Kevin McMullin

College admissions advice for students, parents, and counselors

Summer reading for leaders

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Back in January, I shared some of the leadership teachings from L. David Marquet’s Turn the Ship Around!: A True Story of Turning Followers into Leaders.  Apparently, Basecamp CEO Jason Fried has a similar take on Marquet’s book. If you haven’t read the book yet and you’re in a leadership role at school, at work, in a community […]

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Financial aid roadblocks

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There are two potential roadblocks to helping families get the financial assistance they need for college—terminology and priorities. Here are four terms to familiarize yourself with, and below them, your three priorities when applying for financial aid. 1. Grants/Scholarships Grants and scholarships mean the same thing—free money that does not have to be paid back. The […]

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Do your testing homework

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Counselors always recommend that students preparing to apply to college check each school’s website to verify what’s required for admission. What’s the deadline? Do you need letters of recommendation? Are interviews offered? There’s no better, more trustworthy place to find those answers than from the colleges themselves. But this year, that’s likely to be even […]

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The missing link

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Here’s the link that I mistakenly left out of today’s post about Simon Sinek’s Leaders Eat Last. It will take you to the referenced summary and to the video with his talk at Microsoft.

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Leadership lessons summarized

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I’ve referenced Simon Sinek’s wonderful book Start with Why: How Great Leaders Inspire Everyone to Take Action and his corresponding TED Talk several times here (here’s a listing of those posts). But I found his follow-up work, Leaders Eat Last: Why Some Teams Pull Together and Others Don’t, harder to get through. His message was […]

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What you don’t see

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In most professions, much of the work takes place behind the scenes. You don’t see how many hours your favorite athlete spends practicing or working out. You don’t see all the rehearsals your favorite actor or actress completes. You don’t see how many medical journals your doctor reads, how many hours a chef spends perfecting […]

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Acting locally

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Many high school students with the means to do so travel to far-flung international locations to serve people in need. I’m sure some of those kids are driven by a genuine desire to help. But there are also plenty who are being driven by what they hope will be an impressive listing on their college […]

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Politics in college essays?

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Our Collegewise counselors often get questions, especially during an election year, from students about whether or not to share political views in a college essay. You can even broaden that question to religion, current events, or any other topic on which intelligent, reasonable people can have very different, equally valid beliefs. Is it OK to write […]

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Join us—from anywhere—for a college admissions seminar!

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Our Collegewise counselors are offering a series of our popular college admissions seminars, all of which are free for students and parents. And for the first time, we’ll also be delivering some of them as webinars for families who don’t live near a Collegewise office. Here’s a sampling of our topics: Secrets of College Admissions There’s an […]

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