In the cut-throat race to elite colleges, creative options such as video essays give Asian American applicants, who are traditionally marked down by admissions for personal ratings, opportunities to distinguish their personalities, experts say.

“[My video essay] was supposed to be a deep dive into authenticity, and I think that's genuinely what helped me get in,” said University of Chicago freshman Jhung Kim. “Because UChicago uniquely gives a lot of room to display authenticity and character, it seemed like the perfect application for me.”

For the fall admissions season of 2018, the University of Chicago added the option of submitting a two-minute video essay in lieu of the traditional interview. The University stated that this addition was to “empower students from all backgrounds by providing them the freedom to craft an application that portrays their best, most authentic selves.” According to several University of Chicago students and college counselors, the video essay component is especially helpful for Asian American applicants, who have been found at Harvard University to be assigned lower personal ratings on average during admissions than students of other races.

This personal rating is based on a student’s character, deduced from their recommendations, personal essays, and interviews. Among a surveyed group of applicants at Harvard University, 18% of Asian Americans received a top personal rating of 1 or 2, compared to 22.6% of white applicants, 19.4% of African Americans, and 19.1% of Hispanics, according to investigations for the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v. Harvard lawsuit. This discrepancy in admissions ratings has led to a national debate on whether the college admissions process disadvantages some racial groups and not others.

Data from Findings of Fact and Conclusion of Law by United States District Court District of Massachusetts Pg 55

“Because I knew my stance as an Asian American, I knew that I had to think about the process completely differently,” University of Chicago freshman Jhung Kim said.

For Kim, the key to his application strategy lay in his video essay, which he described to be down to Earth and “not really a flex.” He recounted that his video was a snapshot of his daily life where admissions officers could see how he interacts with his friends, the jokes he makes, and his quirks that couldn’t be shown in a traditional application. It wasn’t perfect. He stuttered sometimes, but he believed that it allowed him to fully display what he would be like as a student on campus.

“I feel like the students have a greater sense of investment, that they put more of themselves personally into their video application, ”said Joe Shields, the coordinator of video applications at Goucher College.

He explained that unlike the Common Application essay, which is only 650 words and tends to be very edited, a video introduces a sense of vulnerability, forging a personal relationship between the applicant and the admissions officer.

For Asian American students such as University of Chicago freshmen Bridget Lu, this interpersonal relationship was what they needed to break free from the shackles of the “typical Asian” stereotype.

A typical Asian applicant has many Advanced Placement classes, a good Grade Point Average, a high standardized testing score and often times similar extracurricular activities such as debate, according to Vickie Chiang, the President of California-based college counseling company HS2 Academy.

“I guess I was pretty fitting for that profile in the sense that I had high grades. I did all the traditional activities like debate, music, and all that,” Lu said.

According to Julie J. Park, an assistant professor of education at the University of Maryland and a consulting expert for Harvard during the Students for Fair Admissions, Inc v. Harvard lawsuit, there is no evidence that the Asian student stereotype negatively impacts the personal rating.

“What we can say is, yes, we know that there are those stereotypes of Asian Americans generally, but the way that they might be affecting the admissions process is really unclear,” she said. “... I think it's really important to be very cautious about the types of claims that we're making.”

Nonetheless, Lu of the University of Chicago said that her video essay allowed her to add a “human side” to her application, rather than simply becoming another statistic in the large pool of Asian applicants. She recalled walking around where she lived in Shanghai, China with her phone, introducing the admissions officers to her hometown, and adding in a few clips of her volunteer work promoting education opportunities for youth.

Joe Shields of Goucher College admissions said that policies that cultivate creativity and personality may be the future for the college admissions realm. Goucher College was the first college to implement an entire video application instead of the traditional personal statement and test scores package.

“I would like to see a college that can demonstrate that they are really willing to value the individual and not just use, let’s say, the buzzword of a ‘holistic admissions review,’ because that is very popular to say,” he said.

Shields said that due to the admissions time crunch and limited resources at different schools, a video essay component may not be the best fit for all the colleges out there. However, he hopes that colleges would be more willing to try different, innovative ways in truly assessing a student’s value, dedication, and character.