Kevin McMullin

College admissions advice for students, parents, and counselors

When more is not better

by

From Seth Godin’s blog yesterday:

“One thing you’ll discover when you start pan roasting brussel sprouts or tomatoes (or running a theater or an airline, or just about anything for that matter) is that more is not always better.”

The same goes for reach schools, materials with your applications, letters of recommendation, and supporting materials when applying for a job.

More isn’t always better.

College interviews: when the bill arrives

by

I got an interesting question from a senior the other day. The alumni interviewer from one of her potential colleges contacted her and scheduled the interview at a local café (which is totally normal). Her question:

“Should I offer to pay after we meet, or will that look like I’m just trying too hard?”

This is an opportunity to showcase the most important trait you can demonstrate during an interview—that you can have a mature conversation with an adult.

Before I explain how to handle this scenario, here’s an important disclaimer. I think that over-strategizing the college admissions process is almost always a misguided idea that just leads to more stress. What I’m about to describe here is not a college interview-specific strategy. In fact, it’s the same thing I would tell a young working professional meeting a colleague, potential client, or future employer in a similar situation. Students transitioning from high school to college are preparing for life in the real world. This is one of those times when you can get a head start.

Here’s what I suggest:

1. Show up with cash, and be prepared to pay for both of you.

This doesn’t mean that you’re obligated to pay—in fact, you almost certainly won’t have to. But my grandfather used to say that you should never dine out with people unless you’re capable of paying the bill for the table (whether or not that’s what ultimately happens). It’s classy and it prevents you from any awkward bill-related conversations.

2. Let the interviewer order first.

I suggest that you plan on ordering a beverage only, no food. Food just increases your distractions as well as the chances of ending up with parsley in your teeth or ketchup on your nice shirt. And if you just order a lemonade, you’re controlling the cost of your meal nicely.

But it’s polite to defer and let the interviewer order first. And it lets you gauge the interviewer’s order. If he or she orders a steak sandwich and a salad, you might feel uncomfortable just sipping your lemonade. An order that doesn’t match the selection or quantity of your interviewer’s choice isn’t going to hurt your chances of getting into college. My only strategy here is to keep you from feeling awkward.

3. When the bill arrives, just reach for it and say, “I’d be happy to get this.”

Any reasonable interviewer will refuse to let a teenager pay the bill. But let’s stay on theme here—this is a polite thing that mature adults do at the end of a shared meal.

Your interviewer will likely thank you but decline to let you pay, at which point you just say something akin to,

“OK. Well, here’s five dollars for my lemonade.”

And if the interviewer rebuffs you again, just say, “Thanks—I really appreciate that.”

It shouldn’t feel like a scripted dance. This scenario is just something that happens when you dine out, particularly with people you don’t know well. Show up with money, offer to pay (and mean it), and if your offer is refused, be gracious. I’ve met people twice the age of the average college applicant who don’t bother to do these things. If you do them at 17, you’re bound to make a good impression.

And in the spirit of lowering stress, here’s a bit on this topic from my favorite comedian.

What if it were against the law to talk about admissions topics?

by

Parents, imagine a state law had just been enacted that prohibited you from praising, critiquing, or even acknowledging anything about your student that would be listed on a college application. Your child’s grades, test scores, awards, number of community service hours completed—mention them to your kid or to anyone else, and you’d be officially breaking the law.

What would you talk about with your student?
What would you say when talking about your student?
When you assessed your own success as a parent, what criteria would you use?

Try it for a week. Or even just 24 hours. See what happens. My guess is that it will lower stress and change your conversations for the better.

Real lessons beat deep lessons

by

Too many students try to inject a meaningful life lesson into the story they share in their college essays.

“Being on the tennis team taught me the importance of committing to my goals.”

“My leadership position demonstrates that I work well with others.”

“During my trip to France, I learned to appreciate different cultures.”

There are two problems with those messages in college essays.

1. They’re often not true.
2. They’re the same lessons thousands of other applicants are claiming to learn.

I’m not suggesting that you can’t learn things on the tennis team, in a leadership position, or in a foreign country. But has that tennis player ever actually said those words, not in a college essay or a formal interview, but in their day-to-day life, to a friend, relative, or teacher? I’ve certainly never met a student who has.

And that’s why those lessons fall flat when you cite them in college essays. They’re clichés, not unlike the formulaic movie where you can see the ending coming a mile away. College admissions officers want to get to know the real you, not some contrived version who injects deep life lessons that weren’t actually there at the time.

There are two ways to avoid this trap.

1. Remember that not every essay subject needs a deep life lesson.

No, you shouldn’t write an essay that leaves the reader asking, “Why did this kid just spend 500 words telling me how much he likes to eat peanut butter out of the jar?” But that doesn’t mean that your stories need to have deep, philosophical meaning. Sometimes the real point is that you were the worst player on the tennis team but you loved tennis anyway. Or maybe you never felt better about yourself than when the school dance you had planned got a large turnout. Or maybe the best part of your trip to France was chatting with your big sister for ten uninterrupted hours on the flight. You’ve just shared an interesting tale about yourself that the reader couldn’t have learned from the rest of your application. No big life lesson necessary.

2. Share the real lesson if there is one.

If you learned something from an experience, say so! But share the real lesson, regardless of whether it’s deep or impressive. And share it in a way that you’d actually express verbally to a person you know.

“When you work as a restaurant host and you have to wear a uniform, you learn how to iron a shirt really well.”

“The day I saw my mother argue a case in court was the day I realized that my mom is, to put it bluntly, kind of a badass.”

“When I had to choose between drama and baseball, everyone in my life was surprised that I chose the stage over the diamond. Two years later, I can say it was the smartest decision I’ve ever made.”

There’s nothing contrived about messages like those. Nothing manufactured to sound deep or impressive, just real insights from the students who experienced them. But the real lessons are almost always more interesting to read about.

Over-scheduling = under-impacting

by

Many of the happy and successful students we’ve worked with at Collegewise were more focused than they were busy. Rather than being distracted by too many activities, meetings, and other obligations, they focused their time and attention on the things that were most important to them. It’s those students, not the over-scheduled kids trying to do everything they can think of to give themselves a college admissions edge, that really make an impact while they’re in high school. They’re not busy being busy. Instead, they’re focused on getting things done.

Study skills author Cal Newport is also a relentless advocate for focus, going so far as to say that you can be busy or remarkable, but not both. His latest post shares Warren Buffett’s take on focus. Not surprisingly, Buffett, who I’m guessing has a schedule that’s about as full as a schedule can be, is disciplined about putting his time and energy into those things that are most important to him.

For high school students, here’s the takeaway. The real measure of success and impact is not the sheer number of things that you do or the hours that you spend doing them—it’s what you actually get done. Not everything you do needs to help you get into college (sleeping, spending time with friends and family, and good old teenage goofing off are important for your happiness and sanity, too).

But you shouldn’t fill your days with obligations in which you just go through the motions so you can list them on your résumé. That’s a sure path toward over-scheduling and under-impacting.

“I’ve been (financially) hurt before”

by

Here’s a financial aid mistake I’ve seen some parents make. They applied for financial aid when their first child was preparing to start college, and they didn’t get a favorable result (no aid at all, or all loans and no grants). Now they have a second or third student entering college, and they decide not to apply for aid because they assume the results will be similar. They’ve experienced financial aid disappointment before and understandably don’t want to go through the trouble of filling out the forms again.

Here’s why that works against you. The number of children in a family who are enrolled in college simultaneously has a big impact on your financial aid eligibility, even if your income and assets remain unchanged. That’s why families with multiple kids in college at the same time tend to get more financial aid.

Bottom line: financial aid assumptions frequently work against you. If you have a student applying to college, apply for need-based aid, even if you’ve been hurt before.

Consider financial fit

by

It wasn’t that long ago that families had to watch their students apply to college without actually knowing how much it would ultimately cost. Financial aid packages are awarded around the same time a student receives an offer of admission. So the choice of where to apply was a financial roll of the dice. That changed in October 2011 when the government mandated that every college had to include a tool called the “net price calculator” on their websites.

In addition to the net price calculators on college websites, here are two other resources to help families estimate college affordability before a student applies:

Mark Kantrowitz recently penned Consider Financial Fit when Choosing Colleges.

And here’s a past post of mine about how to include affordability when searching for college fits.

Do you have any questions?

by

Students often ask our Collegewise counselors, “What questions should I ask during my college interview?”

Our answer is almost always the same—are there things about this college that you’d genuinely like to know more about? Those are your questions. You’re sitting with someone who knows much more about this school than you do. If you’re genuinely interested in the college, you almost certainly have questions.

Don’t worry so much about whether or not the questions are good. Just make sure they’re sincere. No, you shouldn’t be inappropriate (if you wouldn’t want your parents to hear the question, it’s probably inappropriate). But asking sincere questions is a good way to demonstrate sincere interest in the school.

The simplest application advice

by

It’s so important that it bears repeating—when it comes to applications, before you worry about anything else, just follow the directions.

One of our Collegewise counselors who previously worked at a very selective college reminded us this week of the importance of following directions when it comes to how many letters of recommendation to submit. Her school asked for two letters. Here’s what she had to say about that part of the process:

1. The letters were important.
2. They would read two letters and only two letters. A student who sent 3 or 4 or 9 letters? They’d read two of them. And those students had no control over which two would be read.

Don’t decide you have a better way. Follow the application directions, and you can avoid many of the most common application mistakes.