Collegewise

What’s your academic story?

Here are three things colleges don’t need to read about in a letter of recommendation from your teacher: 

1. The grade you earned in the class.
It’s helpful for a college to learn about your level of achievement relative to the other students in class, but colleges have your transcript.  So they don’t need a letter of recommendation to tell them you got an "A."

2. The activities you’re involved in.
You list your activities on your application.  So there’s no need for your teacher to elaborate on what you do outside of the classroom.

3. How well your teacher knows you. 
Maybe your teacher is also your yearbook advisor, or knows your family, or coached your little league baseball team when you were 12.  That’s all fine, but none of that needs to be explained in an academic letter of recommendation.

So, what’s left?  Colleges want to know the academic story behind your grade in the class. 

What are you like in the classroom?  Do you ask questions?  Do you contribute to class discussions?  Do you seem genuinely interested in learning the material?  Did you struggle in the class but work like crazy to improve your grade?  Did you do an interesting project or complete outside reading on your own or stop by to talk about the material with your teacher after class?   

That’s the information that tells colleges what you’re going to be like in their classrooms.  And your teachers are the only ones who can share it.

If you had to get a letter of recommendation today, which teacher could tell your academic story?  And what could you do differently to make their job easier? 

You can do a lot more now to change the answers to those questions than you’ll be able to do once you start filling out applications.

Five guaranteed college admissions strategies

There are no magic formulas that will guarantee your admission to the school of your choice.  But there are things you can do that will always make you more competitive.  Here are five college admissions strategies that will make you a stronger, savvier applicant regardless of where you apply.

1. Seek information and advice from people who know what they’re talking about.
High school counselors, admissions officers, and good private counselors know more about how to get into college than any of your friends or neighbors do.  Who you ignore is just as important as who you listen to.

2. Take challenging classes and do your best. 
Before anything else, college is school.  Prepare for it by taking challenging courses and working hard without sacrificing sleep or sanity.  It’s OK to have an occasional late night, but if you’re up until 2 a.m. regularly just struggling to keep up, scale back.

3. Find activities you love, and make an impact while you do them.   
There is no magic list of activities that look “good” to colleges.  Whether it’s marching in the band, learning karate, collecting stamps or quarterbacking the football team, do it because you enjoy it.  Bring the kind of effort and attitude with you that will make people notice that you’re there contributing. 

4. Be a good kid.
Some of the highest-achieving and successful students get mediocre letters of recommendation because they’re arrogant, difficult, or just not all that nice to people.  The golden rule applies here.  Be the kind of student, son/daughter and friend that you’d like to have.  Remember that just being a nice, respectful, polite, responsible kid never goes out of style, even when you apply to college.

5.  Apply to the right colleges.
Don’t apply to colleges just because they’re famous or because they landed a good spot on the rankings list this year.  Think about why you’re going to college in the first place and what you hope or expect to gain from your time there.  Then pick schools that fit you where you think you can make those visions happen.

There are good practices, but no maps

A lot of students are looking for a roadmap, a step-by-step plan that will get you into the college of your choice.  But that’s like looking for instructions telling you exactly what to do to have a great marriage.  There are lots of good practices and mistakes you can avoid that will improve your chances for success.  But there’s no roadmap.  No two couples who’ve been happily married for fifty years took exactly the same steps to get where they are, and no two students at a given college got in by doing exactly the same things.

A lot of the stress, confusion and frustration families feel surrounding college admissions comes from their search for the roadmap.  From picking which high school to attend, to choosing classes, to selecting test prep tutors and pursuing activities and making decisions about what to do over the summer, they want to know the exact steps to take to get them to their desired destination.

If there were such a roadmap, somebody would have decoded and profited from it already.  Read the colleges’ websites to see what they recommend.  Talk with your high school counselor about the colleges that interest you and what you could do to make yourself a competitive applicant.  That’s where you’ll find the good practices that will make sure you get in someplace that’s right for you and are ready to succeed once you get there.  

But don’t ask, “What should I do to get into Stanford.”  That’s a roadmap question, and nobody ever got into a dream school by following a map. 

Likeable work vs. likeable kids

It doesn’t matter if a college likes you.  It matters if they like what you’ve done in high school.

Of course, the reverse is also true.  It’s hard for a college to admit a kid they don’t like.

Some students are too focused on one when they should be spending more time on the other.  If you do great work but you don’t treat people well, you’re missing just as much as the kid everybody likes, but who also just can’t seem to buckle down and work when he needs to.

College lessons from a sixth grade app maker

Thomas Suarez is 12 years old and he’s already got what colleges are looking for. 

He loves to learn.  He not only taught himself to program computers in two different languages, but when Apple released the iPhone software development kit, he went right to work learning how to make apps.

He makes things happen.   He created “Bustin Jieber”—a Justin Bieber Whac-a-Mole app for the iPad and iPhone—and persuaded his parents to pay the $99 to get the app on the App Store.  It’s .99 and I can tell you it’s pretty addicting. 

He shares his talents.  He started an “App Club” at school where any student can come to learn how to design an app.  And any teacher who wants to learn, too, is more than welcome to join.  He’s also part of the iPad Pilot Program that works with teachers to create apps that will be made free to districts.  Any sales of the apps will go into the districts’ educational funds. 

And last October, he was invited to give a talk at a TED Conference.  He’s 12 years old and he’s already making me feel inferior.  It’s hard not to be impressed. 

People could write off what he's doing as an exception, a tech prodigy who got lucky.  But the truth is that while he’s obviously smart, what he really has working for him is motivation.  As he says in his talk, it’s easy for kids to play games.  But it’s not easy to learn how to make them.  He’s trying to change that.  He was willing to take the time to learn what interested him and take it to a logical extreme.  And he seems to be having a great time doing it.   

You can see his TED talk here:

 

A formula for admission to a prestigious college

Here’s one formula we’ve found that’s scarily accurate in predicting admissions chances to the most prestigious colleges.

The amount of time a student spends obsessing about what will get him into a “prestigious college” is almost always inversely proportionate to his chances of actually getting in.

Curiosity, hard work, committing to activities you enjoy, being a nice person people like having around—that’s what makes you an engaged, likeable and interesting person colleges want.  Basing every decision on "what will look good to Harvard" doesn’t accomplish any of those things.

The key?  Spend less time looking for a magic formula and more time doing this.

Duane gets it right

The clothing they sell isn’t my style (I don’t dress well enough to even use the word “style”), but if it were, I’d feel comfortable buying from Duane.

You get to the home page and there he is, talking to us honestly about what they do and how they do it.  He's not trying to sound like something he's not.  In fact, he wants you to know that his store isn't one of the big guys.  He's reveling in being small.  Makes them seem more trustworthy to me.  I feel like I can count on Duane.

Not a bad way to write a website…or a college application.

Good failure vs. bad failure

As college admissions to the most selective schools has gotten more competitive, too many future applicants are afraid to experience, or to admit, failure.  But there is such a thing as a good failure. 

If you try out for the varsity soccer team and get cut, it’s not fun.  But that doesn’t mean it's a bad failure.  Maybe you use that free time to do something else you’re excited about?  Maybe you use getting cut as motivation to come back even stronger next year?  Maybe you find a way to be a part of the team anyway by being the team manager, or taking photos of the games, or running the fundraiser?  Any of those scenarios turns that failure into something good. 

Most successful students—and adults—have experienced failure.  If you put yourself out there enough times to go after things that aren’t easy to achieve, you’re going to fail every now and then.  There’s no shame in it.  It may be a big fat cliché with cheese, but the real failure is never trying. 

One of our most successful applicants at Collegewise wrote her essay about how she had lost every election she had every run in…badly.  But she used each of those opportunities to find activities that were even better suited to her.  And she ended up at Notre Dame. 

Sure, not all failures are good.  I’m not suggesting that you should blow off studying for your biology midterm just so you can experience failure.

But if you have a good failure, don’t be ashamed about it.  And don’t be afraid to share it with colleges (especially if they ask you about a failure and what you learned from it).  It takes a mature, confident person to admit defeat and to move on positively.

Colleges don’t expect you to be perfect.  And in fact, most will be impressed by good failures.

Harvard’s advice on preparing for college

Not all straight-A students are created equal.  Some of them got straight A’s because they wanted to go to selective colleges and simply willed their way to a top GPA.  And others achieved because they were naturally curious intellectuals who just couldn’t turn off their desire to learn.  All of them have worked hard and deserve to be proud.  But the members of the latter group are the ones who get into the highly selective colleges.

Arun pointed me to the “Preparing for College” section of Harvard’s website.  We’ve rarely seen a school state quite so directly and succinctly not just that you should take rigorous classes, but why you should take them.  I’ll share some highlights below.  But please read this before you walk up to a rep from a highly selective college at a college fair and ask, “What’s your average GPA?”  It’s not about the GPAs at those schools.  It’s about the intellect that drove kids to earn those numbers.

English Literature
...We hope that by the time you arrive at college you will love reading for its own sake, and that you will have gone beyond the books you have been required to read into areas of your own interest – fiction, biography, essays, or poetry – and that you will come to care about manner, as well as matter. Besides reading novels for what they can tell you about life in times and places other than your own, you will notice how authors treat different problems or how they treat the same problems in different ways...You can bring to college no more valuable a possession than a mind well-stocked from reading. Just as speaking is modeled on hearing, so writing is modeled on reading. Every good writer was a good reader first.

Foreign Language
...You should leave secondary school knowing at least one foreign language well enough to read it easily and pronounce it acceptably. Knowing a foreign language enables you to enter another culture and to understand its ideas and its values."

History
...Dates and places, names and events, are not trivial facts. They are the very stuff of history. "Concepts" are useless without information to back them up. If you do not know when the invention of gunpowder affected warfare, you will not fully understand the rise of nations from city states. If you are ignorant about when Commodore Perry arrived in Japan, you will not grasp the impetus for modernization in East Asia. If you are unfamiliar with the invention of the cotton gin, you will not comprehend the expansion of slavery westward in the United States."

Research and writing...
In writing a scholarly research paper, you depend on information from authors who know more than you do about the subject. Try to read with common-sense questions in mind. For example, for a paper on emigration from the American colonies in 1776, you might ask "Who were the people who chose to flee to Canada when the American Revolution began? Where in Canada did they go? Why? What became of them? Did they go on to England?" If you read with curiosity and purpose, you will be able to take notes more easily, to weigh one author's view against another, to categorize your research under leading questions, and to form your own observations and opinions.

Mathematics
...You should acquire the habit of puzzling over mathematical relationships. When you are given a formula, ask yourself why it is true and if you know how to use it. When you learn a definition, ask yourself why the definition was made that way. It is the habit of questioning that will lead you to understand mathematics rather than merely to remember it, and it is this understanding that your college courses require. In particular, you should select mathematics courses that ask you to solve hard problems and that contain applications ("word problems"). The ability to wrestle with difficult problems is far more important than the knowledge of many formulae or relationships."

Science
...Even if you have no intention of becoming a scientist, an engineer, or a physician, you should study some science throughout secondary school...A desire for knowledge is not the only motivation for studying science. Broadening the range of human activity through technological advance, fighting disease, and controlling the earth's environment, also spur scientists and engineers to discovery and invention. How did the universe begin? What laws govern its behavior? What is life? Did life result from the chemical reactions of inanimate matter? Could it? How does a fertilized egg become a baby? What are memory and consciousness? Does the human mind consist of more than a large number of interactive nerve cells in the brain? The study of science begins with the habit of asking questions. These questions are fascinating in themselves and their answers can be equally engaging. To answer such questions, scientists perform experiments, make measurements, and develop theories to explain and predict the phenomena they observe. Such experiments and observations are the essence of science and are a critical part of secondary school as well as college science education."

Conclusion
...While the heart of the matter will always lie in academic promise, we prize candidates with special talents and with outstanding personal qualities; we are interested in students who excel in one or more extracurricular activities; and we seek a distinctive and diverse national and international student body. Most of all we look for students who make the most of their opportunities and the resources available to them, and who are likely to continue to do so throughout their lives."

 

Why the nice tuba player will be just fine

At 6:45 a.m yesterday as I was finishing my morning run at the local high school’s track, the marching band was just making their way to the field to practice their formations.  And the fact that the entire band was walking out together meant that they’d probably arrived even earlier to rehearse inside first.   It wasn’t even 7 a.m. yet, but there were the clarinetists, flutists, saxophonists, percussionists, and a lone tuba player who looked to be a freshman with a tuba almost as large as he was.  Just a bunch of high school kids happy to be there practicing with the marching band before school.

It’s hard not to be impressed when you see nice kids working hard at things they enjoy.   I feel the same way when I see the cross country team out running together during the summer or the kid working behind the counter at the local In-N-Out Burger after school.  Kids and parents should know that your work ethic, curiosity, how you treat other people, how you commit yourself to things that matter to you—those traits, not the name of the college you attend, are what will determine your future success and happiness. 

If you’re a nice kid who works hard, does your best, and plays a mean tuba in the marching band, you’re going to be just fine whether or not Georgetown says yes.