One of the best ways to keep someone interested in your story is to lead with something unexpected. This is not an example of that: "The marching band practices every day after school for two hours. It's very arduous, but necessary if we want to perfect our formations." Nobody would be surprised to learn that. […]
Read More >A prescription for over-scheduled kids
A lot of today's high school students are completely over-scheduled with absolutely no free time. That's hazardous to their mental health as well as to their college admissions chances. It's easy to spot a kid who's over-scheduled. It's a teenager who doesn't have any life in her face. She's tired and stressed out. She spends […]
Read More >What does your outgoing voicemail say?
If you list your cell phone number on your college applications, make sure your outgoing voicemail message is something you'd be comfortable with an admissions officer or, more likely, a college interviewer hearing. I'm not saying you need to be as formal as a Fortune 500 CEO, but you might want to play it straight […]
Read More >On Veteran’s Day…
College applicants, Veterans Day is a good day to remember that you are lucky to be living in a country that has the strongest and most accessible system of higher education in the world, a country that encourages anyone who wants to do so to go to college, a country where you get to decide […]
Read More >Don’t take anonymous college essay advice
You wouldn't just walk up to a random stranger on the street and ask him what you should write your college essay about. But a lot of kids are actually doing the online version of that. Pick a college, any college with an essay prompt on the application. Type that prompt into Google and you'll […]
Read More >Is it still worth it to go to college?
In many ways, today's economy actually makes having a college degree less important. It used to be that just having a college degree was special. If you applied for a job and you'd been to college, you instantly stood out. That's not true anymore. Lots of people have college degrees. Just about any job for […]
Read More >This is what college should be like
Today, I'm spending all day at a seminar given by one of my favorite authors. It's expensive. It's happening at our busiest time of year. I'll be up at the crack of dawn to take a train over an hour each way so I can avoid what would almost certainly be three hours of LA […]
Read More >How to show interest in a college
There are two reasons why telling a college, "You're my first choice" doesn't mean much to most schools. 1. It's too easy to say it without really committing to anything. 2. It's often not true. Sometimes that statement is true. Many other times, a student is just feeling the college admissions pressure, reacting to the […]
Read More >Five college admissions factors that don’t matter as much as people think they do
The stress of college admissions makes a lot of students and parents focus on the wrong things, things that don't matter nearly as much to colleges as we're often left to believe. Here are five examples. 1. Connections. Most people who think they have an influential connection later find out just how little influence those […]
Read More >“He’s seventeen. He’ll screw it up.”
At a high school college night last week, a parent approached me afterwards and said, "I know I'm not supposed to be filling out my son's applications. But he's seventeen. He's procrastinating and leaving it all for the last minute. I feel like this is just too important for me to let him screw it […]
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