Most families who come to us for college guidance are also hoping we can help their student with the essays. And any counselor who’s done that knows that there’s a fine line between giving good assistance and helping too much. Most admissions officers expect that students will look to counselors and teachers for feedback and advice. But they can always tell when caring wordsmiths got too involved and inserted their own ideas and words into the essays.
Here are three concepts we use during our essay work to make sure we walk that line right.
1. Use our “Hidden camera” concept.
When we’re counseling a student, we imagine that an admissions officer from the student’s dream college is watching what we’re doing. If it feels right on camera, it’s probably OK. Asking students questions, giving feedback on their ideas, and even pointing out when we think something they’ve shared might be interesting (or risky), those all feel within the rules when you’re on camera. But as soon as you start coming up with ideas for the student, or trying to change a student’s mind about what he wants to write, or telling a student exactly what to say and how to say it, you’re out bounds. If you wouldn’t do it on camera, don’t do it at all.
2. Don’t pressure a student to take your advice.
We never pressure a student to take our advice. If a kid tells me he wants to write the most inappropriate college essay in the history of college essays, I will be very direct about what my concerns are. I’ll tell him why I think it’s a risky idea. But then I’ll ask him what he wants to do and let him make the call. Again, the camera is a good guide here. Colleges would want you to advise the kid, but they wouldn’t want you to impose your perspective on him.
Also, essay advising only works with a willing participant. If the student doesn’t want your help, don’t give it to him. I don’t care what the reason is. If the student thinks she’s a natural writer who prefers to work on her own, let her. If you’ve got a surly teenager on your hands who just doesn’t feel like doing the work, you’ve got to let him make that (bad) choice. If you force your help on the student, you’ll be met with resistance. But more importantly, no college wants you to care about a student’s essays more than he does. And they certainly wouldn’t want you to do the work for the student.
3. Don’t help a student who comes to you with nothing.
I won’t brainstorm an essay with a student unless he’s thoughtfully answered our brainstorming questions (24 questions about their lives, activities and college aspirations that students answer in writing ahead of time). If a student shows up without responses, I send him home. If he shows up with two-sentence answers that he obviously completed five minutes ago in the car out in our parking lot, I send him home. Even if the student argues that she doesn’t need to do the brainstorming questions because she already knows which prompt she wants our help with, we won’t do it.
Students need to earn the right for this kind of help by doing their part. Colleges are trying to get kids to thoughtfully consider their lives when writing essays. I want our brainstorming process to encourage, not eliminate, that introspection. If a student can’t be bothered to take the time to give us responses, that’s OK with me. But he hasn’t earned the right to essay help.
You don’t have to use written brainstorming questions to follow this. Just make sure your student come to the table with some ideas of his own. He needs to have thought about the prompts and what he might like to write. He’s got to give you something or he’s just not trying hard enough.
Even if you have a nice, willing kid who’s happy to receive your help, if he just tells you he doesn’t have any ideas about what to write, then looks at you waiting for suggestions, he’s putting you in an awfully difficult position. And you won’t be doing him any admissions favors by coming up with stories for him.