A letter to the parents of the Class of 2026

 






By Rajkamal Rao

Updated: June 9, 2026


 
 
Rajkamal Rao, MD, Rao Advisors LLC

I wanted to take a few moments to outline what to expect for your teenager during the next few months.

Since 2014, Rao Advisors has advised high school student families in navigating the complicated process of securing admission to choice colleges. If you came to us when your student was in the younger grades, we helped you build your teenager's brand using our 4-year roadmap. As your student completes the 11th grade, we stand ready to help you market their brand to colleges.
 

What are the four components of your student's brand?


Developing a high school student's profile is similar to building a modern automobile's four-cylinder engine - although a lot more complex because it involves a teenager's likes and dislikes - as each well-oiled cylinder functions flawlessly and independently while working well with the other cylinders. As we do when developing the 4-year roadmap, let us review these four cylinders.


BMW X3
 
 
Cylinder 1, Core academics: The foundation of a high school student's profile is formed by the cumulative end-of-11th grade credentials (WGPA, class rank, and special certificates such as the AP Capstone Diploma). Please review our post: What colleges look for in high school students.

Cylinder 2, College admission tests: Tests are crucial because they help confirm the legitimacy of your high school GPA. High school grades alone are not as accurate a predictor of college success because of issues like grade inflation that make it difficult to assess a student’s work.  
 
The PSAT-11, SAT, ACT, and Advanced Placement tests are designed, conducted, and evaluated by independent educators who don't know your student. Merit alone matters in these tests. Review our post here about preparing for the SAT/ACT if you are taking it for the first time or retaking it.

In 2024, test-optional policies at many colleges instituted during Covid finally came to an end. Colleges are beginning to realize after four years of experimentation with student admissions and performance that test scores better help predict students’ college grades, and their chances of graduation and post-college success. Many top colleges, including UT Austin, now require the SAT/ACT. The California universities will continue to be test blind. Fairtest.org maintains a list of test-optional schools. We can decide on your score submission strategy when we meet.

Cylinder 3, Extracurricular Activities that build a student's skills and talents: We like to classify any activity that helps build a student's skills as a Cylinder 3 item, including school-based activities like clubs, sports, and the arts, or any advanced or college-level course, or internship, job, hands-on capstone project, or research. Review our post about how crucial extracurricular development is to a student's brand.

Cylinder 4, Volunteering: As colleges become more selective, students who demonstrate compassion by caring for the less privileged are likely to score better.

The summer between the 11th and 12th grade can be crucial to strengthening the extracurricular section of your student's resume. Please visit our post here - we have significantly expanded the list of summer opportunities.

How we help market your student's brand to colleges


Your college admissions journey ideally starts with a counseling session in mid-June or a date soon after. The U.S. Department of Education has finalized college admission metrics for about 500 selective institutions, including publishing SAT and ACT cutoffs for the 25th and 75th percentiles and selectivity and yield statistics, which will help us determine the best college matches for you, including the all-important Early Decision school.

During this 1 to 1½ hour session, we will share our proprietary College Selection Toolkit which contains a detailed "Admissions Milestones" project plan detailing a comprehensive list of activities bucketed into four distinct milestones. It also includes our Early Decision analysis tool, a campus visit checklist, and a simple essay status tracker. We will also share our long-form (expanded form) resume template. Both tools are ready for Fall 2026. 

At the end of the first session, assuming that you have shared your SAT scores with us, we should have an example list of Dream, Core, and Safe schools, ideally containing at least one college of each type as relevant - public institutions (in-state and out-of-state) as well as private schools.

Of course, the selection of institutions is an iterative exercise, so you will have to do some homework to finalize the list on your own. This process may take a few days of dinner-table conversations with your student. You will be considering numerous factors - the institution's reputation, cost, location, proximity to home, major and alternate major choices, course offerings, college clubs, student body demographics, placement statistics for internship and employment, housing, local transportation, and opportunities for financial aid. We can join your deliberations by Zoom if you wish, but we recognize and respect that this step to finalize the college list reflects your student's deeply personal choices in a life-determining decision.

To complete the selection sheet, we ask that you populate key details for each institution, such as if it is an ED or ED2 school, whether it is a Dream, Core, or Safe school, whether you would ultimately apply to the school or it is a placeholder, the deadline for admission (Early Action, Regular Decision), and the platform (Common App, UCal, Coalition, ApplyTex). Each field helps us determine the priority for action - ED schools obviously rank first, followed by EA schools and RD institutions.

[If your list of schools is short, we can accomplish this entire exercise during one additional session].

Excellent coordination is essential and a crucial success factor during the college admissions campaign, a point that we emphasize during our first session. We require that families create a WhatsApp group with us for easy, secure, and prompt communication. We are responsive on WhatsApp, often within minutes, for nearly 16 hours a day, 7 days a week.

Once the list of schools is finalized, our active engagement to complete the task list items begins - reviewing the resume and Common App activity list, reviewing essays, finalizing recommendation letter and score-send strategies (test-optional, both SAT and ACT scores, all scores, individual test scores, only the SAT or ACT score), a discussion regarding college financial planning, requesting high school transcripts and submitting recommendation letters.
 
The resume and essay reviews are primarily conducted offline using our Essays Shopping Cart, meaning no counseling sessions are required. [If your student wants to have an "ideation" meeting to decide which essay topic to choose or what to write about, we can hold a short session]. All reviews will occur through Google Drive document shares in the secure cloud, emails, and backup communication through WhatsApp, informing the family about the first and second-pass review status. As I said before, excellent coordination is a crucial success factor. 

Please check out our other services, including mock interview support, advice to H-1B families, assistance in petitioning high school or college administrations to handle extraordinary situations, such as requesting in-state classification for tuition, credit transfer, visa issues, or other exceptions, and deciding on which offer of admission is the best, using our structured, analytical approach. We are an A-Z provider in the world of college counseling.

During the very first session, we will have mutually decided on the date and time for the following "Checkpoint" call to review progress. As you begin marking off items on our project plan, please let us know the progress your student is making. We can always schedule an "emergency" session if needed.


Essays: Your student's college essays will remain the most critical part of the application package. Please sit with your teenager to review our primer on essays. We replicate the process that colleges employ, such as each essay being reviewed by two reviewers.

All of our essay reviews can now be ordered from a simple menu-driven product list resembling an online store. You prepay for our service using a fixed-price model and get full buyer protection from PayPal. 

Each essay goes through a two-pass review. On our team are strong creative writers affiliated with institutions such as Stanford, Penn, and Duke. Our second-pass review examines every word and punctuation mark for correctness, clarity, engagement, delivery, final presentation, and plagiarism. During the peak of the 2025 college essay review season (Aug 1 - Oct 31), we reviewed 565 essays.

I use my years of experience as a columnist and 17-years of management consulting experience to oversee essay review operations. I currently serve on the editorial board of tippinsights, from America's most accurate pollster, writing 3-4 editorials and op-ed columns a week. More than 600 articles of mine have already appeared across various media outlets including TIPP Insights and The Hindu.

Results: Several clients during the last season were interviewed at the best schools, including MIT, Caltech, Yale, Columbia, CMU, Princeton, Penn, Brown, Cornell, CMU, and Johns Hopkins. During the Early Decision cycle, students got confirmed admissions to Stanford, Rice, Johns Hopkins, and Wash U. Many clients reported getting into some of the best public Ivies. UT Austin, UC Berkeley, Georgia Tech, the University of Illinois-Urban-Champaign, UCLA, the University of Michigan, Purdue, the University of Virginia, and the College of William and Mary repeatedly made the list. Clients also got into Texas A&M, Arizona State, the University of Washington, the University of Pittsburgh, and Virginia Tech.

Our clients have continued to acknowledge our work through their public reviews - we have been a Google 5-star small business for six years in a row.


Fees

Our fees structure follows a hybrid model - significant free advice via our popular posts on this website, Facebook page, and public seminars; a variable pay-by-the-hour counseling component, and a fixed-price offering for essay and resume reviews.

We are especially proud of our free offerings - our library of nearly 100 original posts dedicated to every aspect of high school readiness. Our Facebook Business Page, operational since 2013, contains a treasure-trove of posts about all things college.

Please review our latest Fees page. To estimate how much you should budget for engaging with us, add up the fees for all the individual counseling hours (typically 4-5 hours for the entire college admissions cycle) to the fees for the number of essays you want us to review. Our essays shopping cart gives you multiple ideas about how to group essays so that you can optimize each essay order.

Example: My daughter wants to apply to UT Austin, Texas A&M, UT Dallas, and the University of Houston only. How much should I budget in total?

Answer: Click here for a graphic and see below for the explanation.

Assume four hours of counseling. 

The resume review is item 7 on our essays shopping cart page.

UT Austin and Texas A&M are two universities with demanding essay requirements. UT Austin accepts the Common App #7. Texas A&M accepts the ApplyTex Topic A essay. These would be two 700 word essay (Item 1) buys on our shopping cart page. [In some cases, you could repurpose the ApplyTex Topic A essay to suit the Common App in which case you will only need one order].

UT Austin has two supplements of 300 words each. Texas A&M has two main supplements, plus five stealth scholarship supplements. You could group all these supplements into two Item 1 orders and one Item 2 order on our essays shopping cart page. 

[UTD and the University of Houston do not require platform essays, but we recommend submitting the Common App essay anyway since you have already paid for it. Submitting Common App essays to these last two schools increases your chances of obtaining an institutional scholarship, like the UTD AES].

In the above example, assuming four counseling hours, one resume buy, and five Item 1 essay buys, your total budget would be $2,700. We remain among the lowest-priced counseling firms in the United States.


Next steps: Please begin your engagement with us early. ApplyTex opens July 1. The Common App and Coalition App open on Aug 1. But essay prompts are already out. The earlier we complete your part of the admissions process, the better off you will be. Please use our online calendar to reserve your spot.

12th-graders are our most important constituency, given how truly life-changing the Senior year can be. As during previous years, we will shutter our services to all other grades between Sep 1 and Nov 1, the busiest eight weeks of the college admissions season. If you have a younger one needing help, we ask you to book appointments outside this window.

I hope to work with your student in the coming months. Good luck!

​Rajkamal Rao




A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please contact us for more information.









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How do you prepare for the SAT/ACT?






By Rajkamal Rao


 
 
 
Image by Rao Advisors

 
We're often asked - what is the best way to prepare for the SAT/ACT?

The simple answer is by not spending any money.

Colleges are indifferent to which test you should take and treat both the SAT and the ACT with no bias towards one or the other. The concordance tables that map the ACT scores to the SAT have consistently shown that this policy makes sense. Statistically, one can be nearly 100% confident that an ACT score falls within a narrow 30-point SAT score range. STEM-focused students will probably do better on the ACT because the dedicated Science section contributes 25% to the ACT composite and will help lift the overall score up. 

Both the SAT and the ACT are attempting to stay relevant as there is increasing pressure from groups who lobby for the elimination of these tests altogether. [Groups such as FairTest have exploited disruptions caused by Covid to convince more than 1,800 colleges and universities to go test-optional]. But there are many colleges that still require the SAT/ACT for college admissions, and when test scores are submitted, colleges will consider them as one more data point to make admissions decisions. Besides, test-optional does not mean test-blind. In Texas, scoring a minimum of 480 in reading and 530 in math (Super scoring is NOT allowed) is required to avoid colleges imposing Texas Success Initiative requirements. 

Beginning in 2024, it has become clear that the test-optional party at many top colleges is finally coming to an end. We track the announcements of various elite schools, including UT Austin, in this Facebook post. Colleges are beginning to realize after four years of experimentation with student admissions and performance that test scores better help predict students’ college grades, and their chances of graduation and post-college success. Grades are not as accurate a predictor because of issues like grade inflation that make it difficult to assess a student’s work.

Digital SAT

On January 25, 2022, the College Board announced that the SAT will be going digital beginning in 2024. Here are excellent tips developed by the College Board for the digital age.

Taking a full-length practice test on Bluebook is one of the best ways to prepare for the real test. Digital practice tests simulate the real test experience, including adaptive modules and built-in tools (like highlighting and answer elimination). [Paper practice tests are still useful for content review, but they don’t reflect the new format or timing]. Our advice is that you prioritize digital practice tests.

The College Board offers 10 full-length digital practice tests through the Bluebook app. These include:

  • Practice Tests 4–6: Previously available digital tests
  • Practice Tests 7–10: Newly added in 2025, combining fresh questions and select items from the original paper-based Tests 1–3
  • Note: Practice Tests 1–3 were removed from the Bluebook in February 2025, but their content is partially reused in updates Tests 7–10.
You can find both the Bluebook digital tests and the updated PDFs on the SAT Suite Practice Tests page

The digital test is shorter because it relies on adaptive testing. That means the test changes based on the students' answers, with the goal of reducing the time students spend answering questions that are either too easy or too hard. 


SAT Digital Suite. Image Courtesy: The College Board.

 

Practicing before taking the full-length practice tests

 
The Khan Academy, the College Board and the ACT Academy are outstanding SAT/ACT resources - so good that no other test prep academy even comes close. And all of these are free.
  
Even tutor-learner online sessions are now free at schoolhouse.world. Sessions are currently offered for Pre-Algebra, Algebra, Geometry, Trigonometry, Precalculus, Calculus, Statistics, and SAT prep. Additional subjects may be added in the future. 
 
Sal Khan, founder of the Khan Academy, partnered with his college friend, Shishir Mehrotra, cofounder and CEO of Coda. Together, with Mariah Olson, Drew Bent, and a handful of volunteers, they created schoolhouse.world. 

But if you are looking for additional hand-holding and project management, there are numerous commercial test-prep companies - for example, KD and Testmasters for in-person test prep and Magoosh or Princeton Review online - which help overcome the anxieties of families and children because test preparation is considered so crucial to college admissions.

Which brings us to two important points.  The first is that these timed tests are measures of scholastic aptitude and predictors of college readiness.  In other words, there's really nothing much that students have to study for.  Reading, writing and math are skills that are taught to them all through their school years, so the material should be readily apparent to them if they have been paying attention. The challenge for many students is to manage time on test day, and luckily, the Khan Academy has excellent suggestions for students to adopt. 

Not studying for, however, does not mean not practicing.  So you prepare for these tests more by practicing than studying.
This leads us to the second point.  What do you practice on?  If you're practicing for a big tennis tournament, you go hit balls on a regulation-size tennis court with real tennis balls and racquets.  Similarly, practicing SAT and ACT content with official questions is the only way to really prepare for these tests. A Kaplan or Barron's practice test at best is a simulated attempt at the actual College Board test. No matter how hard these companies try, they can never get it just right. The degree of difficulty and the distributed intensity of the questions can never be as accurate as the official tests.

Step-by-step review of how to maximize SAT/ACT outcomes

 

Let's review all of the tools which students have to prepare for the SAT. The most important book you need is the Official SAT Study Guide. The Khan Academy website is your best friend because it is the official partner of the College Board with outstanding technical features.

  1. If you link your College Board account with the Khan Academy account, the KA website will automatically detect which areas of testing you are weak in based on your performances on the PSAT.  And it will start serving up lessons and practice questions so that you can improve.  Even a private coaching academy will not give you such personalized service!

  2. You can set your smartphone or PC to automatically challenge you with practice questions every day at a certain time.  You set the frequency, the topic, and the number of questions. 

  3. Practicing content before taking full-length practice tests. The Khan Academy website is your best friend because it is the official partner of the College Board with outstanding technical features. There are loads of videos and review content if you are ever not sure about a topic area. Don't forget to sign up for free SAT instruction on schoolhouse.world. 

  4. Taking full-length practice tests. There are the full-length practice tests from the College Board (see previous sections for links) so that you can create test-day conditions in the privacy of your home.

    Timing the practice tests for maximum impact is crucial. Studying for the SAT during the summer and taking the test in August is the best solution because you do not have school obligations to interfere with test preparation.

    Say that the big Test Day is Aug 24. Refrain from taking a practice test the day before. You want to be fully relaxed and confident, so take in a movie or play your favorite video game on Aug 23. Also, never take two practice tests on consecutive days. You should set aside the day following a practice test day for diagnostics and comprehensive review - more on this in point #7 below.

    Your schedule should look something like this:

    Aug 24 - Test Day
    Aug 23 - Relax!
    Aug 22 - Diagnostics for Practice Test 10
    Aug 21 - Practice Test 10
    Aug 20 - Diagnostics for Practice Test 9
    Aug 19 - Practice Test 9
    ....
    ....
    Aug 4  - Practice Test 1

    Before taking the first practice test, you will have practiced your skills on the over 2,000 official questions on the Khan Academy website, including over 900 questions in Math. Each student is different - but you should plan on a minimum of 30 practice questions every day. Depending upon how many questions you routinely get right, and how much time you require to review video lessons to remedy those skills with which you're uncomfortable, plan on about an hour of diligent study every day. This is not a big ask - it's after all the dry, boring days of summer.

    If you plan to practice on every question (this may not be possible because of how the site allocates competency badges as you master skills for each test topic), this will theoretically take 66 days. So, working backward from Aug 4, you're looking at starting your test preparation on or about June 1, about 2½ months prior to the test date.

    This preparation window is standard in the industry. When you buy a package from an online test preparation company, your license will generally expire in 90 days. Even brick-and-mortar test academies plan for a 90-day schedule from the time you start. The nice thing about the Khan Academy is that the cost is zero. 

  5. If you are doing paper based practice tests, you can print out the answer sheets even and use 2HB pencils to oval your responses out.To score your test, go back to the page containing the seven full-length non-adaptive paper-based practice tests. Test bundles from practice test 4 to 10 are available. 

  6. Here's the most important step: Diagnostics. When reviewing the detailed explanations for wrong answers, track if you had more than one wrong answer in a topic area, such as Congruence and Similarity (Math), or Possessive Determiners (English Grammar).

    If yes, you must go back and review the appropriate refresher video lessons on Khan Academy before taking the next full-length practice test. Many students are too eager to believe that their foundational knowledge is so strong that a remedial review is unnecessary. For well-designed tests such as the SAT/ACT, which pry on tricking students, such over-confidence could impact test-day scores.

  7. ACT Prep. If you're preparing for the ACT, check out our post.

When you enroll your child in a test prep academy, you are primarily outsourcing the project management of your child's preparation.  But is this really worth $2,000 - $3,000? 

The big testing companies know that the market is slipping away from them. This is why many of them are getting into the college counseling industry. Read our post here about how one famous test company is doing just this and why.

 Tell your child that he or she is much better off practicing at home on his or her own.  And promise your child half of the savings in cash if they beat expectations!  After all, nothing is more American than that!

When you are ready to report your SAT scores to colleges, please follow the detailed College Board instructions here.




A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please contact us for more information.









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Rajkamal Rao Sports Journalism Profile

 

Stanford University Track. Image: Rao Advisors

 
I am a U.S.-based part-time journalist/columnist with my work appearing in Tippinsights, multiple media properties of the Hindu Group in India, and All India Radio.

I received media credentials to cover the 2020 Tokyo Olympics but I couldn't attend because of Covid restrictions.

I present below a sample of several tennis/sports columns of mine that have appeared in the press.

Rajkamal Rao - Print/online media
  1. Wimbledon's second fall from grace - Times of India op-ed
  2. Australia smashes down Djokovic’s pleas
  3. President Biden Could Learn From The WTA's Resolve (Editorial)
  4. Tennis — French Open proves unpredictable, again
  5. How the likes of Rajiv Maheswaran are using data to pull out winners in sport
  6. At the US Open, bizarre rules topple top seeds
  7. Indian cricket is back to its glory days
  8. Serena Williams lost, and not just the US Open final
  9. Why Nadal and Federer continue their domination
  10. Federer and Nadal return to dominate tennis
  11. Cricket and its failings
  12. The resurgence of Federer and Nadal is a treat
  13. Fine wine and the Australian Open
  14. Duplicate Olympic spirit? Easier said than done!
  15. Is too much money tainting tennis?

Rajkamal Rao - Radio
  1. Apr 11, 2023 - All India Radio, weekly sports roundup. WPL summary. 
  2. Nov 25, 2014 - All India Radio, weekly sports roundup.  Interview with Vijay Amritraj covering CTL in Bangalore.
  3. Oct 14, 2014 - All India Radio, weekly sports roundup.  Interview with Olympic Gold and World Gold medal winner Abhinav Bindra (starts at 01:30).
  4. Sep 9, 2014 - All India Radio, weekly sports roundup covering the Davis Cup pre-tie activities. At clip marker 05:27, an interview with Anand Amritraj.
  5. Other broadcasts (some in Kannada):

    1. Sep 16, 2014 - All India Radio, 10 PM, weekly sports roundup covering the Davis Cup matches.  A 13 minute clip featuring an exclusive interview with Rohan Bopanna in Kannada, starting at clip marker 06:17. 

    2. Sep 9, 2014 - All India Radio, 10 PM, weekly sports roundup covering the Davis Cup pre-tie activities.  9 minute clip featuring an interview with the Jt. Secy of the Karnataka State Lawn Tennis Association; followed by, at clip marker 05:27, an interview with Anand Amritraj in English.   
       
    3. Aug 26, 2014 - All India Radio, 10 PM, weekly sports roundup largely covering the Pro Kabaddi League game between Bangalore and Patna.  17 minute clip featuring commentary in Kannada, starting at clip marker 01:49, followed by interviews with the Bengaluru Bulls coach and the former captain of the India Kabaddi team, an Arjuna Award winner. 
     

    My official Muckrack profile is here. As a print/online columnist opining on various topics, I have written 450 published pieces and appeared numerous times as a commentator on television.
     
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UT Austin dramatically relaxes essay requirements after Fall 2025






By Rajkamal Rao  





Image Credit: Rao Advisors LLC.

Update: May 22, 2024

The University of Texas will continue to accept the Common App (along with ApplyTexas), but the essay requirements have been dramatically relaxed and shortened for Fall 2025 and beyond.

Goodbye to the 650-word required essay (the growth essay) plus the three tough supplements. The dreaded "Please share how you believe your experience at UT-Austin will prepare you to 'Change the World' after you graduate" essay is now gone. There are now only two supplements. All of these changes should be good news for thousands of high school students. 


Required essay (500-650 words)

Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you’ve already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design. 

This is identical to Common App prompt #7. It means that you can submit any essay you wish (including responses to any of the seven Common App prompts), significantly lowering your effort to complete the UT required essay.

Supplemental essays (250-300 words).

  1. Why are you interested in the major you indicated as your first-choice major?

    This has remained unchanged from Fall 2021. A good way to discuss this is to start with what triggered your interest and then pivot forward to what your intended career after college would be.

    To research careers, check out the U.S. Department of Labor's website, ONET, which contains detailed job descriptions for over 575 careers. Consider using those themes and some buzzwords back into your essay making sure not to copy content verbatim. Here's the ONET listing for Aerospace Engineers as an example. Also, don't forget to examine related careers.

  2. Think of all the activities — both in and outside of school — that you have been involved with during high school. Which one are you most proud of and why? (Guidance for students: This can include an extracurricular activity, a club/organization, volunteer activity, work or a family responsibility.) 

    This is similar to the "Experience" essay from Fall 2021 but the wording has been significantly watered down. For example, the words "describe" or "share" do not appear in the prompt, so you could be more free-flowing in your response. You could talk about your experiences, perspectives, and/or talents have shaped your ability to contribute to and enrich the learning environment at UT Austin, both in and out of the classroom. Or you can describe your "Leadership" qualities in school, a job, your community, and/or within your family responsibilities.

     
  3. OPTIONAL. Please share background on events or special circumstances that you feel may have impacted your high school academic performance. 

    We encourage students to take advantage of this prompt only if you have met with real adversity, such as a loss of job of a parent, impact to family income, perhaps, loss of life. 

    For the full list of official prompts, visit UT's Freshman Admissions website.

    For a primer on how to write essays and how we can help, click here. To learn how we help high school seniors navigate the college admissions process, click here. 


A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.









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About the new Undergrad Degree in Informatics at UT Austin





By Rajkamal Rao  





Image Source: School of Information, UT Austin

The University of Texas has launched a brand new undergrad program in Informatics in its School of Information.  I reached out to Natasha V. Saldaña, the Undergraduate Program Coordinator, with several questions and here are her polite responses. You may contact her here.  

  1. How is the School of Information different from the MIS major at McCombs or BHP?

    Informatics is multi-disciplinary and has six different concentration areas for students to pursue.  All of them have an aspect of how technology intersects with humans. For students who are interested in CS, ECE, and MSIS, the Bachelor of Science in Informatics (BSI) is considered a STEM major.

    If you are specifically interested in Data Science we offer the Human-Centered Data Science major concentration.

    Concentration in Human-Centered Data Science

    Data is one of the most valuable commodities in the information society, and workers who can use data to gain new insights are in great demand. Diverse skills are required to collect, manage, and analyze data, as well as consideration of the great ethical responsibility that comes with collecting, managing, and analyzing data, and the importance of critical thinking skills. The Human-Centered Data Science Concentration of the B.S./B.A. in Informatics will prepare you for a career involving artificial intelligence, machine learning, information retrieval, data curation, and data analysis. The Human-Centered Data-Science Concentration includes taking Introduction to Human-Centered Data Science followed by advanced topics courses such as Data Wrangling, Crowdsourcing, Machine Learning, and Search Informatics. Choosing the Concentration in Human-Centered Data Science will prepare you for a career in which you leverage data, information, and technology to benefit society.

  2. In which college does the School of Information lie (Natural Sciences, Liberal Arts, etc.)?

    The School of Information.

  3. Do you have an Honors program associated with the Informatics degree (like the Polymath or Deans Science Honors)?

    At this time, no; Fall 2021 is the launch of the new program and we will begin to build these programs. 

  4. Can students pursue a double major?

    Yes, students can dual-degree seek. In the School of Information, there is only one major​.  Students can choose to pursue a BA or BSI. 

  5. Approximately how many students are in the Freshman class?

    For the first class, we anticipate 50-60 freshman students.  The additional 40 are internal transfer and external transfer students. 

  6. What scholarship programs do you have outside of the usual UT offerings considering that you're a relatively new degree?

    As you mentioned, we are a new degree and because of this, we do not have any established scholarships.  We are working to build these as we grow.




A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.








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Highlights of individual counseling






 

 

 What do you get as part of individual counseling?

Stanford University. Image: Rao Advisors

We like to think of ourselves as the Amazon of college counseling!   We provide a full suite of services - high school course planning, college readiness, college selection, and admissions strategies, financial planning, advice for demonstrating student interest in colleges, structured essay reviews - from when your child is in the 8th grade to when the last college admissions offer is received.

We create a detailed customized roadmap for each child for all remaining high school years including structured plans for how to spend summer months, how to plan and manage extracurricular activities, when best to schedule the various tests, how to prepare for tests at the lowest cost and how to free up a student's time so that there is sufficient school-life balance. 

We provide numerous proprietary tools - weighted average GPA tracker, resume templates, SAT practice logs, 4-year roadmap, college selection using U.S. Department of Education metrics, and a detailed project plan for college admissions. Plus each family receives our popular, proprietary 230-page guide to elite college admissions which is the content source for our public appearances, book, and flagship online courses.  

Families have free access to our Popular Posts page along with regular updates about all things school and college on our Facebook page.  Our low-cost live paid webinars are also very popular. Finally, customers gain free membership into our growing WhatsApp community of over 300 parents.

Families come to us for help answering numerous questions. Here is a sample list of topics we cover during our sessions, tailored to the needs of your student.

 

 A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions. We are indebted and privileged to have earned their trust in matters which are so important to them. Please check out our public Google reviews to see what they say about us.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please contact us for more information.

 


 

 



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