Except for essays, many schools have college counselors enact the why a student gets into college over another exercises to show how admission processes work.
OTOH, Tufts has had a roadshow in the past to show how the students get admitted in their school with real examples. It was an interesting exercise with audience voting during the early process to narrow down applicants although it felt like some of the final selections were more driven by the adcoms based on the way they explained the decisions.
It was a two hour workshop in a huge hotel room. Since it was widely announced in a major city, anyone with an interest could have attended it.
I think the fraction of US high schools that offer college admissions sessions, where admissions officers bring actual applications and have small groups discussing them, is extraordinarily small.
There are two parents on this forum who posted that their schools had this, one public and one private. texaspg mentioned a workshop in a huge hotel room. If the essays weren’t shown, and it was a huge group, it’s not really the same level of advantage, though it is better than not having anything at all. I didn’t see any ads for a Tufts session back in QMP’s application season.
If Googling the fraction of schools that offer this kind of session would be a good idea, would you please suggest what search parameters I should use? I don’t think these data are aggregated anywhere. But the parents on this forum could say whether their schools did or did not offer this opportunity, and that probably gives an upper bound on the fraction of high schools that offer this.
Well, my kids attended a selective magnet program, and there was not (assuming I’m recalling correctly) a session like that–there were some general sessions, I think, but nothing with that level of detail. There were visits by reps from some top schools (separately) and kids had to sign up to go to them. Advising on college admissions was not very strong (in my experience, anyway).
No, nothing even remotely like that was offered at our high school. There is a college night for junior parents which provides very basic college application information of the kind we on CC know like the back of our hand, eg. explaining what a FAFSA form is.
There is also an annual college fair held at our high school which my kids did not attend because there were no competitive colleges present–mostly just the state schools and mediocre privates. The only hotel event advertised, we attended. It was the traveling one with about 10 reps from some top schools like Duke and Georgetown who gave a brief version of a campus information session. There was no workshop or breakout session beyond a chance to visit the table of one or two colleges afterward amidst a thousand eager beaver annoying parents trying to schmooze. It was not helpful.
A lot of the ANDs I’ve heard about demonstrate intellectual curiosity in a memorable way. I suspect that a kid who is a beekeeper on top of excellent grades and scores is intellectually curious, for example.
Just to add: It’s not enough to say that you are intellectually curious, or even for a recommender to say that. How do you demonstrate that in your application?
There is no formulaic essay across board that fits all of the elite schools. I would suggest that one school showing their school essays to a small group of parents fits that school’s way of picking students.
JHU publishes their pick of successful essays each year. I would bet anything that all it means is that the adcoms at JHU liked those essays in that particular year. Would the Yale, Brown, Princeton adcom pick the same essays as successful essays - most likely not.
What I’ve generally noticed is that if you have to ask, you don’t have it. Sometimes, kids who have had it crushed out of them can rediscover it. In some cases, I’ve seen kids fake it.
Our affluent public high school sends students to elite colleges every year, yet offered only a generic information night for interested parents. GC’s touched on the importance of choosing a safety, the numbers of applications to submit, deadlines for submitting transcript requests, how to access Naviance, and procedures for applying ED. There were additional sessions for potential athletic recruits and for explaining how to apply for financial aid.
GC’s require that both students and parents complete an information sheet, and some teachers who write rec’s also ask for additional information from students.
The school hosts college reps from a variety of schools on a regular basis throughout the school year, and students can leave class to attend information sessions. College information night is staffed by local alums and parents of current students, and features tables from a variety of schools.
That is it.
Frazzled kids wrote and submitted essays that they did not show or discuss with anyone else. When they went on interviews, they were sometimes surprised at the EC’s that evoked the most interest.
Intellectual curiousity can be shown pretty easily. In computer science, most kids who are interested go way, way beyond anything the AP curriculum offers and have activities that show what they’ve done.
My younger son showed his interest in history on the Common App in an essay for “your favorite EC” about cataloging the archives of the neighborhood association. (He related a fight the association had with the district over the course of a year about keeping open classrooms in the school, and how limiting the primary documents were for telling the story.) For one school he also did an optional essay that involved imagining US history if we had lost at Lexington. For that one he actually found Ben Franklin’s diary, newspaper headlines and the like and adapted them to his revised history. Anyone who read that essay/story, knew he’d gone way beyond the basics. He drove me crazy because he insisted on writing that essay after Christmas when he would have more time.
“Except for essays, many schools have college counselors enact the why a student gets into college over another exercises to show how admission processes work.”
“Many”? LOL. Please.
In the vast majority of high schools in this country, “college counseling” is something added on to an overworked guidance counselor who is already dealing with Janie whose mother passed away and Joey who is skipping classes and Susie whose homelife is such that she should be sent to foster care.
And the college counseling that does exist is geared towards finding scholarship money for kids to get into the nearest state school. Private colleges? The finer points of Haverford vs Amherst? Schools halfway across the country? Not even REMOTELY on radar screens.
I really hate when CC-ers act as though the whole country is affluent suburbia.
Adcoms don’t have the time or budget to do everything for every hs.
The best home schoolers are a good example of intellectual curiosity. Some are really out there doing more than some formulaic linear curriculum. No, not all kids can do that. But what do we here think is intellectual curiosity? Think of friends and other posters and what tells you they are curious. It’s not saying it, not the, “Wow, and I can take so many classes at Top U.” Not the generic, “I love to read,” It’s about how the kid has been choosing and pursuing things to learn. One kid I knew loved camping, (have to omit details,ok?) and fell in love with the outdoors. But this wasn’t, “I love the outdoors, the little birdies, I started a school recycling program.” He then started learning about geology, ecology, wrung everything out of his hs curric that he could and took on a summer’s ranch activities of some sort that put him in the particular environment he loved.
That example butts up against “passion,” but see how he didn’t just claim it, didn’t just talk about a love of (“passion for”) collecting rocks. He lived it. And he wrote beautifully, which cemented a perception of his smarts. I should add, he wrote comfortably. And of course, had the rest of the picture, stats, rigor, activities. The balancing act is, “show not just tell.”
Well, that could be seen as supporting the theory that some kids have it and some don’t. There are an awful lot of threads which start with “How can I show my passion for…”.
Several colleges used to offer glimpses of what went on in their admissions decision meetings. I remember a few years back Amherst’s committee meeting discussions were a feature story on NPR. The story aired before decisions went out, which certainly added to the applicants’ stress. In addition, the committee ran late that year, and Amherst’s decisions were released later than expected. Speculation was that all of this was going to impact their yield. I don’t think Amherst (or any other school) has tried that degree of openness since.
Tufts used to live blog their ED committee meetings. There was some obscuring of details, and there weren’t any direct essay quotes, in order to have a bit of privacy. The idea was that RD or future applicants would get a sense of what the committee was looking for. And yes, it was helpful, if a bit horrifying to see in real time how the sausage was made. I swore I wouldn’t read the live blog the year that D1 applied ED, but she checked. Lo and behold, they described an applicant that sounded very much-but not exactly–like her. That applicant was admitted. We spent the next few weeks before decisions were released ping-ponging between being certain that they were describing D1, and worrying that this other applicant was D1’s phantom competition. After D1 was admitted, I contacted the adcom in charge of the live blog, asking if the admitted student was D1. He denied it, but D1 never met any student that much like her. And Tufts has never live-blogged their committee meetings since. And they deleted the past committee live blogs from their website. So draw your own conclusions.
Just like the origami essay, my son’s essay was about solving the Rubik’s cube blindfolded and learning to bboy (aka break dancing) by watching online videos. Neither of those ventures to which he devoted many, many hours (especially bboying) would ever appear on a resume, nor did they have anything to do with the rest of his application which was very musically oriented. I thought his essay was a a good juxtaposition to the rest of his application. I remember my son saying to me that his application would show his passion for music; therefore, he wanted to show the AOs something else about himself in his essay. The essay encapsulated his personality while his application was heavy on the AND.
To answer @QuantMech, my son attended a very large, diverse public high school, both racially and socioeconomically. In my son’s graduating class, three kids were accepted at Yale. Prior to that, no one had been accepted at Yale in many years. Prior to my son’s acceptance, a Yale rep had never been to the school before. The schools that showed up were state schools and several of the colleges that change lives schools. The year after my son graduated, a Yale rep was at the school for the sponsored HS college fair. His large, urban HS never had any kind of college night like @renaissancemom talked about. Over the summer after my son’s junior year, his HS had a four day pilot program for the top 25 kids in his class which included help with choosing colleges, an exercise on reading college apps etc… There wasn’t anything about crafting an application “package”. No essay writing or review of essays. None of the exercises were conducted by an AO from a university. The sessions were conducted by the HS guidance counselors. At his HS, there are 6 guidance counselors and 2500 kids. There is no way that the guidance counselors would have the time to do what the guidance counselors in a small private school do.
Also, concerning the LOR, I would agree. One of my son’s LOR was very ho hum. I would call it a laundry list LOR. The other LOR was out of the ballpark. Within the letter, his English teacher included a paragraph about a Shakespeare project and how my son incorporated his passion for music into the project. She indicated that after he was finished, all the other kids were looking at each other and asking themselves how they could complete with that. It was the perfect tie-in with the rest of his application. While the LOR was a winner, I don’t think it was the reason that he was accepted.
My daughter is starting HS this year. I kind of wish that I was still as blissfully ignorant as I was when my son applied. I didn’t actually join CC until after he was almost completely finished with his college app.
@QuantumMech at our HS “competitive college workshop”, they bring in adcoms from 7 competitive schools. It is scheduled from 7-10 pm. There is a general panel discussion/QA (essentially a power point with with adequate QA time. Then we break out into groups with an adcom in charge and in fact, we do look at previous year’s applications (none from our HS) with all pertinent info blacked out and we all act as an admissions committee and render a decision. It’s interesting to see how, with some apps, it’s totally unanimous up or down. But for others, it is more unclear and some interesting debate goes on.
Thank you to everyone who mentioned whether the high schools their children attend have a college admissions night with “real” applications on view. This seems to be geographically somewhat spotty.
