Now that our new Mill Valley, California office is up and running, we're kicking off our arrival to the San Francisco Bay Area with two free "Secrets of College Admissions" seminars in the next week. All of the info is here. If you live in the Bay Area, we'd love to see you there. I think you'll be surprised how much we can teach you (and how much admissions-associated stress we can relieve) in just 90 minutes.
A testing assignment for juniors
Juniors, May 7 is the last day to register for the June 1 SAT or SAT Subject Tests. While I don’t recommend taking the SAT on that date unless you’ve yet to take it (juniors tend to be exhausted at the end of the year and adding another standardized test to your plate is worth avoiding if you can), June is actually the best time to take the Subject Tests if you need to take them. So here’s a testing homework assignment:
1. Visit the websites of the colleges you’re considering and find out if they require (or even consider) SAT Subject Tests.
2. If they do, register for those specific subjects required by the college. If the colleges give you options, choose those that match the courses you’re taking now. Popular choices for juniors are US history and chemistry.
You’re not going to know subjects like US history or chemistry better than you do as you’re preparing for finals. So find out if you need to take them, and if so, time the testing when your knowledge is best.
Course selection considerations for seniors
As the juniors wrap up 11th grade and prepare to rule the roost at school, here are four course considerations when planning your senior year classes:
Will you be:
…taking A.P English?
…taking a fourth year of math?
…taking a fourth year of foreign language?
…completing the lab science sequence (biology, chemistry and physics)?
The more competitive the colleges you want to attend, the more “yes’s” you’ll need in response to those questions.
And even if you don’t have aspirations of attending a college that rejects almost everyone who applies (good for you, by the way!), find selective yes’s. If science is your favorite subject, jump into physics and leave the math and foreign language behind. If you love writing a lot more than you love numbers, take AP English and pass on AP Calculus.
The key when planning courses is to take the most challenging classes you can reasonably handle. The vast majority of colleges in this country do not expect that you will take AP Everything. Challenge yourself, work hard, and make a special effort to shine in your favorite classes. That will help colleges see your potential when you take classes that really interest you.
Start a conversation
One of the best ways a private counselor, college, or even a student can market themselves is to earn the right to have a conversation with someone.
You might meet someone you don’t know at a dinner party and start a conversation. That’s a first step. If you like each other, you might exchange emails and stay in touch. You might decide you enjoy each other’s company. You might become good friends. You might become best friends. But it has to start somewhere, almost always with a conversation.
Most people will not immediately make the jump from viewing our website to enrolling in our counseling program. That’s like expecting someone to meet you at a dinner party and immediately invite you on vacation with their family. A lot of our customers are referred by their friends, but for strangers who don’t know us, it’s a process that looks like this.
1. Sign up for our free newsletter or subscribe to our blog.
When someone signs up for our newsletter or blog, we have permission to communicate with them (not spam them with marketing messages they didn’t ask for). We share good insight and advice, just as we promised to do. And over time, they’ll come to trust us more.
2. Sign up to be invited to one of our free college admissions seminars.
This is the professional version of, “We should get together sometime.” So we reach out to invite them, and if they attend, they’re in our figurative living room, willingly showing up to hear what we have to say. The conversation has progressed and we’re becoming friends.
3. Schedule an appointment for a free introductory meeting.
Now we’re meeting one-on-one and learning more about each other. We’re talking about the family’s college-related worries and how our counselor might be able to help. The conversation has progressed. We’ve gone from being strangers to potentially working together, but it didn’t happen because of one ad or marketing message.
If you’re trying to “get your name out there,” to get more people to notice you and maybe even buy what you’re selling, find ways to start conversations first. Do the work it takes to keep the conversation going so that both parties benefit. Good conversations are hard to stop having once you start them.
Welcome Shantá Lindo to Collegewise
Today, I’m excited to welcome Shantá Lindo to Collegewise as the director of our soon-to-be-opening office in Syosset, Long Island.
Who is Shantá?
Since graduating from Middlebury College in 2010 (where she attended on a full tuition scholarship from the Posse Foundation), Shantá has been working as an assistant director of admissions in Middlebury’s admissions office—an office that evaluates approximately 9,000 applications for 700 spots in the freshman class every year. She managed their Senior Admissions Fellowship Program that recruited and trained Middlebury seniors to deliver information sessions for prospective students. She also developed and ran an overnight program for prospective students from multi-cultural backgrounds.
Shantá has been living in the admissions world for the last three years; now she’s ready to bring what she's learned and help students on the other side of the admissions desk.
Why is the fit so good?
Throughout each of our interviews, Shantá kept coming back to a teaching theme that resonated with me. She wants to share what she’s learned—with students, parents and counselors. She wants to make a complicated process a lot more accessible to people by breaking it down and explaining it clearly. She’s as comfortable presenting to large groups as she is talking with students and parents one-on-one. That’s exactly the kind of teacher and guide that makes a great Collegewise counselor.
But Shantá was also excited about the business side of this job. She told me that she wanted the opportunity to be entrepreneurial and run a business. She wants to work someplace where she can say, “I might have a better way,” and get the green light to try it. It’s easy to say that you’re interested in a job; but it works a lot better when you find a job opening that fits what you’re looking for, not unlike the way that students always have better answers to the “Why this college?” questions when they’re applying to colleges that fit them in the first place.
Shantá is an overachiever, she’s passionate about her work, and she appears to be a great sport. When I completely butchered her name during our first interview (it’s pronounced “Shaun-TAY,)” she just said, “No problem—it’s a conversation starter!”
Ready to get started
Shantá is wrapping up her final season at Middlebury and moving to New York later this month. She’ll join me and our new trainees in Boston the week of June 10th for training, then head back to Long Island to officially launch our Syosset office. We’re really excited to work with her and are so happy she’s joining us.
Put a little voice into it
Whether you’re writing a college essay, an announcement for your club, or even just an email, don’t just get the words onto the paper. Put a little voice into it.
I’m all for being professional and polite when you should be. But that doesn’t mean you have to leave your voice out of your writing.
If you wouldn’t say, “Reaching my goal was extremely satisfying,” don’t write it in your college essay. Put some voice into it and say, “Running a mile in six minutes isn’t going to win any track meets. Still, it was a pretty big deal for me.”
Which club announcement would make you want to attend?
“The Red Cross Club meeting will be held today at lunch. Open to new members.”
Or
“If you’re looking for a club where you hang out with great people and do work you’re proud of, come by the Red Cross Club’s meeting today at lunch. We’ve got football players, drama folks, mathletes, vegans, computer programmers, poets, and musicians here. You’re bound to fit right in.”
Adding voice doesn’t mean you have to be funny. You just have to be you. If you were speaking these words instead of writing them, how would you say it? What would your tone be? Excited? Worried? Encouraging? Maybe even funny? You wouldn't hide those emotions when speaking this message. So don't hide them when you write it, either.
Words alone will get the basic message across. But the voice is what makes it real.
Open for business in the San Francisco Bay Area
The ink is dry on the lease for our new office space, and Collegewise is officially open for business in Marin County, California. If you live in the San Francisco Bay Area and would like to learn more about how we might be able to help your family enjoy the ride to college a bit more, have a chat with Casey Near, our fabulous director of Collegewise – Mill Valley, at 415-577-7184, or caseyn@collegewise.com. She may still be arranging office furniture and getting some college-related art on the walls, but after spending nearly three weeks traversing Marin County looking for office space, Casey is ready to do some college counseling.
We’ll also be offering several free college admissions seminars in the coming weeks to kick off our arrival. If you’d like us to invite you when we schedule them, you can sign up here.
It feels good to finally have a spot in Northern California and we're excited to get started.
Don’t give all the power to the pickers
Seth Godin has two good entries this week about the danger of waiting to get picked (#1 and #2). Here’s the bullet: If you spend all your time and energy working to get picked, whether it’s trying to sell your book idea to a publisher or working like crazy to get into an Ivy League School, you’re giving all the power to a small group of people doing the picking. The better plan is to pick yourself.
No, you can't "pick yourself" to go to Harvard. But you don’t need a prestigious college to pick you in order to be successful. In virtually every career, and in all walks of life, there are happy and successful people who went to hundreds of mostly not-so-famous colleges. What nearly all of those people have in common was the work ethic to get them where they wanted to go, not the luck of somehow getting picked.
If you want to be successful, go do the work it takes to be successful. Put your time and energy into getting smarter, finding what you’re good at, and developing your skills. College is a wonderful place to do all of those things. The harder you work to get there, the more likely you’ll be successful when you do. But don’t give all the power to the pickers. As Seth says,
“If you want to devote your work and your efforts to getting picked, that's your choice, and more power to you. But I think it's dangerous to start with the assumption that you have no choice.”
Five ways to encourage younger students
A friend who is volunteering as a mentor for a 7th grader asked me yesterday, “What’s the best way to help a student understand why school is important?” I don’t think there’s an easy answer, but here are things I encouraged her to try, all of which I’d recommend to parents of high school students, too.
1. Emphasize learning.
When school becomes all about grades, standardized tests, and going to college, many students lose sight of why they’re attending school in the first place—to learn. So emphasize the learning. Ask your kids about their favorite teacher and subject. Talk about what they’ve learned and why they find it interesting. And don’t limit those discussions to subjects covered in school. Whether it’s baseball history, computer programming or cooking authentic Italian food, when students appreciate how enjoyable it can be to learn things that interest them, their curiosity will stay fed (and the grades will likely take care of themselves).
2. Praise effort, not results.
Send the message that it’s more important for your student to extend an effort in school than it is for him or her to get straight A’s. Effort is an equal opportunity employer available to everyone from A students to C students. And kids are more likely to thrive when they know that Mom and Dad just want them to try their best. So when you see your student putting time and energy into school, praise the effort. Tell them how proud you are that they’re working hard. They’ll be more likely to keep seeking that praise in the future.
3. Ask them to teach.
One of the best ways to master a subject is to teach it to someone else. So when your student tells you about an enjoyable class, subject or teacher, be interested along with them and ask if they can explain it to you, not as a test to see if they know it, but as a chance to help you understand more about something they’ve learned (play dumb if you have to!). The more you get your student teaching the material to you, the more enjoyable—and more permanent—that learning will be. And showing your student that you enjoy learning new things won’t hurt, either.
4. Focus on strengths, not weaknesses.
This is a recurring theme on my blog for a reason. It’s easy to give attention to those classes and subjects that seem to be weaker areas for your student. But even an adult would tire quickly of a job where your supervisor focused only on the areas where you needed to improve. Instead, make sure you give appropriate acknowledgement to subjects where your student naturally excels. Strengths deserve to be celebrated, not ignored. And helping students appreciate their strengths will give them more academic confidence to take on bigger challenges.
5. Don’t worry.
Lots of successful adults admit to being less than stellar students in junior high, high school, and even college. Yes, a student’s academic future is important. But it takes some kids a little longer to start exerting the effort it takes to get somewhere. You might see a C on a geometry test or a failure to complete homework assignments as choices that are closing doors four or ten or twenty years from now, but remember that there’s not one straight line that leads to a happy and successful life. Keep encouraging learning, praising effort and celebrating strengths. Your kid will be more likely to respond eventually.
A good date to start saving for college
May 29th is (apparently) National College Savings Day, the significance of which is that "5/29" refers to the college savings programs named after section 529 of the Internal Revenue Code. 529 plans are a tax-advantaged investment program designed to encourage saving for college. Parents can designate their beneficiary while retaining ownership of the money, and anyone can contribute to the plan. The best part is that the funds can later be withdrawn tax-free as long as they are used to pay for qualified educational expenses.
Two great sources to learn about 529 plans are this page on collegesavings.org and this one on finaid.org.
- « Previous Page
- 1
- …
- 236
- 237
- 238
- 239
- 240
- …
- 380
- Next Page »