7 College Essay Writing Tips

1. Write your college application essay before your senior year begins. Senior year is very busy, and you don't need another distraction from concentrating on what's more important: your studies. Get it brainstormed, drafted, corrected and finally written before September 1.

2. Find a topic that you know better than anyone. For example, you're a dancer because you use dance as a way to express with your body what you cannot express with your vocal cords. Who knows the language of your body better than you do? Who knows more about what you say with your dance than you do? You're the expert, which is why it'll be a whole lot easier for you to communicate what you want to say. Read: your essay can be one easy task!

3. Keep it simple. By way of illustration, let's say you're standing on a street corner and you witness a car crash in front of you; you were the only one who witnessed the crash, and the police have asked you to write a description of what you saw. Why did the police ask you? Because they know you are the expert in what you experienced in that brief moment of the car crash. You could write about a brief moment in your life that had some positive impact on you because you are the expert on how that moment affected you. Keeping it simple also means using simple words, so throw away the thesaurus.

4. Make your first statement of the essay the most powerful. Readers in a college admissions office believe 80% of the essays they read are a waste of time. So make your first statement a "hook" - a pleasant surprise that catches their attention from the get-go. Here are some example first-sentences of what some of my students wrote last year:

"I was suddenly surrounded by rifles pointing at me." (theme: paintball)
"It was clear that I was completely cut off from civilization." (theme: wilderness hiking)
"I had nowhere to go but down." (theme: overachieving)
"Pain was a requirement for me to succeed." (theme: dancing/ballet)

5. Read your essay out loud. Besides your eyes use your ears to hear what you're saying. Reading out loud gives you another sense of how the essay is moving, and you'll be able to tell if it sounds right or needs improvement. Then get friends and family members to read and listen to what you're saying. Ask for comments and suggestions.

6. Essays should be no longer than 500 words. Give the admissions reader another reason to LOVE you - keep it shorter than 500 words. The 500-word limit has been a standard for years, and the Common App now allows you to write more than 500 words. With short attention spans in a college admissions office, do you think colleges are excited that the Common App allows you to write more than they want to read? Less is more, or quality beats quantity every time.

7. Keep your essay upbeat and positive. My favorite college essay requirement comes from the College of William & Mary in Virginia where they suggest: "Surprise us!" What they're asking you to do is write something that's positive. Why? Like most colleges they're so used to reading the seven topics they don't like. Not to write about these topics would be a huge surprise.

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5 Benefits Of Going To College During The Summer

Just going to college in the summer doesn't automatically put your student on a "preferred" list at any college. You have to have a specific reason for going, such as taking a course because a scheduling conflict during your child's junior year prevented him or her from taking a needed AP or Honors course, or your student simply needs to find out if s/he really wants to go to college.

Here are 5 benefits for taking a college course during the summer between junior and senior years:

1. Colleges will be impressed that you took initiative to "make up" what you missed (translation: you didn't use the standard excuse of bad scheduling to NOT take an AP or Honors course, or that a 2nd AP course was never offered);

2. Colleges will see that you challenged yourself at a time when the beach was more appealing (translation: you demonstrated a high level of maturity and focus that are not always evident on a college application);

3. You were able to test-drive the college experience: you actually know what a college class room session is like, how professors act, and how challenging college can be. You now have a solid sense of whether you want to go to college, or you now now have a confidence level about going to college that was never known before, and the anxiety of "what's college really like?" - the fear of the unknown - is a lot less;

4. Your student earns college credit before senior year in high school, an advantage that 99.6% of competing seniors will not be able to claim; and

5. Your student's letters of recommendation will reinforce all of the above.

Hot Chicks & Minorities

Over 75% of college catalogs are fraudulent. Evidence is found in the photos.

Look carefully at the catalogs you get in your mailbox. How many include photos of black and Asian students? Nearly all of them.

A recent study reveals some embarrassing information that has caught colleges with their pants, well, in the lower regions of fiction. A few examples...

1. Although 7.9% of college students are black, college catalogs convey a 12.4% impression.

2. Colleges are defining diversity - brace yourself - with photographs of students with a different skin color. And you thought diversity of thought was the standard. Always with colleges, appearances trump substance. Because colleges are superb marketing machines, they truly believe that your perceptions are more important than their reality. If photos make you conclude their college is "diverse," then it's true.

3. Colleges justify their misrepresentations as, "What we're really saying is that you're welcome here." Cynics would add, "...although you don't qualify to be here."

4. The old 80/20 rule probably applies: 80% of the truth-in-advertising lies with a little more than 20% of the college catalogs. Translation: to find the truth you have some real digging to do.

A student who helped put this study together concluded that the catalogs portray nothing more than "hot chicks and minorities." Colleges want you to believe they want more male students (who are more apt to drop out, thereby being an economic liability) and minorities (7.9% is a dismal representation of blacks, but it's a reality colleges accepted a long time ago).

Also, attorneys general in more than 40 states last year investigated colleges for their highly questionable relationships with private loan companies, where exotic trips and kick-backs to financial aid officers were commonplace. In effect students ended up paying higher interest rates on their loans.

The catalog photos are now the indicting visuals of college fraud.

Parents are rightfully being forced into this mindset: Buyer beware.

What To Do On A College Visit

Here are 4 objectives of a first college visit. This will assume you will be impressed with the results of your visit, which will require a second visit with a different strategy. Parents should stay away from the admission office so the student can impress the admission people by your NOT being there.

1. The student - not the parent - should show up at the admissions office unannounced. You want to witness first-hand how flexible and accommodating admission people can be so that your gut instincts will help determine your first impressions. It'll also tell you how hard the college works on making good first impressions.

2. The student should ask for the name of the admissions person who handles your geographical area. This is your contact person for future phone conversations. Try to meet that person, introduce yourself, and get a business card. It would be wicked cool to trade business cards, so I would get one created with only your name, address, email address, and phone number. And no cutesy designs.

If the college doesn't assign admissions people on a geographical basis, ask for a business card from one of them and make that person your contact.

3. Either the parent or student should ask about the school’s retention rate: “What percentage of freshmen return after the freshman year?” When you get home, look on the school’s website to see if the figure matches what you heard. If the answer is a high retention rate, you want to ask a follow-up question: “Is it because of a proactive college policy to recruit a diverse student body that includes non-A students, or does the school focus on the A students who almost always account for a high retention rate?”

These 2 questions will give you a sense of the school’s orientation or philosophy of recruitment. If you’re not comfortable with the answer, move on to another campus.

4. Either the parent or student should ask a question that will be most difficult to answer, but as a parent you have a moral obligation to ask it. If the school is going to ask you to spend thousands of dollars, you absolutely want the answer to this question: “Because campus safety is in the news all the time, how and when can I get access to the campus police’s records of crime on this campus for the past 12 months?”

This could be a real curve ball question, and listen carefully to how your question is answered. If the answer sounds too practiced or too routine, such as, “Any incidents or crimes on campus are public record. You can call the local police to get that information.” If you hear this answer, you’re being lied to. The local police do not record all the campus’s incidents because the college wants to keep any real crimes quiet if they can. The most convenient reason to have a campus police force is to hide any potential public relations or image problems that could damage the school’s effort to recruit if disclosure of all crimes is made.

Unconfortable Fact: Colleges are a business, and image is everything.

Student tour directors are programmed to tell you what you want to hear. Which is why I detest planned tours. You get far better information from students sitting at a dining hall table. But if you take a tour with a young and enthusiastic robotic speaker, you need to ask questions they don’t hear; however, do not be surprised to hear other parents ask these 3 mind-boggling questions:

1. How’s the food here?
2. What are laundry facilities like?
3. Do students get enough sleep?

Colleges witness parents asking what they view as really dumb questions. These are the equivalent of asking, “Do you have running water?”

If you’re touring a college that requires $40,000 a year, you need to ask tough questions. If you don’t get the satisfactory answers WITH FOLLOW-UP research, perhaps another college will be glad to help you.

Comfortable Fact: There are over 4,000 colleges and universities out there, and you are in the driver’s seat to choose, not the colleges. They know it, but they won’t tell you that they know it.

It’s a game - a game you can win.

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