Kevin McMullin

College admissions advice for students, parents, and counselors

Set boundaries like a hostage negotiator

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Students, parents, and counselors all occasionally struggle with setting boundaries. Taking on too much, staying reachable all the time, refusing to decline invitations and opportunities—it’s no wonder so many people of all ages are overworked and over-stressed these days. To take some productive steps toward relief, consider following the advice of someone for whom setting […]

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Anatomy of a thank-you

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If you owe a genuine expression of thanks to someone who really helped you out and made a difference, “Thanks so much!” probably doesn’t get the job done. Instead, try hitting three important areas. 1. Express your thanks. Be specific and reference the thing they did for you. “Thank you so much for jumping in […]

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Act on your future counseling need

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Students, have you met your high school counselor? Have you engaged with them at all about your academic or college planning? Have you established yourself as someone who’s availing yourself of the resources available to you at your school? Or are you waiting for your counselor to reach out to you? Or worse, have you […]

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Nervous? Try anxious reappraisal

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Do you get nervous before tests, big games, or other high-stakes situations? Your instinct might be to tell yourself to calm down. But Alison Wood Brooks, a professor at Harvard Business School, recommends you do the opposite: Tell yourself how excited you are about what’s currently stressing you out. It’s called “anxious reappraisal,” and it’s […]

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Another strategy: just be sensible

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Washington Post writer Jay Mathews spent his career writing about education. But he’s always shown a particular fondness for injecting sanity into the college admissions process, not only with his regular doses of wisdom and calm via his pieces in The Post, but also in his book Harvard Schmarvard: Getting Beyond the Ivy League to […]

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Your best response the first time

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I recently started using an outside software service at Collegewise to help us collect signatures by email for our employee documents. Enabling a particular option within the account requires that you contact them, and this week, I’d been bounced around to four different people, each less helpful than the previous one, when an account rep […]

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Create a reason

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I write often here about the value of the energy, attention, and personality you contribute both inside and outside of class. There are plenty of ways to make an impact that have nothing to do with honors, awards, and other accolades, and Seth Godin made a list in his most recent post, “Missing from your […]

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Innate strengths vs. perceived weaknesses

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I’m not a fan of most personality tests. Even the people who rave to me about a particular one always seem to point to fairly obvious findings, like the wildly outgoing person whose test results reveal that they are outgoing. But for me, the StrengthsFinder test by the Gallup Organization was different. It was the […]

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