How Yale's committee chooses between strong applicants

YYale's admissions committee works as a small, skeptical room, according to the people who sat in it. Jeffrey Brenzel, Yale's dean of admissions from 2005 to 2013, described around five people hearing each file from the officer who read it first, a group that can include a faculty member, a senior dean and other officers, and that votes. A former senior assistant director described the dynamic from inside: the presenting officer is your advocate, and everyone else at the table is there to be skeptical. Committees, he said, tend to look for a reason to say no.

That leaves one person in the room on your side, and what the file gives that person decides how long the argument lasts.