Acing the College Application: How to Maximize Your Chances for Admission to the College of Your Choice
Language: English
Pages: 288
ISBN: 0345498925
Format: PDF / Kindle (mobi) / ePub
With so many qualified applicants, competition for college admissions is fiercer than ever. Now you can put yourself ahead of the pack by making your application flawless!
When applying for college, good grades and high standardized test scores are not always enough to guarantee admission. What sets you apart, argues Michele Hernández, is the way you describe yourself in your application. But how do you present yourself with flair, and highlight all your talents, skills, and passions, in just a few pages?
A former assistant director of admissions at Dartmouth College, Dr. Hernández takes you step-by-step through the entire application process, revealing the details that make or break an applicant. From the multitude of short and longer essays to the myriad of charts, lists, and personal data sections, she offers essential advice, useful anecdotes, and vivid examples. Included are:
• A line-by-line look at the common application
• The truth about the essays, with samples of those that made the grade
• The best way to ask for teacher and guidance counselor recommendations
• When to provide colleges with optional essays and peer evaluations
• The ten common myths and misconceptions of the on-campus interview
• The most meaningful academic subjects, work experience, and extracurricular activities to mention
• Early action versus early decision—the trade offs
With this helpful, savvy book, prospective college students—and their parents and counselors—can now vastly improve their chances of getting into the college of their choice.
“Want to scale the Ivy wall? Michele Hernández gives you the tools to do it. This brisk, no-nonsense book is built on inside dope, and Hernández’s experience allows her to challenge conventional admissions thinking.”
—HARRY BAULD
Author of On Writing the College Application Essay
papers you wrote in high school. Even if math really isn’t your cup of tea, you could certainly focus on a narrow area like the research paper you did on Archimedes’s Method of Exhaustion (I’m not making this up—I actually did write a ten-page research paper on this Greek mathematician’s method of measuring the area under a curve well before calculus was discovered). Have you done any experiments, research, or out-of-school projects that reflect a major interest? Rather than just saying you like
for their kids while my father was sitting doubled over on the bleachers, catching his breath after the fifty-yard walk from his car. After his physical the next year, his doctor prescribed emergency open-heart, quadruple bypass surgery. Words cannot describe how scared I was sitting at home beside my sister, waiting hours for the doctor to call saying we could come to the hospital to see our father. The first time I saw my father after the operation, he was lying in his hospital bed with wires
from a nonestablished program, feel free to E-mail the athletic offices at the colleges you are interested in. They will take it from there, asking you to submit forms, grades, whatever they need. If the coaches ask you for a video, send one to them. At all costs avoid sending anything directly to the admissions office though, since the coaches handle this process. The last thing the admissions office wants to do is watch your football tape. Don’t be shy about establishing a preliminary contact
student will seldom know whether the school has mentioned the incident or not. After all, colleges receive two letters of recommendation and a guidance counselor letter from the school; there’s plenty of opportunity for someone to mention an incident. My advice is to be honest. It is much better to acknowledge an incident than to ignore it completely, especially in the case where a school official mentions it. In that case, it would look as though you were avoiding the problem or trying to cover
from scratch. When I go into a bookstore, I often find myself spending money on computer books to learn a new language or a new skill. In my free time I have taught myself Flash, Adobe Photoshop, basic C++, and 3D Studio Max. There are several elements here worthy of note: the student’s achievements and initiative are substantial. Rather than just taking the usual short computer course, this student took an adult-oriented class with 250 hours of instruction. That’s a serious time commitment.