"Stanford is the easiest to get into with low grades" (ft. Arpi Park, Elliot Choy)

how I tackle the college admissions is I looked at where I was at which is my grades were not the best and so I looked at all the top schools and I thought about which one would be easiest to get into and Stanford is actually up there before we continue this video I just want to say thank you so much to audible for sponsoring this video get your first audible for free plus two audible originals when you try audible for 30 days visit audible.com slash Joma or text Joma at 500 500 so what are honorable originals well I'm glad you asked audible originals are exclusive audio titles created by celebrated storytellers from worlds as diverse as theatre journalism literature and more so basically there's like sound effects music voice actors and it's basically really well produced I myself have been listening to bad blood by John Kerry you which is about Elizabeth Holmes and her startup thoroughness and how she lied her way into creating a multi-billion dollar biotech startup Bill Gates loved it apparently it was one of his favorites in 2018 I've been using audible when I do boring stuff like when I commute when I do laundry when I cook which allows me to suck in all that knowledge and become a better me and you should too so if you're interested don't forget you can go to audible.com slash Joma or send Joma to 500 500 to try audible or free like when I look at your channel I was that I'm actually like oh man I kind of want that channel you know random [ __ ] like if you looked on my vlogs and some my old videos you would see that you know it's a lot of random [ __ ] also yeah and I actually enjoyed doing that but then it was um it was because this channel blew up that okay I have to double down on this right so it's kind of sad that you see what you mean yeah I'm always tempted to make more Stanford videos because it gets clicks I got abused right but you know I just want to see whatever yeah but I do think that like your audience is like very strong though yeah I'm really thankful yeah it's a lot of good means yeah yeah like I think at the beginning my channel was also like that like a bit more like me me you know a lot of like inside jokes and stuff yeah but but but then like the tech videos they just like boo me up something okay I guess I'm gonna keep doing that right yeah okay cool so all right let's start the interview I I always say like I don't wanna you know make it too much of an interview so if ever you want to ask me questions you could ask me questions okay and what's funny is because like my viewers are always like dude can you shut the other person to talk like it's not always about you Joel McHale so I'm just telling that like it's not an interview it's a conversation so that I can say stuff too yeah so before I start you want just like introduce yourself a little bit about your channel what is it about it Hajis ash feel hi i'm RP park have a youtube channel check it out hi doc brought you in because you go to Stanford and you know Stanford gets a lot of clicks through I'm gonna use that on my channel so can I just ask you a little bit about like your scores first and then like how did you get in what did you like why did you think you got in and stuff like that ICT I got a 1590 and an AC ticket what is that out of 1600 canadian sorry all right 1600s yeah yeah that's pretty good I think you let Leigh like it's like it's one point if before the maximum yeah there's one question mm-hmm always bummed about rash but I know I just you know you shouldn't even get accepted to Stanford yeah that's pretty impressive so in your videos you say that you know you don't study a lot stuff like that yeah is it true now or is it even true before because like 1590 that's very like right you would need to study a lot for now right so what I'll say about the test scores is that I think I was just always sort of lucky with test taking skills like I didn't study too much for like standardized tests I just took like oh wow maybe like three or four practice tests beforehand and then usually that be enough yeah I mean who keeps telling me it's a meme that I don't study I told you earlier I'm taking like two classes right now in high school I'll say I tried a lot harder I see only like junior senior year it's cuz I had like this end goal this holy grail of getting into standard also you wanted to get into center right right I wanted to get into a prestigious school because what about like Harvard and the other schools you don't care about them how I tackled the college admissions is I cuz they don't look at freshman year and like I have like a weird set of extracurriculars so I thought it fits Stanford best so the decision to apply to Stanford versus like Ivy League or whatever was basically just because I thought it'd be easier to get into Stanford okay so so you wanted to get into like Ivy League slash procedure school yeah and then you thought Stanford was like the easiest one as weird as it is to say Stanford seemed like the easiest option interesting KL it is here right now oh so I'm gonna I'm gonna get them so here we have Elliott now so you want to tell you a little bit about yourself what your channel where you talk about yeah I'm a sophomore at Vanderbilt I am working on a channel right now that focuses a lot on like college videos entrepreneurship lifestyle I'm really into like videography whatnot but it really changes up a lot so I'm just trying to like find my style I'm pretty like new to the game yeah classic kids try to hey you know what do you want to do you know passion stuff like that makes a lot of sense but yeah so we were talking about why you chose Stanford and you said it was the easiest to get what I meant by that is that like I don't have a good chance to get into any of these schools but like between like the 2% chance at the other schools there was like a 5% chance for Stanford mm-hmm which is why I applied there all right that's a good opportunity for me to get more clarification question okay so don't say anything to Elliott Elliott normally how many practice tests do you take for like these SATs wait was it SATs I took both okay okay yeah so usually how many tests would you take before taking the real test mm like this maybe like at least five up to around 10 to 15 okay yeah because I was just trying to get a feel if that was a lot or not a lot so yeah you're correct you do not study a lot yeah I mean I I took a lot of like tests growing out oh because like I got a standardized test everywhere in the other schooling system so good yeah not in Canada we don't have that right yeah that's why University of Waterloo is a great school there's so many people from Waterloo who really feel attacked oh yeah because we're basically a factory I'll just make like tech babies and trim them off pretty much yeah listen and I'm whatever but Stanford you got to turn out like entrepreneurs you know people care about you know like snapchat you know it's gonna change the world and stuff like that snakes I can ask about you like how did you get into like your school yeah like do you know it's it's not that like well-known on the east or like West Coast I'd say I didn't even know about the school before right where is it exactly it's a Nashville Tennessee so it's like down south yeah so what are your like SAT scores and yeah I got a 35 on my acct I never took that CT and I out of 36 oh okay yeah yeah and what else yeah can you tell me about your was like the common application or like essay stuff honey what is it what did he ask you and then like what Jews like why did you think you got in what was your selling point my cell was honestly my in Syria my was doing a lot of photography oh and I have talked about like I know I could talk to about my violin but like every agent of that or like my volunteering when you play violin I play wow that's pretty good I'm saying their Sun fouled in know so I talked about like my Instagram account in high school I have like twenty four five thousand and I was like growing it and I thought I was like kind of unique and I don't know I just thought it would be pretty interesting to talk about developed a story around it's a nice that make sense what was your selling point for Stanford my selling point is that um I don't know basically I'm the kid studying communication mmm which nobody really does mm-hmm so yeah yeah yeah well so yeah so can you tell me a bit about like what you guys are studying right now right now I'm taking some film classes I took some acting classes and I took once the s class decided that it's not for me so I have to cut that out for my Troma Tech the channel and watch it all the time later on I'll tell you why you should get to see us but okay okay okay so I it's called human and organizational development and I bought your business minor it's too complicated to explain it I see it's just business pretty much like it's a liberal or at school so cool just it's kind of wishy-washy interesting in thatis thing so I mean it's it's way too early for you guys but I was still asking like what do you envision yourself in like five years so like what kind of job or how are you guys gonna make money like you don't I mean you don't have to but basically what do you think you'll do in five years after college I'm like really interested in like marketing even maybe pizza for tech and I like eventually would love to be like entrepreneurship and running my own thing I don't think that's something where it's like super force though then you have to be patient with it and just get some experience and learn about like the inner workings of an industry before you can really be like oh I'm gonna go create a amazing solution for it if you don't know what the problem is it's kind of difficult so I just like want to try to work like a traditional job for a little bit but eventually they would love to do my own thing mmm I didn't thought that okay yeah we all know who the better student is okay question so once you guys got you know pretty famous you know Big Boi Chanel yeah what what kind of questions do you guys get most often asked on instagram or sorry my Instagram just games I'm not curious that year a lot of the earlier ones just people telling me asking me to like read over their applications so like for the first couple months of my channel I was just editing essays like 24/7 you actually didn't afford him yeah I did cuz like I started the channel to try to help people because I thought there was like an information gap in the college application process for kids who didn't get like counseling and things like that yeah so I wanted to help them but after a while I just I was just drowning how are you hmm I was it like I do get a lot of questions from high schoolers as well it's like oh what I do for like how do I get into this college like I don't know but I also get like some entrepreneurship stuff like how do i you know make some side money or videography questions stuff like that then so are you already making --side money right now see how I transitioned so do you make sign money right yes so you still like flipping resale which was like my I was making a lot in like high school like thousands and I was like whatever that's great and I invested all that money into like an Amazon business doing private label FBA what's private label it's it's basically like you get a product and you make your own branded yourself and like like drop shipping a little bit kind of but like drop shipping is less company is like you use all their people's products because in private label you go through the manufacturing process and the branding and about it yeah so it's a lot on but yeah I'm looking at all that money I made through flipping and reselling I lost through Amazon and really yeah pretty much and so yeah I am pretty much just relying on YouTube in khoka YouTube income yeah do you have any like side businesses that are related to your YouTube like do you do sponsor videos do you sell something I am not selling right now yeah pretty much just ad revenue some small I've done like one sponsorship in my total time on YouTube I don't like doing them a lot and then really really focus on monetization so I just kind of like leave that alone I'm trying to get back into it cuz it's like it takes a lot of time you guys know taking up a lot of time I was about to say like yeah I hate it too but then I'll probably have a sponsor [Laughter] okay all interesting okay um so how much do you make for like YouTube and stuff yeah Carolee so it really depends I'm sure you guys know like from once a month for me it's like all the check or the the payment I get from YouTube is around 1 to 2 K and it is could be a lot higher if I actually I use a lot of copyrighted music probably on 80% of my videos so that's the reason why all my biggest videos none of them are monetized because I care a lot about music and whatnot so like around how many views per month do you get just so that we can get a comparison on them okay people want to be I would actually put up I think probably at least a million yeah mm-hmm I think maybe you wanted to okay cool cool cool so do you will get to use do you plan on like expanding something new business line or something you know like do you do something for photography sure as of right now really I'm just like exploring I'm trying to tap into my creative side a little bit more so not really focused on you know I could roll out that course or whatever like you know here's how you get into college whatever I could do that yeah I want to convey that and you can make big bucks doing that and it's pretty it's pretty easy so I would arguably say like anyone who has a sizable following and has some informational you know power there can like make a few hundred grand let's say doing that and I know people who have but really I'm not like trying to monetize quick so that's it right now no yeah what are they selling you've list all ice courses the courses go for like five hundred two thousand dollars I know like people so like the Amazon thing I know people who have like sold never sold on Amazon sold a course they made like around ten million off of that so there's a lot especially in like entrepreneurship there's a lot of [ __ ] like what courses are good cuz you don't there's no cost except your time to make it once again you could sell it I'll make sure that however druggable product babies yeah nice maybe I hear in my garage guy here micro what does he have Taiwan plug tile oh oh yeah yeah here's my garage he's a veteran that's this whole dysfunction yeah just like Dan lock I don't know if you've ever so yeah they know there's people it's all yeah yeah I mean if it works it works I mean congrats on them yeah but yeah anyways yeah back to you because you said that people usually ask for applications so you actually reviewed their applications how long would it did it take you to review them so like they'd send me like their common app essays like 650 words so it goes like 30 minutes 45 minutes just like reading through it and leaving comments and stuff like that that's a lie so what we're like the general tips you would say what makes an app good I guess for me like the biggest problem I saw in essays I read is that like you want to make your essays enjoyable to read like it doesn't have to be funny but like it's like if someone picks it up they want to finish it you know what I mean mm-hmm I don't know how to put that into words it's basically just saying write better it's like it'll retell yeah yeah yes so we're talking a narrative up because yeah there's a very good so what did you write about in yours my comment up essay I brought back some anecdote from kindergarten when I did a show and tell thing and I brought a dead bird mmm us freaked out I know sort of connected that to how I just like like talking and like presenting and performing things like that and like all my ex other extracurriculars so I guess my narrative was literally my life story and that's good I they seem to like it that's cool yeah so are you saying that like yeah you brought a bird and then people freaked out or something when I brought the bird and people I felt like empowered yeah I felt like this is something I want to do which is why I did speech in high school why I made videos took you know film classes things like that because I wanted to get that same sort of feeling of Joe stell interesting so what why do you think you have this feel like why did it feel so good when people freaked out over here I don't know I guess since since I was a kid I was always small and I was a minority back then I lived in like Texas so I was the only Asian kid so I always felt like really invisible and once like people started looking at me it just felt good yeah you felt like a serial I really like that yeah do you still feel this like segregation a little bit maybe not segregation but it like alienated because you're asian-american in Stanford or just in general here I'd say in a Stanford in the Bay Area in general I really don't feel that at home maybe in like some like subsections of the school like maybe if you go to like frat houses you might feel a little off but in general I never felt like any sort of prejudice against me since I've been here mm-hmm what so when did you feel like prejudice just like bouncing between like suburbs like white suburbia like through most of my childhood it's always like the only Asian kid in the neighborhood yeah I mean I had there they're all my friends but looking back on it now there was always some sort of divide okay can you kind of elaborate on the Defiant yeah like they like make jokes about like my eyes and things like that and I just sort of learned to just take it you know they called me like [ __ ] or something like that King kook et cetera and I just sort of rolled with the punches I thought gee I just took it because I wanted to be friends with them but I realize now that I couldn't be friends with them because I'm never going to be then man did you ever felt that like oh I wish I wasn't Asian yeah definitely for a lot a large part of my life but yeah I mean I'm very comfortable with being Korean Korean Korean oh you guys are both Korean yeah actually makes sense program extends oh I guess I just spending a lot of time with my parents learning about the Heritage and going to Korea now and then I realize that it's a good place to be cool cool what about you how do you like did you ever felt like you were alienated when you were kids and stuff like that I feel like I grew up in like New Jersey pretty diverse area and and when I went to high school I was look I moved to Indiana for my high school which is like it was pretty much wipe suburbia too but I was lucky enough to like have a pretty diverse community there but I feel like the school I'm at venerable it is that segregation there's a lot of Greek life at Vanderbilt Greek non-greeks most Greek is white and life there is that segregation and literally the other day I was just like looking at Latin lunch and you can even like see it's not on purpose or anything but there's actually like segregation implicitly and like I thought that was pretty interesting I never really like to notice that but you know I don't know if that has to do with the fact that like people you know are drawn to you know there's similar communities I don't know exactly but there is a divide and like I thought I was like the knee interesting cuz I never really recognize it until like college to be honest yeah yeah did you want to do see us like in high school oh yeah that's a that's a great question so I actually want to be an investment banker yeah so I joined math and business there was a program that was called double degree and you do math at Waterloo and then you do business at another school and then I want to be investment banker because I didn't want to follow my brother's footstep what he did was he dropped out of the business he did the same program but he dropped out of the business in two semesters and he did math he was like a big math nerd he did pure math and he ended up being like a quantum like a quantitative researcher I didn't want to do that I didn't even want to touch like stem stuff I said you know I'm a sociable guy I could be a businessman whatever that means right so then I joined I joined Waterloo and wilfrid laurier which is the other course I started theater College and after one semester I dropped business because I just couldn't handle it I was like oh my god it's so boring and then it was after that I learned about oh you know Facebook they pay a lot for computer science I mean for software engineers and Google and all these cool jobs and then I just switched from math to computer science I was lucky because when I was taking math I also was take like cs4 fun because of that had a credits to go into computer science but uh but yeah and then even after I went to do a few internships in software engineering I still didn't really want to do it because I thought I'm a businessman I should do more like things that is like a little bit more social so that's why I changed the data science and then I changed a product manager because because back then I was very ambitious I was I wanted to make a startup or like I want to run a startup or do my own thing right and then over the years I you know I kind of reevaluate and my values on what I care about and in the end like there are some other things I care about now and I feel like right now software engineering is a good fit for that yeah so yeah you guys have any a study tips I'm not gonna lie I'm a little lacking in this area but like so are you getting bad grades right now or no I'm not like getting bad grades like the thing is like Stanford grade inflation etc and as long as you just start what's the great inflation rate inflation basically means like if there's a like a bell curve for like the grade distribution and then it's like skewed though so they arrange the median is not like C no it's not it's like it's probably round to be I think I read that the average GPA Stanford is like a 3.7 or 3.8 oh interesting that's that's odd but but then again are your grades important nowadays because you're not gonna go to correct I mean if I went to grad school it's important but yeah the only fields were great to really matter I would say is probably like if you're pre-med if you're going to like some sort of stem graduate school like physics or something or blah I'm not really sure but other than that the Stanford name on top of your degree will probably matter more the number beneath it mm-hmm a lot of the types of schools like have Harvard for example like people say it's hard to get a four oh but it's like easy to get like a three seven three eight okay because they ever want to get well because it was so hard to get in they deserve that great info yeah I mean right I know exactly how it works yeah but like baby has like great deflation yeah yeah a lot of school really so it's like the average is addy it's all other that's well weird yeah well that's terrible okay yeah I think MIT and Princeton also a great deflation oh really yeah so hard actually MIT I think has a quota on a number of students I can get A's in a class huh so they're literally competing with each other yeah and I don't know that seems toxic to me so yeah yeah when I went to see Jeb which is something in Quebec it's like pre University we had something called a Norse our score and it what it is is if you're it it compares your your grades with your classmates and so no one would collaborate because if your classmates do bad then you do well yeah alright is is terrible so what about like um you know now that you've started college do you think you're very different from when your high school like what are some of the lessons that you've learned a lot and you and you wish to pass it on to kids our high school nurse right I think it tastes a lot like in high school I didn't really care about things I just was always just doing enough to get by I wasn't really ambitious or anything and I did well enough I think just to know do okay in school and when whatever and even freshman year of college I'd say I wasn't really like that driven or like ambitious freshman year summer though I spent as like three months alone in New York and I really just got to do my own thing and explore and I think I really thought about like where I wanted to be in the future and that really helped me be grounded and in my goals and my ambitions so I think I've changed a lot since then yeah I mean like a lot of people change in college just because you're exposed to new perspectives it's a different world and like it's not the real world yet but it's one step closer so like your eyes are open - opened up to a lot more information and perspectives well the first two years of high school I was slacking off like I said I had this weird concept that being cool and not studying like the cool kids so I just didn't study but junior senior year I was so like romantically attached to the idea of getting into a good school that I worked my ass off like really hard but now that I'm here at Stanford it's like if since I don't have an end goal in mind I guess have like a bit of perspective I don't I don't like work as hard mostly because I don't have anything to work towards at the moment I mean it it's a hard thing to do right like I'll give you a comparison in a company we have something called like a goal metric or an okay are it's something that the company worked towards - right but it's not always correct it doesn't always lead to the right path and the most dangerous thing you can do is following it blindly and then realizing that that's not what you want right so I mean I think it's totally okay that you don't have a goal anymore but it's nice to try to think about it and know at least what kind of direction you want to go to I mean I feel like you kind of know what you want especially for now it's like you want to own your own thing you want I'm guessing you want to do your own thing run your own business kind of a thing right yeah it changes everybody we exactly chain activities every two weeks I can think about it and literally within a month it could be complete opposites it's just like thinking long-term like what I really want out of life in order so do you not even have like a slightest of an idea of a goal or something I want to work towards too late it can be anything like oh I want to be more honest person I want to write funnier person right like yeah I think what I've concluded is that if I am if we're gonna work on anything it has to be sort of creative mmm I need to have my own input on it because I've tried like sort of busy work like desk jobs and I just I don't know I don't think I can do that so whatever I'm doing it's probably going to involve sort of what I'm doing already maybe like YouTube or just maybe writing just anything in that sort of industry area who Nydia entertainment etc yeah imagine if you guys can do YouTube like full-time imagine if every job paid the same what would you do would it be YouTube or something else I mean all things considered if you could do YouTube as a career it's an amazing thing you can work at your own pace you can just do whatever you want so I mean yeah it wouldn't be bad my only problem with it is that your budget is not as high as like if you worked and like the film industry or something like if I if I wanted to make a feature film in the future you can't do that on YouTube mm-hmm I mean you could be a creative director or like a direct a movie director that that's also possibility right right you know yeah I don't yeah I guess like imagine if you could do anything anything not constraint to you to or something else you could do anything anything what would you do I don't know think of it I would probably say like movie directing would be if I was good enough would be a dream I personally think like YouTube allows me to fulfill a lot of what I want out of life and that's not just like super career driven goals it's like I want to meet people who are doing cool things and surround myself with those types of people and YouTube has allowed me to do that which is great that it aligns with that goal it also allows me to like travel and explore and that has also been like one of my long-term goals kind of like Barbie was saying about like having something where he can really express his creativity I think like YouTube really does kind of allow me to do that and I've realized like recently that's like super important to me so yeah I think like time so yeah considering if it was like more sustainable in the long term like it could definitely be viable or reasonable for me to pursue but you know in the real world I don't think I would ever do it like full-time mmm so what's like the future of your channels but actually before talking about the future what was the origin of your channel like why did you start it because sometimes it might not be like what it is now like you might have started for another reason like my channel and a scary huh right I guess I'd really plan to start a channel just at summer break last year when I was when I just graduated high school I knew I wanted to make a video on college essays like I said to help like the information gap and then um winter break of this year of my first year at Stanford I was just bored and I decided to make some videos and it's just been sort of going like that ever since yeah so for me I was in high school I got into Vanderbilt I searched a veiner book on YouTube and I could not find any other videos other than this five year old video of this guy interviewing drunk people and I knew like daily life videos we're doing well and I saw that same in tech right so it's like okay should I like create a dating life Peter for Vanderbilt so in my mind it made a lot of sense because I wanted that when I was in high school there was nothing to watch on and so I decided to make one and I was like all these videos are getting millions of views I can make one that's like okay you know or even half that would be amazing so I just went off and made it and yeah I mean I made I started my channel just like make that video and then it after like three weeks it's sort of doing well and I was like yeah I was like oh what was the heck's going on but like I realized at that moment like that was an opportunity to ride that momentum and you know this like once you get on the YouTube train it's really hard to get off but I read the momentum and I just said like okay well now I'm just ready to momentum like that I can't really like a foot I love what I do so it's like it's great for mmm Stephanie good to write a momentum I did the same thing right I did like a daily life of a Facebook engineer and just blew all like it blew up and that's what started my channel pretty much but yeah so if ever anyone wants to make a youtube channel you should start that and there's a lot of people in are like the college news mm-hmm there's a lot of people popping yeah you guys are the future generation of youtubers like soon I'll become irrelevant like in a few years like my channel be irrelevant will be filled a few guys you guys would be like the next generation so yeah and it's funny cuz um I actually watch a lot of these videos and I always keep tabs on them and it's fun to see cuz some of them like yes you can get millions of you for your day in the life video but if you don't sustain that or if you have nothing to say like it doesn't last for long there's a lot of people that get like 2 million views there are 3 million views but then their future videos nobody care anymore but yeah so um yeah make sure you engage your audience yeah I agree with that that's why I'm I guess my approach is quite different where like I saw the potential and like making a bunch of Stanford videos like I do and I still sort of have a quota like I shouldn't make one every so often to make sure I'm still on the radar but what I noticed about like you know like channels you sent to make one like video that pop off like people subscribe or people view feed about one type of content and if they can't sustain that then nobody like wants to watch them so I guess what I'm trying to build is like people want to watch a meal and not like the type of video I'm making or like maybe they here's interested in my life and I even if it's a bit slower I think I definitely appreciate that more it's very true cuz like um the way how I thought about it when I start making my made my channel was that I made the startup series to sustain people by made all like the [ __ ] like how to get into tech that was to drive real audience right and and you can also think about it in a way where you just title it in a way that is very you know external to external via but then once they wash your video they're like oh my god this guy is funny oh my god this guy's you know so that they can relate to you and stuff like that but yeah have you guys did people recognize you at school or like you know on the streets and stuff you know how did it feel the first time I guess for me I've always like when I first got here I I sort of enjoy feeling invisible because I like to just observe and like I do like bringing the dead bird yeah same right right but like that's in like a specific setting or more like people are there to look at me like otherwise like I'm not very social because I don't know I like to think to myself so when people started approaching me in recognizing me it was sort of weird because I felt like just this little freshman at the school just trying to learn things and people are like approaching me I also choked really hard when people approach me or really bunch of like kids who like show up to me and it's like oh I watch your videos and I'm like me too and yeah I don't know it so it's a lot to take in definitely good cool cool nice nice alright would you guys like the second part of the video where you just I just tour around my apartment sure thing alright let me