Race to the Deadline

With the deadlines for college applications coming up shortly, students often find that this time of year is a whirlwind of applications, essay writing, and test taking, in and amongst holiday prep and family time.

Here are some simple tips to avoid missing those important college application deadlines:

1) Start a calendar. It’s very easy to have a deadline sneak up on you, so be prepared! Having a simple calendar up on your wall, with all the important deadlines circled in red will ensure that you aren’t scrambling at the last minute to get your application out the door.

2) Prep early. College admission essays typically take at least 4 hours to research and write, and it’s important that you have a trusted advisor proofread and edit your essay at least once. Start your essay and other application material early, to avoid a late-night writing session that will result in work that’s less than your best.

3) Stay on your test results. SATs are stressful enough without worrying that your results might not arrive in time. Keep track of when you can expect results, and when results will be sent to your selected colleges.

4) Line up your materials. Financial aid applications are a separate process from your general admissions application and requires financial information about your family. Make sure that your parents are informed about the information that’s required and the deadlines for Financial Aid applications. Similarly, letters of recommendation may take time to write, so be sure to request them early to give your reference person time to write a glowing account of your abilities.

5) Stay on track. It can be easy to ignore your currently high school course work in order to manage your college applications, but final year grades are an important factor in your admissions process. Keep up with your current work and keep your eye on the prize!

It may be a sprint to the finish to hit your college admissions deadlines, but with a bit of forethought and consistent attention to detail, you can ensure that you never have to worry about missing out on your college dream!

How Students Can Use Goals to Set Priorities

It’s common for students to have many different, and sometimes conflicting, goals. Goals may include:

- Being made sports team leader (i.e. quarterback)
- Getting admitted to a great college
- Making money through a part-time job
- Being voted homecoming king/queen
- Mastering a musical instrument
- Being the best yearbook editor in the history of the school
- Winning a scholarship for college
- Being chosen as valedictorian
- Spending a much time as possible with friends
- Volunteering with a local charity

Start by writing down a list of at least 5 goals. Some will seem very important, and some will be less important. The important thing to realize is:

Your Goal List defines what you spend your time on.

Working from your Goal List, set priorities. Go through the list and pick the most important goal on the list. What is the one thing that you most need to accomplish? Note that the wording is what you “need” to accomplish, not what you “want” to accomplish. Everyone wants to master the piano like Mozart, or be a quarterback like Brett Favre. The focus should be on the one thing that will further your future, and in doing so, allow you the opportunity to achieve some of your other goals.

Chances are your top priority is going to be getting into a great college. That doesn’t mean that your other goals aren’t important – they’re very important! They may support your primary goal, or they may afford other rewards like personal satisfaction and personal development. But now you know what your top priority is, and you can firmly fix that in your mind. When you’re confronted with a tough choice between two activities, you can simply ask yourself:

“Which activity will help me achieve my top priority?”

The Waiting Game

One of the most difficult positions for students to be in is to find themselves admitted to the waiting list at their 1st choice college. Suddenly, the college admissions process becomes even more complex, as the student must weigh waiting for a spot to open vs. accepting an admission to a less desirable school.

Some of the things that students can do to make the most of their chances on the waiting list include:

1. Being informed as to what the “waiting list” means. Even if your child eventually gets accepted from the waiting list of the school, he/she may miss out on scholarship, housing, or internship opportunities that are available to first round students. If you were depending on Financial Aid to pay for a portion of tuition, this may be a deciding factor
2. Demonstrate enthusiasm. It can be hard to go back to the college that has placed you on a wait list and still demonstrate enthusiasm, but this may help rank you higher on the list. Send a letter of appeal to the Admission Board, not to argue the placement on the list, but simply to state that you’re still very eager to enroll. You may also wish to include referrals from your guidance counsellor or a mentor in high school who can vouch that you would be an excellent admission prospect.
3. Do a second interview. If you had a previous admission interview and you genuinely feel that you blew it (you were sick, you were late, you were stressed about something that day, etc), request a second admission interview with your ideal college and wow them. Your goal is to make them think “We made a mistake overlooking this student the first time!”
4. Make backup plans. The only thing worse than not starting September in your 1st choice college is not starting college at all! Re-assess your 2nd or 3rd choice colleges and seriously consider if you’d be willing to settle for them. Inquire as to their policies for transfer to other colleges – perhaps you can start your college career there, and transfer to your 1st choice college in the 2nd year.

Playing the waiting game can be stressful, but it’s not the death blow to a strong college dream. Make the most of the waiting list with these simple steps.

5 Tips to Get the Most from Your Campus Visit

One of the more exciting and fun parts of your college admissions process is visiting the campus. Colleges understand that this is an important step to your decision as to what college you should attend, and do their best to make their college appealing to both students and parents alike.

While enjoyable, a campus visit is also critical to extracting the most information and value from your campus hosts, so that you can make an informed choice, and put your best foot forward with the Admissions department.

Here are some simply tips to follow to make the most of your campus visit

1) Know the college: Instead of asking the simple questions that campus guides hear all the time (How many students does the college have? What year was it founded?), get the basics out of the way by reading college brochures and studying the applicant information on the college’s website

2) Feel like you’re already there. A lot of colleges offer virtual tours that you can review from the comfort of your home. Check them out, as well as a campus map, ahead of time so you don’t waste precious time wandering around.

3) Research your areas of interest. If your focus is a particular department, review the department online, and know the principle players (the Dean, professors, and faculty). If you are lucky enough to run into them on campus during your tour, you may have the opportunity to introduce yourself and get a foot in the door!

4) Ask intelligent questions. College Admission departments really like engaged, enthusiastic students. Stand out by asking questions such as “What was the most recent paper published by the head of the faculty?” or “What kind of internships and research possibilities are available to first year students in this field?”

5) Don’t forget the living necessities! As a student, you will be living the next 4 years of your life on this campus. Get to know the area around the campus well, including how far a jog it is to the local Laundromat, grocery store, and even the local mall. If your college is secluded from a metropolis, you’ll want to know in advance that you need to budget for bus or cab rides to get your necessary chores done each week.

Campus tours are fun, but they’re also a great source of important decision-making information. Make the most of your visit!

The Senior Year Calendar

Already looking forward to going to your dream school... or sending your child away to their dream school?  By now, you've probably already sent in early applications to a chosen few schools. It's early in the 2010-2011 school year but if the prospective college student is in senior year, it's already time to start planning what you're going to do in the new year:

January: If you have any applications to complete, get them done!

February: It's time to fill out your FAFSA – Free Application for Federal Student Aid.  If you are applying for any sort of student aid, get this done.  The student will need information from their parents, which customarily arrives this month.

Stay organized! The college application process is complex, with many parts. You need to make sure that colleges you've applied to have received all the relevant information.  If you aren't keeping a list or a spreadsheet of what needs to be sent and when, start now.

March: Acceptance letters start arriving from some schools.  If you're in, congratulations!

April: By now you may have to make a decision on what school to accept.  If so, use the time you have; this isn't a decision to be taken lightly.  Let every school that accepted you know what your decision is, even the ones you won't be going to.

May: By now you should be making financial arrangements with the school – a tuition deposit, residence, and the like.  Don't forget to look into transportation arrangements and moving.  The beginning of the school year is the biggest moving day of the year and you don't want to get stuck without transportation, or stuck with really expensive arrangements.

Oh, and concentrate on your grades!

June: College may still be a few months away, but now is the time to make moving arrangements if you're moving – getting a phone, finalizing living arrangements, and yes, even packing.  Some colleges will already be offering early registration into courses, so start that now!

College will be a long and fulfilling journey – it's worth getting ready for right away!

Extra-Curricular Activities That College Admission Offices Like

It's hard enough to get good grades and high scores on SATs, but your dream college might also have a very keen interest in extra-curricular activities as well.  As you prepare your application letters, consider what universities are looking for.

Quality is better than quantity. 

Anyone can join a club or volunteer for a day or two. Stuffing your application with a hundred extra-curricular activities simply looks like you lack focus in your non-school activities, or worse yet, you’ve just tried to pad your application. The college admissions officer is no fool and has seen it before. 

What impresses colleges is commitment to something; sticking with a team, club, or cause for a year or more shows that you have the kind of focus and perseverance needed to succeed in a high-quality academic program.

Demonstrate leadership. 

Leadership roles still have a lot of pull in college admissions.  Not everyone can be class president, but any experience with team leadership or mentoring skills should  be highlighted.

Tie extra curricular activities to your chosen college program.

Ideally will be at least some correlation between your extra-curricular activities and the program you're applying to.  Applying to a leading engineering school with an application full of theatre and music credits is not a winning endorsement. Similarly, applying to theater school with nothing but tech extra-curricular activities will seem equally strange. 

This isn't to say that you can't do some things just for fun – after all, balance in life is important – but if you don't have something connected to your program of choice, the admissions department might question how committed you'll be to the program.

Give yourself credit! An amazing number of students leave extra-curricular activities off their applications because their personal interests are so much a part of them that it doesn't occur to them that those activities might impress a school.  All your jobs, all your clubs, all your sports, everything you've volunteered for... make sure the college knows!

6 Tips for Writing College-Level Essays

College admission essays are one of the most stressful points in the admission process for high school students. A proper essay will tell your professors everything about you as a student; your command of the topic, your work ethic, your ability to research, and your logical thinking.  When you start tackling college essays, keep these six points in mind:

1. Assemble your research first.  Don't get halfway through your essay only to stumble across facts that contradict the last thousand words you just wrote.  Its okay to keep researching as you write an essay – for upper years it's almost necessary – but you should start your essay having already done enough research to know where it's going.

2. Understand the structure of an essay.  Unless your college gives you a different or limited sort of assignment, an academic essay is a piece of writing that makes a claim and provides evidence to support the claim.  Your essays should present a thesis – an assertion that something is true - provide evidence that the assertion is true, and then conclude by summarizing the major points of evidence.  You can't go too wrong by sticking to that structure.

3. Plan your essay.  An essay plan can be as short as a hundred words.  State your thesis in ten words, each of three major points in twelve words; a few notes for each of the three major points, and you have an essay plan.

4. Use multiple resources.  Don't just parrot one book.  If you're at a good school, your professor very likely knows all the best books.  He or she might have written the best books!  The purpose of an essay is to show you are learning how to think, not that you know how to read. 

5. Learn the rules of attribution.  In other words... don't plagiarize.  Plagiarism can end your trip to college or make it much more unpleasant than you've planned.  Any quote you use, any passage you borrow, or any fact you cite should be in a footnote or an endnote.  If you don't understand the basics of academic attribution, ask your instructor.  Your college's bookstore will have writing guides as well.

6. Get someone to proofread it.  No matter how good you think your writing is, no matter how carefully you proofread it yourself, get someone who has a sharp eye for language to proofread your essay.  You will be amazed how many errors they'll find and suggestions they'll have.

Most of all don't be afraid to ask your teachers for help.  They keep office hours for a reason and they'd much rather help you understand academic writing than mark a bad essay.  When in doubt, ask the expert!

Give Us an Hour; We’ll Give You Answers

On Tuesday, November 30^th, I’ll be hosting a FREE live teleconference for college-bound high school students and their parents to talk about college admissions, the right college, and college counseling.

“Winning The College Admissions Game - How To Get Into The College Of Your Choice” is going to be full of insider tips and tricks on defining your perfect college, and how to navigate the admissions process.

Here’s what one of our last attendees said:

“Planning for college was one of the hardest things I’ve ever done. I didn't know what steps to take and when I should take them. With the help of Rhonda and A2Z, I was able to complete a professional resume, apply for scholarships, and submit applications to four colleges. I am proud to say that I was accepted at 3 out 4 colleges. A2Z helped me more than I could have possibly helped myself.”

Take the first step to an easier, less-stressful college admissions process by attending this teleconference. All it takes is a phone and an hour of your time, and you’re guaranteed to get great value!

Time: Tuesday November 30^th at 6:30pm EDT

Cost: FREE

Register Here

Do you know someone else who is college-bound? Send me an email and I’ll personally reach out to invite them. 

- Rhonda Manns, College Admissions Consultant