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.
Some days, it might feel like there is just so much to do when it comes to the college application process. And there is. But the personal statement, while significant, should come as somewhat of a relieving assignment. Unlike other essays, this one requires no research. It just requires some knowledge about yourself and often, the best ones are just honest, authentic portrayals of some aspect of the applicant. In fact, the best ones are usually those in which the writer had some fun.
As we’ve stated before, we do our best to answer the emails we receive from our readers. Recently, we wrote a blog post titled “Which Ivy League Should I Go To?” and in that post we kindly requested that our readers stop asking both that question, and variants of it. If you’re a regular reader of our blog, you should know that we do not subscribe to the theory that everyone needs to go to an Ivy League school.
Whether or not the colleges you apply to should look at your social media has recently become a heavily discussed topic. As that debate rages on, we wanted to find out whether or not they actually do look at it. So, we called colleges. A lot of them. And the general consensus turned out to be quite logical and uncomplicated.
Choosing a major to write about in your college applications is important, but we’ll get to that in a moment. What’s way more important to understand is that it’s completely, totally, absolutely normal to not know what you want to do with the rest of your life. At 17 or 18, it’s rare to have everything figured out. It’s rare to have everything figured out, ever. You might have goals and ideas, and those goals and ideas might change more than once. That’s fine, too. Most of the students we work with panic when they tell them they have to choose a major before writing their supplement, so you’re not alone if trying to choose yours is causing you stress. We understand how scary it sounds, but it’s an effective application strategy and there are multiple reasons why:
Our clients and the regular readers of this blog should know by now that we do not subscribe to the insane theory that everyone should go to an Ivy League school. The truth is that most students aren’t better off at an Ivy, and one of our goals is to demystify the application process so that kids can apply to schools that they actually have a chance of getting into. That said, there are still a lot of high school students (and parents) out there that think the Ivy League is the only way to go.
College applications aren’t just work for you. Often times, they mean work for your parents, college counselors, and teachers, too. So, hopefully you’ve been nice and respectful to a few (if not all) teachers throughout your time in school, because they are a critical part of the admissions process. The purpose of the teacher recommendation is to establish credibility for the applicant. Every other piece of the application is pretty much authored or engineered by you. The teacher recommendation allows universities to see if applicants are who they say they are. They’re also an opportunity for someone who knows you well to sing your praises and tell them something they might not know yet.
We originally intended to write a blog post on the best undergraduate programs for students interested in majoring in Southeast Asian studies. We set out to find programs that would allow students to delve into the histories of Southeast Asian countries while taking classes about literature, religion, and language. The results of that search were very disappointing.
We get this question a lot, and there is no one size fits all answer here. We understand that at its core, what this question really asks is how students can best position themselves to get into college. The truth is that there is no one club that sends your application straight to the accepted pile.
Subject: College choice
Message: Hi! I’ve read your website and it seems like you’ve helped a ton of people get direction on their university choice. I was wondering if you could help me out too? I really have no idea where I want to go and I’m in my senior year of high school. I want to get into one of the Ivy’s but I don’t know particularly why or which one.
If you are an aspiring artist of any medium, spending your summer as a volunteer assistant arts teacher one day/week is not going to cut it. College admissions are, frankly, ruthless, and the BFA-track provides no exception. So, we’ve curated a list of impressive and rigorous summer programs for aspiring, cut-throat artists wishing to immerse themselves in their craft once school is out.
It’s about that time of year when we start fielding questions about timelines, essay topics, and the Common App. It’s also the time of year when students find every excuse in the book not to keep things moving regarding the college process. The dreaded task of studying for finals might even seem more appealing than creating your Common App account, or perhaps you’ve deemed rewatching every season of Game of Thrones more important than opening up the Common App homepage.
Recently we got this email:
Subject: Getting into ivy league with C's??
Message: Hi, I am currently a junior in high school and I was never really interested in studies and getting into good colleges back when I started 9th grade. But now, I finally found the motivation but I feel like its too late. Is there anything I can do with the time I have to boost myself?