Hernandez - Acing the college application : how to maximize your chances for admission to the college of your choice

CONTENTS

To my friends, family, and all the parents
who have allowed me to work
with their superstar children

INTRODUCTION

Who Needs to Read This Book?

If you are applying to colleges that fall into the selective or highly selective category, this book is for you. Even for those applying to less selective colleges, this book will still be of great help in filling out all parts of the application. For selective colleges, the application is what distinguishes one applicant from another. Thousands of colleges fall into the selective and highly selective category including almost all that are listed in the U.S. News and World Report annual college ranking issue: Americas Best Colleges.

Many schools have now moved to honor the common application, an application that is uniform for over fifty schools. Therefore, essay questions for many schools follow a common pattern and are more predictable year to year. Even so, there are still many schools (the University of Chicago for one) that take great care in developing unique essay questions that purposely dont overlap with questions from other schools applications. This book will take you by the hand and lead you step-by-step through the application process from visiting colleges and requesting applications to mailing in your applications to the colleges. It provides many actual examples from short answer questions to essays from students Ive worked with over the years.

Why is the application so important? The simple answer is that there are so many academically strong students in the United States who apply to so many of the same schools that even schools that used to be considered safety schools are now much more selective. These so-called second-tier colleges are now very difficult to be accepted to as well. The admissions office will see thousands of students with strong standardized test scores, strong high school records, strong teacher recommendations, and good leadership positions. At a certain level, the only way to distinguish between students with excellent records is to judge the student on personal meritthat impression comes directly from the students writing in the application. Thus, students cannot afford to assume that they will be accepted solely on their academic merits without putting the necessary time into the application process. Students who ignore the importance of self-presentation in the application do so at their peril. This book will break the process down into smaller steps and take the tension and anxiety out of a process that students enjoy about as much as getting a tooth pulled.

Are you a bright, motivated student? If so, you are more likely than most to need help completing your college applications. Why? Because it is precisely the most intelligent, most creative, and most interesting students who have the hardest time packing themselves into the tight constraints of the college application. The fault lies with the whole idea of the college application. Colleges ask you to summarize everything important that youve done in your first seventeen years or so into just a few pages. Obviously, you have to know what admissions people are looking for to do a convincing job. The task can appear overwhelming, especially when you consider that many colleges still have their own specific applications rather than one common set of forms. Applying to ten to fifteen colleges can mean writing more than ten different essays just to cover the basic questions asked. To make matters worse, writing for the admissions office is nothing like writing a paper for your English teacher. Despite what most people think, admissions officers read the various parts of the application, including the main essay, mostly for content, not writing style. Therefore, it is not worth it to struggle to write Faulknerian prose when plain old John Grisham will do.

Why You Need an Insiders View

You will get tons of solicited and unsolicited advice from teachers, guidance counselors, students, and alumni. Though they will all have good intentions, they all lack one qualification: They did not work in an admissions office. Why is this important? Only someone who has actually spent several years working in a college admissions office knows and understands the inner workings and nuances of the admissions process. High school guidance counselors know only what colleges want them to know about the process, as do students and parents. Admissions officers only share select information with the public, including guidance counselors, although they will share more specific information with the latter group. Though I dont want to spend time listing all the half-truths, myths, and misrepresentations perpetrated by admissions offices, Ill give one quick example of what I mean. You approach an admissions officer from a selective school and recount your mediocre test scores. You then ask if you should apply. Even if the admissions officer realizes that you have virtually no chance of admission, they are trained to encourage you to apply anyway. Why? First of all, they have an ungodly number of applications to wade through so the worse an application is, the less time it takes to read it. Few will admit this basic truth, but it takes less than five minutes to read the application of a grossly underqualified applicant. In addition, these weaker applicants usually only require one reading (hence the term, one-reader reject) and a quick perusal by the director, so the admissions staff gets a break. Second and most important, colleges are always on the lookout to improve their selectivity rating. That is to say that if more students apply and are subsequently rejected, they can say they only admitted 20 percent of those who applied rather than a higher number like 30 percent. Since parents and students are fixated by national rankings (by the likes of U.S. News and World Report and many college guides), they specifically look for schools with the lowest selectivity rates.

Unfortunately, students often rule out a college because it appears to be easy to get into. I say unfortunately because selectivity alone doesnt tell you much. Cornells very competitive and nationally known school of engineering admits roughly 42 percent of its applicants while the less competitive general school of arts and sciences admits roughly 30 percent. On the surface it looks like the engineering school is easier to get into, but that is not the casethe pool of students willing to commit to this rigorous engineering program are some of the best students in the country. A C student with a low math ability would never in his right mind apply to an engineering school, while he might send in an application to a liberal arts school. In other words, the pool is self-selective in the first place. The same phenomenon is evident at some of the top womens colleges like Smith, Wellesley, and Bryn Mawr. Ive worked with many students who rule out womens colleges because they assume from the selectivity index that they are less competitivethis is not true!