How much value do certifications give your application?

Answered

Hi @Mayawire314

Most of the early decision and early action deadlines have passed. So you must be talking about the some of 11/15/22 ED or EA deadlines.

Certification at the expert level is great for your resume if you are looking for a job or to show evidence that you have mastered a piece of software. I wouldn't conflate that goal or value with college admissions criteria or something an admissions reader is going to earmark as something of great value to them.

While it's impressive that you are going to get expert certified, remember that Trimech is a small software company with 30,000 users across all its platforms which is like 10 different pieces of software. So I'm not sure being one of 3,000 expert users is that compelling for a university to give you special commendations.

Now if the university or college you are applying to does in fact use SolidWorks, and this is something that is going to help you with your chosen academic path and you are going to have to leverage being an expert user, then there is some value.

Why I say this is that if you were an expert at Autocad which is one of the industry standards with 6,000,000 users, it's fair to say that whether you are applying to engineering or architecture schools or CS, there is a good chance that Autodesk has a strategic alliance or partnership with most the colleges that require CAD software as part of their set of tools for their coursework. So being an expert in something that is a benchmark tool, might come in as handy as already knowing how to code in Python, C, C++, or Javascript.

I didn't research this software very much but it might make sense to identify which research universities currently hold a license agreement to use SolidWorks. Why? Because those schools would be the ones that already have made a decision to use it.

I do not think that adding this certification either now or later is going to have much direct impact on your ability to apply for scholarships or other merit aid at the colleges you are already interested in applying to.

Good luck.