We just released streaming videos of our three most popular seminars—college essays, financial aid and college interviews. All three are now available in our online store. Today, I wanted to give a little background on our college essay video, why we made it, and what’s included.
Why we made it
We learned early on at Collegewise that college essay advice does a lot more good when given at the beginning—before a student writes a draft—than it does at the end. Before we started doing our seminar, if a student brought us an essay that was 600 words of full-blown cliché about how his time on the wrestling team taught him the importance of committing to his goals, it was a difficult position for us and for the student. We wanted to give the good advice we’d been hired to give. And that's what the student expected from us. But we also didn’t want to take over the process and veto a student’s story idea—that would be helping too much. We knew we could have prevented those mistakes and done more good if we’d given our advice at the beginning rather than at the end.
Our college essay seminar solved that problem for us. Today, our Collegewise students learn everything they need to know to choose and write good stories before they ever start writing. When students get it right the first time, we don’t have to give them as much feedback on their drafts, which helps us make sure we don’t help too much. This video was shot at one of those essays seminars we gave to our families. Now any student—whether or not you’re in the Collegewise program—can write better college essays by just spending one hour watching our seminar on video.
How we’re using it
I do the college essay seminar for students in our Irvine, California office. But now we’re giving Collegewise families who work with us in all any of our offices free access to the video. We’ll also use the video to supplement our trainings of new counselors and essay specialists. And any family in our Irvine location who can’t attend one of our scheduled essay seminars can now watch it on video.
How to use the video
The advice in the video applies to any type of college essay. It doesn’t matter whether the required essay is long or short, a general topic or something more specific. You can even apply the advice to questions about why you want to attend a particular school.
So there are a few ways you could use this:
1. Applicants can watch the video before you start writing your college essays. You’ll pick better stories, you’ll tell them in a compelling way, and you’ll be a lot closer to a strong finished product when you take your first draft to your counselor or English teacher for feedback.
2. You could even view our video a you’ve already written the essays and are still looking to make revisions. The advice on our video will help you evaluate your choice of story, how well you’ve written it, and whether or not the essay is going to be a positive factor in your admissions decision.
3. A teacher, counselor, parent, or anyone else who is asked to critique college essays will know exactly what to look for after watching this video.
Results
We’ve done this college essay workshop for thousands of Collegewise students and their parents. We’ve done it at high school events, at conferences for counselors, and even for English teachers who were looking for advice about how to help their kids with essays. We’re really excited to make this available to a much wider audience now and would love to hear what you think of it.
You can buy your copy here and view it right away online for $12.99.
kwally says
omg, that’s me! the black hair guy in the center! haha