When I was a senior in high school and we were given the opportunity to pen a senior quote to place below our picture in the yearbook, I had just one objective—to make sure I didn’t write something that would make me look like an idiot 20 years down the line. It was a mature […]
Read More >Is a personal struggle an appropriate essay topic?
College applicants often write essays about personal struggles. Sometimes, those stories provide great insight into the human being behind the grades and test scores, revealing strength, resilience, and the ability to overcome challenges, all of which are valuable traits that can help those students be happy and successful in college. But in other cases, tales of […]
Read More >The difficult part
In my life before Collegewise, a former co-worker approached me about joining his college counseling business he’d founded. When I met with him to learn more about the opportunity and how I might fit into it, he had a long list of things he claimed to have accomplished. Website, logo, business cards, email addresses, full-color […]
Read More >Tomorrow’s heroes
Jay Mathews is a Harvard graduate, an education writer for the Washington Post, and a vocal opponent of the prestige obsession in college admissions (I believe he also coined the term “Namebranditis,” which I’ve since borrowed liberally.) In 2009, he penned the column, Elite Colleges Don’t Make Elite People, which posed the question, “Where did […]
Read More >“What was your title?” vs. “What did you do?”
Editor, President, Co-captain, Treasurer, Team leader, Fundraising chair, etc. These, and other titles like them, are appropriate to list on your college applications. But what’s more interesting and potentially impressive is your answer to this question about each role—what did you do? How did you impact the group? What did you accomplish? What did you […]
Read More >Parental admissions irrationality
I understand why many parents become irrational when it comes to their children’s college admissions planning. You want the best for your student. The process has become unnecessarily complex and stressful. You’re facing the impending departure of your former little baby to live on their own at college. It can feel like a perfect emotional […]
Read More >NACAC Notes: take them and share them
Two weeks ago, a dozen of our counselors were out in force at the annual NACAC (National Association for College Admissions Counseling) conference in San Diego. In between the usual presenting, learning, and socializing, they also took meticulous notes during the sessions they attended with the intention of sharing them later with high school counselors […]
Read More >Just start now (try it once)
One of my friends and fellow English majors in college regularly did something that just about nobody else I knew could pull off with regularity—she would finish her papers days or even weeks before they were due. To her, it made such perfect sense. I’m sure she wondered why the rest of us didn’t follow […]
Read More >Confront the brutal admissions facts
Jim Collins is a former Stanford Business School professor who spent four years studying the secrets behind the greatest companies and the leaders who helped them get that way. One of the findings that he shared in his book Good to Great was that the path to greatness began with a company’s willingness to confront […]
Read More >Does attending an Ivy League school really matter?
The longer I continue to preach that brand-name schools don’t offer inherently better educations or experiences, that what you do in college will be more important than where you do it, the less likely I am to debate the point with someone who doesn’t agree. Emotional, anecdotal, even statistical evidence doesn’t change minds on this […]
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