These college application tips and articles are the result of years of coaching teens through the college application process. My main focus is the personal essay. The essay is a core feature of the Common App as well as many other school applications. Read some broad thoughts, below. Then scroll to the bottom of this page. There you’ll find links to four key articles about the application process.
The Core Question & the Answering Trick
My experience as a fiction writer, teacher, and marketing copywriter have informed my viewpoint. The result is a method for helping young adults create compelling, genuinely unique essays. I have also learned a great deal as a mom walking through that stressful senior year with my own sons. I truly appreciate the challenges college application season can present to the entire family. Emotions run high and opinions are plentiful!
At the core, however, is a seventeen- or eighteen-year-old person being asked to write about their beliefs. They are being asked to share their opinions, their dreams when their adult life has hardly begun. They are being asked to write about what makes them stand out from the crowd. Or what makes them worth admitting to University X. However, students have often seen little more of said University than its website.
Here’s the trick: It’s not really WHAT you choose to tell the University in your application. (And by application, I mean that resume, personal essay, short-answers, even those lists of accomplishments and awards). They key is HOW you put that information together. Being a thoughtful, organized, smart STORYTELLER puts students in the driver’s seat of the application process. Being a storyteller lets students think about it a little more clinically and a little less personally. Being a Storyteller is the way to take back some power in the oh-so stressful college admissions process. Feeling empowered is, in my opinion, the most important of college application tips.