One of my favorite concluding paragraphs waddled ashore in a 2014 piece by longtime New York Times columnist Gail Collins, who is a master of expressing complex ideas simply and rendering devastating judgments cheerfully.
Over 150 years have passed since Walt Whitman told us that he contains multitudes. Presumably, so do the rest of us. College applications are both wonderful and maddening because they afford applicants the opportunity to talk about some of those multitudes — not just one, not just two, but potentially many,
If you’re interviewing doctors, do you want to know about a surgeon’s first operation, or about the surgeries they performed last year? If you’re a coach holding tryouts, do you want to know the first time a player made a basket or their points per game last
The Common Application’s combination of essays, objective questions, and the option to submit supplemental materials typically provides enough avenues for most students to convey their backgrounds and highlight the qualities they wish colleges to recognize. For years, a critical component of this system has been the Additional Information section:
This year, a surprising preponderance of students have asked me a certain question, each using the same phrasing: should they attempt to “trauma dump” in their application essays? I don’t know exactly what prompted these questions, though I suspect that it may be a meme worming its way through
High school students aren’t likely to ask friends or relatives to review their workaday expositions on the causes of the War of 1812, the functions of mitochondria, or the role of memory in Beloved. College essays are different. The stakes are higher than they are for academic essays, they’
A student once came to me wanting to write a college essay about her experience learning how to waterski barefoot. Fun, right? She justified this choice on the grounds that it revealed how “unusual” she was. I couldn’t argue with that. The last time I watched anyone waterski, barefoot
This past application season, I presented a student with a preliminary list of colleges and explained, as I always do, that the list is just preliminary and purely for research. I intend for plenty of discussion, soul-searching, and decision-making to follow. And, like most counselors, I try to present students
During college application season, I think of my one of my favorite Andy Warhol quotes: “If everybody’s not a beauty, then nobody is.” I don’t know of a college that evaluates applicants’ beauty as such. But, if you substitute “unique” for “beautiful,” you can unpack one of the
I could not, and probably would not, advise students on college applications if the English language did not fascinate me. Thanks to the volume of material I read and to my exposure to a particular demographic group — high school seniors — I get a privileged view of linguistic trends. Sometimes these
A cathartic analysis of unduly awkward, challenging, and nonsensical college essay prompts from the 2021 application year.
Going to college is usually fun no matter where you go. But applying to college is a strange way to have fun.