Psychologist Madeline Levine at Challenge Success offers some good perspective in her post, Six Things that Matter More than Perfect Grades. And she drives her point home particularly well in the last paragraph: “I’ve seen hundreds of unhappy kids over the years. While academic success is certainly to be applauded, it is only one piece […]
Read More >Today’s post: take two
My original post for today lost the final two paragraphs somewhere between last night’s queuing and today’s posting. I don’t have an explanation, but it made for an abrupt ending. Here’s the complete post. I received an email from a parent yesterday that described how she’d been contacting alumni interviewers to set up the interviews for […]
Read More >Parents: retire from your management duties
I received an email from a parent yesterday that described how she’d been contacting alumni interviewers to set up the interviews for her daughter. Regular readers won’t be surprised that I responded with a gentle reminder that the person hoping to attend those colleges—her daughter—was the one who should be scheduling the interviews. I’ll admit that I […]
Read More >Lying by application omission
I haven’t met many students or parents who want to write something on a college application that is blatantly untrue. But I’ve met plenty who wanted to leave something off an application that the college is clearly asking for. For example, if you’re asked to list all colleges you’ve attended, you can’t conveniently omit the […]
Read More >Don’t make the chase about getting in
I remember when a student I was counseling came into my office one day and told me that he’d signed up to take two summer courses on the Civil War at a local community college. He never asked me if it would help his chances of getting into his dream school. He never asked me […]
Read More >If you share it, they will read
It was about ten years ago that I first started getting the question during seminars, “Do colleges look at your (insert popular social media tool here)?” The question often came from parents who were smartly concerned about what their kids might choose to post online. More recently, I’ve heard from students and some parents who […]
Read More >Passion carries
“Passion” is a frequently-used college admissions term. Colleges want it, and students are advised to discover, pursue and demonstrate a passion for something while they’re in high school. But I haven’t heard a lot of discussion about why passion is such a desirable trait. Passion is appealing in an applicant because students who have it […]
Read More >Are you asking for help the right way?
When successful students have trouble understanding the material, they don’t hesitate to ask their teachers for help. But there’s a right way and a wrong way to ask, and doing it the right way starts long before you need the help. Here are two past posts, one from me, one from Cal Newport, on not […]
Read More >Helping parents get a grip
Laura Fitzgerald Cooper’s recent Washington Post piece, Parents: We need to get a grip on our own college application anxiety, is a nice balance. A mother herself, she empathizes with parents who want the best for their kids. But she’s also emphatic that “parents like me need to slam on the brakes, and get a […]
Read More >Know more than just the name
Richard Feynman was a professor of physics at Caltech who won the Nobel Prize. He worked on the atomic bomb and was a member of the team that investigated the Space Shuttle Challenger disaster. Here’s a video of Feynman explaining why knowing the name of something isn’t the same as actually knowing it. If you’re […]
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