ADMISSIONS

In general, colleges are much more concerned about how a kid grows from a summer program than what, exactly, they did.  Your child might have an experience that is so impactful that she writes about it in a college essay, or maybe it is something she mentions in a short answer question from a college or in an interview on campus.  Or maybe she just expands her world view and returns home a better and more interesting human.

Kids in high school don’t get enough advice from teachers and counselors about how to approach their classes, and, just as importantly, how to think about their in-class presence. The author’s comments certainly help guide kids toward making the sort of impression that informs a good letter of recommendation for college, but, less cynically, they simply remind students of what their responsibility is in high school. This article is aimed at juniors, but applies equally to sophomores and seniors (anyone who has taught freshmen knows that they have too much going on in their busy little minds to absorb much advice).

In this post, I offer Expedition College’s Common Application Essay Tips  (www.commonapp.org).  My previous post discusses the sorts of things that a college essay should aim to communicate while this one delves into the essay prompts themselves.  https://expeditioncollege.com/2019/09/03/demystifying-the-college-essay-part-1/. Since my last writing, a client mentioned to me that they understood that colleges are especially drawn […]

What is the secret to writing a compelling college essay?  Authenticity. Kids often worry that they need to write an essay that is “different,” or one that describes a fantastic achievement or experience.  They don’t, of course. The average 17 year-old has led a pretty average life.   The most basic goals of the college essay […]

I recently had to do a deep dive into standardized testing strategy and planning when a student of mine with a perfect ACT and nearly perfect AP scores was trying to decide what to do about taking and submitting SAT Subject Test Scores, which were coming out lower than the other tests he had taken. […]

In the post-Rick Singer Admissions Fraud era, this article reviews the steps colleges do and don’t take to make sure that admissions applications are honest representations of a student.

The SAT is adding a new “Adversity Score” to the score reports it sends to colleges for the 2019/2020 admissions year. This article explains what the score does and does not measure.

To paraphrase a well-known college counselor in Atlanta, I think that summers should be productive, but in a way that relates to things that a student genuinely wishes he or she could have had time for during the high school academic year.

This is a thought-provoking article about the effects of extracurricular activities having transitioned from something you did for fun and recreation in high school to becoming essential currency in the selective college admission process.

A little while back, I took a road trip within Colorado, having driven there to visit clients in Boulder. One parent had great things to say about Fort Lewis College, a place I’d heard about for years and have occasionally included in college lists. I’d never seen Fort Lewis, so I decided to make the […]