We’ve spent the past few weeks breaking down each Common App essay prompt one by one, and now it’s time for the grand finale: our ultimate guide to writing the Common App essay. Sure, there are seven different prompts, but at the end of the day, every school is looking for the same thing: a story.
Getting waitlisted or deferred from your dream school is hard. We know it’s hard! You feel rejected, but it’s this weird non-rejection rejection that can leave you feeling lost and confused. And while a lot of things in college admissions are totally out of your control, there is something you can do if you’ve been waitlisted or deferred to give yourself another chance. A letter of continued interest, sometimes known as a waitlist letter or deferral letter, is one of the few, actionable things you can control when admissions decisions seem so out of your control. It’s your only chance to make a good second impression, and we help students write them every single year.
Getting waitlisted is the ultimate limbo – it’s not not a rejection, but it’s not a full-on denial, either. And depending on your circumstances, you could be feeling everything from mild disappointment to full-on panic. Don’t get yourself into a tizzy just yet, because there are things you can do to give yourself a shot at getting off the waitlist and make sure that you have a plan in place for the next year.
Hey, look, sometimes ED doesn’t work out the way we want it to, and we have to change strategies. If you just got rejected or deferred from your ED/EA option, we’d like to introduce you to our good friend, Early Decision 2. ED2 is just as binding as ED, and it signals to the school that you are serious about attending that school, and guess what? Schools like when you’re serious about them.
Earlier this week, we got an email. It read:
"I am a junior in high school interested in pursuing finance or economics and management in college. Do you know of any summer programs at decent/top tier colleges for high schoolers less than two weeks long in June or July that would help me show colleges my interest in these areas? Thank you very much for your help!"
We recently wrote a blog post on transferring into an Ivy League school and Cornell was a very clear outlier. When looking at the transfer acceptance rate chart from the post linked above, you might think “I want to go to a better school, Cornell is an Ivy, I’m going to apply there!” But in the grand scheme of things, an acceptance rate below 20% is not high. It’s only high when compared to the rest of the Ivy League schools. And it turns out there’s a reason for that figure, explained below:
It’s not always easy to trust your gut when it comes to decisions about college. For some, intuition might suggest that you’re not at the right school. But for the rest of those students looking for validation that you might be better off elsewhere, we’ve compiled a list of reasons for wanting to transfer. If you can check off five boxes or more, it might be time for you start looking into the transfer process.
The Ivy Leagues schools are the way they are for a reason. That is, they are extremely exclusive. There are a number of really strong students across the country, but only a handful are Ivy league applicant material. Colleges advertise to B+ and A- students. We advise that students who fall into that range be skeptical. You’re clearly smart and successful, but at the end of the day, the Ivies aren’t probably aren’t going to accept you.
Buying final-sale clothes without trying them on is ill-advised. So to is going through the application process without touring colleges. U.S. News & World, secondhand information from friends, and information packets can only tell you so much about a school. To give yourself, not only a three-dimensional experience of a university, but also a sense of what you want in a school in general, visiting is really the only way to go.
It’s a common misconception that you need community service hours to get into college. Even though your high school might require service hours, very few colleges actually mandate that incoming students log even a single one. In this post, we will talk about a few schools that do look for kids with a background in service.
Getting a deferral is not ideal. But it’s also not game over. We’re sorry in advance for the corny sports analogy, but sometimes, you just need to take a Rudy approach to life and give it the old college try. If your coach benches you, the last thing you want to do is accept defeat. The moment you are sidelined is the moment to give it everything you’ve got. Train harder than you’ve ever trained, keep up the drills, and get back on that high-protein diet. In this post, we talk about what you can do to stay in the game and how to make sure your timing is on point.
There are a lot of different ways to take advantage of nature. You might love the great outdoors so much that you want to go to a school with access to hiking and skiing, or maybe you’re looking for an environmental studies program with outdoor class offerings. This list has both, but it’s not exhaustive. We’ve listed ten schools we believe are good fits for outdoor enthusiasts, but of course there are more. It’s a mix between east and west coast schools with a short explanation as to why these campuses could be a good fit.
The rise of flickering cell phone screens, social media, and the insane competition of college admissions will define this era in history. Alongside the innovations and competition of the 21st Century is a rise of anxiety amongst all age groups, including, and perhaps especially, teenagers. Your anxiety is totally valid. It’s real and it is something that you should communicate to colleges, but you need to know where to send the message.
We have gotten hundreds—approaching thousands—of emails and calls in the past week. Early decision has come out and people don’t understand why they were deferred or rejected. Our students did phenomenally well, but it seems, as we predicted, that more people than ever are getting turned away. This makes sense. School’s haven’t increased the number of kids they accept while applicant pools have expanded exponentially. It’s incredibly hard to get in. And people don’t like that.
By the time kids get to the interview, there are so many strenuous, variable parts of the operation, that they are usually just ready to assert control over what they can—namely, the essay and the interview. While we fully understand the desire to work hard at an area of the application where you can exert some effort with the objective of producing a result, unfortunately, no matter how much you put into the interview, it’s just not going to have much bearing on your admission. While essays can make or break an acceptance, interviews are also an exercise in you getting to learn about the school.
The college application is holistic. What that means is each part of it should help to complete a picture of the applicant for the admissions committee. As such, no two parts should be the same. A lot of kids end up writing their essays about something that’s already represented elsewhere in the application, like an extra-curricular. While we typically advise against doing that, there is an exception.
Getting rejected from an early decision school can be gut-wrenching…for parents. Your kid has worked so hard, missed out on social activities in the name of extra-curricular ones, visited scores of colleges, and finally aligned their hopes on that perfect school only to be told that, well, this year isn’t their year, after all. Rejection is bad enough. What makes this time of year worse for kids who get the dreaded thin envelope is parents who are shaken, as well, and not doing a great job of hiding it.
We have been conditioned to believe that there is a very specific checklist of requirements to get into a great college. First comes the mandatory minimums of excellent grades and scores, followed by knockout essays. On the second tier lie the extra-curriculars, the recommendations and of course, the impressive hours of community service you’re supposed to somehow cram in instead of sleeping. But one thing on the list is not like the others; colleges require you to submit test scores, grades, essays, recommendations and a resume, but what a lot of kids don’t realize is that contrary to popular belief, community service can really be extra.
The odds of you getting into a school where you don’t fall into the range for GPA or scores is slim. But if you’re on the cusp, having great essays can tip the odds in your favor. They are an absolutely crucial part of the application and something we are very rigorous with in helping our own students. In this post, we discuss strategies for writing killer supplements.
The goal of the essay is to tell a story that illuminates something new about you to the admissions committee. Many students take this as an opportunity to try and get deep. Students frequently write about tragedy or major, life-altering obstacles they’ve faced. Some students choose to write about how they’ve grappled with something like addiction or disease. While those experiences are valid, there is a whole separate section just for them. This essay is not the appropriate platform. The trouble with writing about, well, trouble, is that one often falls short of connecting with the anonymous readers, and the whole point if the exercise is to connect with those very people.