Marin Kids Applying to College? Send to Admissions via YouTube.

Guest blog by Guru of New Tufts goes YouTube; invites prospective students to submit video applications Posted: 15 Mar 2010 12:24 PM PDT We’ve all heard the sorry stories of the drunken student whose photo-tagged Facebook picture gets discovered by either a prospective employer or an admissions officer at the college of her dreams. And these aren’t just snopes-worthy urban legends. According to a NACAC press release on the report, one-fourth of colleges surveyed indicated that they used a Web search or social networking technology to locate information about prospective students. Which is why what topnotch school Tufts did is not only incredibly refreshing but game-changing as well. For the first time this year, Tufts University in Medford, Mass., invited aspiring students to submit short YouTube videos to supplement their applications. According to a report in the New York Times, about 1,000 of the 15,000 applicants did so. The results range from gutsy (convincing the school that admitting a proficient Raver is a swell idea) to adorable (Paulo Nutini’s “New Shoes” meet Hillary) to heartwrenchingly authentic and uber-sincere. Some of the videos have developed a YouTube following. Amelia Downs’ Math Dance video, which has almost 57,000 views, blends “two of my favorite things: being a nerd and dancing.” In the perky video,she performs a bar graph, a scatter plot, a pie chart, and a sine and cosine graph: Hello Tufts Admission person! This movie shows me performing my math dances! The dances shown are: Volume of a solid of revolution (y-axis) Line graph Scatter plot Box and whisker plot Pie graph.. Click here to browse the sample videos. (No word yet on which of these brave and creative videographers made the cut. And they still have to complete the traditional essay.)