The Insider: College Admissions Advice from the Experts

Happy New Year! We’re just seven days into 2016 and we hope that means many of your resolutions are still alive. Whether you’re going to the gym more, eating healthier, or resolving not to look at your phone while you drive (good one!), January 1 is a great time to think about what you want to improve in your life. For high school juniors and their families, the application work looming in the fall threatens to interrupt all kinds of progress. We’ve got some resolutions for students (and parents!) to help keep you on the right path over the next twelve months.

After participating in your sport for a number of years and achieving a high level of play, you may decide you want to continue in college. You may very well end up being one of the fortunate high school athletes recruited by coaches. So how do you navigate the athletic recruitment process? The following are some general tips and resources to guide you through the college admissions process.

College reps and your high school teachers will invariably tell you that “there’s no such thing as a bad question.” But we all know the truth – there are absolutely bad questions, or at least there are better questions to ask than others. If you’ve already read Part 1 of our guide to college fairs, you’re in the right place. Today, we drill into all that face-to-face time you’ll have with college reps at your next fair. And we’re starting with the questions for you to avoid:

College fairs are a great opportunity for students and their families to browse a large number and diverse range of schools in one evening. Fairs are typically large gatherings and most often held in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, or even malls. The rooms can be noisy, warm, and over-crowded – but don’t give up! College fairs are an efficient and cost-effective way to “get to know” many schools in a few short hours.

Students all around the country are returning to their high schools this fall, and seniors are heading back with the special thrill and anxiety that comes with college applications. Those who have made the most of their time this summer will be pretty close to finishing their college list and will have a serviceable draft (maybe even a finished draft!) of their college essays. But even if you’ve taken care of a huge part of your college apps on your end, you’ll need to enlist the help of your high school guidance counselor to ensure everything is finished by the appropriate deadlines. A little extra thoughtfulness will go a long way towards making your application even stronger, and improving your chances of getting into your top choices. Here are some steps you should take to make the most of your high school counselor.

In my former life as an admissions officer, I was often cornered at the end of my information sessions by a student or parent who wanted to know the “secret” formula, the undisclosed algorithm, for getting into MIT or Caltech:

How to Ace Tough College Interview Questions

In my time spent as a senior admissions officer at Reed College, I must have interviewed hundreds of students. And I asked weird questions, too. What would be your useless superpower? Is math discovered or invented? If you had one question for God, what would it be? Sub-question: Would you rather he give you the answer to your question or tell you the question you should have asked? My goal was to keep students on their toes, then to catch them off guard, and then, when their expectations had been flipped upside-down, I would find out who they really were.

Where to Begin with STEM Education

Your Guide for High School Tips and Preparing for College

When I was in high school, we used to argue about when you become a senior. Does it happen the second you walk off campus on the last day of your junior year? Or do you have to wait in summer limbo, becoming a senior only when you return for classes the fall? Now that I’m an admissions counselor, I can say definitively that your senior year starts in the summer. And why? Because you have so much you need to do to prepare yourself for the coming fall: coaxing nascent essay drafts into riveting final copies; shaving your college list down from twenty to the final seven to twelve to which you’ll apply;  organizing yourself for your final year of high school and the transition to college.

Do Asians face discrimination when applying to Ivy League schools?  Do they need to appear less “Asian” when submitting their college applications in order to be admitted?  These are questions I often receive when counseling students on competitive admissions — usually when students learn I worked as an admissions officer at MIT and Caltech.  They’re questions I’ve come across in articles such as “’The Asian Penalty,’” most recently featured in The Boston Globe.  And while the questions posed might sometimes lessen the sting one might feel at the possibility of not getting admitted to one’s dream school, the reality is much more complex.