw them almost everyday at school for eight hours and I appreciated my time alone. But, it doesn’t work like that. Facebook became a necessary medium through which I could contact people. Currently, however, Facebook is the only social media platform that I am active upon. Other sites like Twitter and Instagram never gathered my interest.

Looking back now, it is easy to see why I never participated on those sites. Social media platforms, especially Twitter, are designed to be used on the go and in real time. I was unable to take advantage of this system because I have never had a smart phone. I still use a out of date (and virtually indestructible) AT&T GoPhone and never even considered switching to a smartphone with a data plan. Up until now, it seems that my flip-phone can serve its purpose for texting and calling, but I worry that in the future, I may eventually be forced to switch to a smartphone.

These days, I find that having a computer simply helps with organization and convenience. Rather than bringing a heavy binder with all my written notes, I can carry around a laptop that contains all the tools I need for class. When used as a learning system, a computer places me only one step away from the vast library of information on the internet. As it stands, the majority of my documents, academic or not, are stored either on a harddrive or a server and I have no plans of moving them elsewhere anytime soon.

Plus the computer comes with games, which is a big plus.

1. We could not reasonably expect Emory to release (at least recent) applicant information, even anonymously. Released data on accepted students could reveal information on the selective process which can very easily be called into question. This lack of information prevents any project such as this to be grounded with extreme statistical significance.

Additionally, because the college admissions process is so heavily guarded, it would create a major headache if data on admitted vs rejected students was ever leaked to the public. Especially in the current social environment around college acceptances, such information could create basis for lawsuits.

2. In order to account for all the variables within this project, we need to take a look at the data for socioeconomic status in our focus areas (Buckhead, College Park, etc). However, even after narrowing our locations to these small counties, there are still massive variation. Let us, for a moment, consider that it is possible to gather the necessary data, that all of it is truthful, and that there is sufficient data to account for statistical variance. Even with these three factors guaranteed, it would still be difficult to decide on the number that uniformly and fairly represents the entire county. If we decide on the mean, ultra high income families or those with special circumstances would skew the entirety of the data to the right. If we decide on the median, we are effectively ignoring the upper and lower echelons of data, meaning that our final conclusion would be less accurate the farther we moved away from the central data point.

3. Within this project, we also require government data that deals with spending per student in a certain areas. This, of course, brings in another complication as we decide how to deal with school districts within a county. Like the household income, difference districts receive different amounts of funding. How the individual schools actually use and report this information has shaky credibility at most. And if we could even bring all this data together, we would still need to differentiate between the source of funding – private and public money sources are important to distinguish.

All of these challenges point towards a need to avoid empirical, sweeping conclusions. In our investigation to find trends in admissions, we must take care to justify how a certain set of data applies to a certain conclusion. It may be more productive to actually to form separate admissions conclusions based on very specific sets of requirements. The decisions made with regards to how data will be interpreted should be an ongoing, evolving process.

And that was that.

Subconsciously, I believe that both of us tried very hard to find something worthwhile to talk about or answer thoughtfully the questions that we had each prepared. As a result, we were forced into a state of comfortableness and trust that is uncommon between strangers. I would like to say that we eventually got to where we needed to be, but it was still difficult to be that open about personal stories and opinions to somebody you’ve just met.

Being in a video conference helped. Something about seeing another person’s physical appearance, or rather their willingness to reveal their physical appearance made it so that it was easier to convince myself that my story would be told with full merit. In any case, even with questions to guide the topics of our discussion, our conversation swung wildly across all spectrums. What I found, however, was that even though the questions we had were constructed with the aim of digging deeper into each other’s personal lives, they were ultimately ineffective. The real stories came out not as a response to a specific question, but because the timing was right. A certain story made sense in the context of the current topic of conversation we were having and it naturally presented itself.

Of course, the process of interviewing a stranger in this fashion is difficult. But I think that given enough time, the conversation can turn productive. It would be less ideal to pick a topic of interest beforehand and force the interaction to revolve around that specific topic. Part of the value of this exercise is to span the distance and culture of two drastically different schools of higher education. Without the freedom to move informally in any direction, both parties would unwittingly project their own mindset onto the other. The project was, at times, frustrating and confusing, but even if the connections created from this interaction are sparse, whatever it does create is invaluable.

But more importantly than that, I was afraid that I would slowly become oblivious to the quickly developing social culture of my generation. News travels quickly and is quickly accessed through smartphones, providing on the spot updates on both important and unimportant happenings. It was frightening to think that just because I didn’t have a smartphone, I would be out of the “loop”, or at least always playing catchup. The worst moment for me in this instance occurred on the app GroupMe, a group chat platform specifically designed for the phone. My fraternity used GroupMe almost ritualistically to provide updates on events, send out notifications, etc. For the first couple of months, I was only able to rely on word of mouth or someone taking the time and effort to contact me through other platforms for information, and I was usually very far behind. My frustration was eliminated upon discovering that GroupMe could also be accessed through the computer and I have since kept that tab perpetually open in the event of any messages.

Fortunately, like the instance with GroupMe, cross-platform applications have allowed me to stay relatively up to date on the events in the community around me and beyond. While I still prefer email as the most reliable form of communication, I’ve made myself reachable across many platforms. Not too long ago, I subscribed to an unlimited talk and text plan for my GoPhone, and even though it is still clunky to type long messages on, at least full conversations with people through text are no longer out of the question.

We will separate our project into three sections: how the data could function from the perspective of students, how the data may function from the perspective of the institution, and how the data may function from the perspective of geography.

The importance of looking at the un-admitted pool of applicants is made apparent when the questions “Are schools like Emory trying to accept more students from the lower income bracket, or is the high percentage of poor students simply a by-product of location and unintentional targeting.” If the former is the case, then we should find that the acceptance rate of poor students would be much higher than the percentages of poor individuals applying. If the latter is the case, we may even find that Emory is not accepting a high enough percentage of students for its location and the number of lower-income students who are applying.

Right away, I eliminated the possibly of doing a podcast on Facebook or other forms of popular social media: it seemed to me that it wouldn’t be productive to explore a platform that has been analyzed to the point of desensitization. Fortunately, I very came up with a suitable alternative that was nuanced enough to be interesting, but also contained many of the general social media elements I wanted to explore: Imgur.

However, I also realized quickly that Imgur was run differently from other social media platforms. For one, it was much closer to Instagram than Facebook. This meant that I couldn’t only look at the website from a social interaction point of view; it would be important to observe the content independently of the viewers. The heavy emphasis that Imgur put on the content posted onto the site made it the perfect target for observing a community that is wholly comprised of images.

When a dug deeper however, I realized that the entirety of the site ran on the community. The community made all the decisions on what sort of content was acceptable. This made it extremely interesting to experiment with the community and watch opposing viewpoints develop in an isolated environment. The focus of the podcast was thus the democratic processes that dominated the function of sites like Imgur.

The podcast seemed much more successful than I expected. We opted to approach the subject in a more conversational manner. I thought that the topic would very quickly become unfocused and fall apart, but I underestimated how immersed I was in the culture of Imgur. What ended up happening was that Rhea asked specific questions about the site and I was charged with answering them based off of my browsing experience. During the process, I continued to be surprised by my answers and their implications. For example, I realized that because so few people browsed User Submitted for new content, they were the only ones that had control over the content that millions of others are viewing. This absolutely skewed the democratic process that the site is supposedly built upon.

All in all, the productivity of the podcast rested on Rhea and I discovering the hidden mechanisms that run under the surface of the site. Once we were faced with some important and interesting issues within the site, we were able to focus in on those topics to produce meaningful discussion.

Hope has never had to hold an axe in her life, and quite frankly never aimed to, until her friends one day convinced her to attend a ESF Woodsman practice. Woods-sports is basically the track and field equivalent for lumber jacking activities. There are different events that correspond to specific skill sets. For example, one event has competitors split firewood. Whoever can split the predetermined number of firewood the quickest wins the event. There are other events like sawing, in which teams compete in pairs, and log running for teams of four. Despite being a city girl, Hope fell in love with the sport from the very first practice and now actively participates on the competitive team.

But the city continues to call her. She says that when you grow up your entire life somewhere, there’s a feeling of belonging that is indescribable. She realizes that other places have opportunities, but she plans to stay in New York area after college.

And like myself, Hope faces her own set of challenges everyday.

“I had a bit of an issue dealing with my anxiety.” she says matter-of-factly.

It was apparent even then, from the moment I met her, that she had seen her fair share of struggles. Anxiety for Hope wasn’t a surge of adrenaline in a tight situation, it was a constant nagging fear of disorganization. She struggled in the past with convincing herself that she had remembered to do all the homework for the next day or remembering to bring everything she needed for a trip. As a college student trying to pursue an advanced degree in what she hopes will eventually be the research field, there are sometimes too many things to keep track up. Becoming disoriented means that things don’t get done and pile up, creating even more anxiety. But Hope found her own way of breaking out of this vicious cycle by developing her own set of strategies.

For one, she like to write things own. Everything that she needs to do, it goes on the paper. “It lifts the load from my mind,” she says. Writing everything down also helps her to visualize her schedule and what she needs to do during the day. By visualizing her work, she is able to focus more on her long term goals. There was one event, however, that made Hope rethink her life and changed her outlook.

The closest to losing her life that Hope ever was occurred during a retreat. She was walking back from the outhouse late at night after getting caught out in the thunderstorm. She realized that she was in danger being so close to the base of so many tall trees and tried to hurry back to her cabin. But before she made it back to safety, a bolt of lightning struck the ground no more than twenty feet away.

That experience was meaningful to her because it was a wake up call to what she should be focusing on in her life.

“I nearly lost my life there, and compared to my passions and goals in the long run, something so small as anxiety shouldn’t be the thing holding me back,” she says. Hope has since learned to focus on moving forward through her life, especially with education.

“The best case scenario for me would be to find a research based job for an environmental company,” she says.