1. Emphasize Hardships and Challenges Overcome in UC Essays: The UC’s want you to place your grades from 10th and 11th grade in context. For example, if you had a bad semester due to hardship, including an environment that discouraged educational goals and aspirations, being forced to take care of a younger sibling, commuting an…
Should You Take a Gap Year? Exploring the Benefits and Considerations An increasing number of students are opting to take a year off between high school and college. The reasons vary from wanting to “take a break” from homework and exams to a desire to travel, follow a passion, or simply work and save money…
Faculty Frustration with High School Curricula Having spent the majority of my career in enrollment management positions, the question of standardized testing’s impact on college admissions arises more frequently than you might expect. Collegiate faculty often express frustration with high school curricula, particularly the lack of courses that encourage students to think critically or synthesize…
As a college admissions consultant, I often find myself advising students to consider whether to apply Early Action to their top-choice colleges. While many students are still weighing their options or trying to make a final decision, Early Action can provide numerous benefits that can help make the college application process a little less stressful. …
The Common Black College Application (CBCA) is a one-stop shop for African American students seeking to attend historically black colleges and universities (HBCUs). The CBCA streamlines the college application process by allowing students to submit one application to multiple HBCUs, thus saving time and effort. Recruiting talented students The CBCA helps provide a broader pool…
For high school juniors, the spring brings more than just a flurry of pollen invaders; introductory meetings with college advisors are scheduled, emails from colleges and universities start to consistently appear in inboxes, and a buzz starts to arise as students get into the tempo of the college search process. While there is often much…
A peak behind the curtain of admissions There has long been a knowledge gap between admission offices and the students who desire to attend their highly selective universities—a guarded process on how students are analyzed and considered for these highly coveted spots. This post aims to demystify the unknowns surrounding how selective schools evaluate admission…
So you applied to college before and did not get your desired results. With a fully completed application under your belt, you may ask yourself, how much of the application do you really need to complete all over again? Will an admissions office be able to tell if you are re-applying? Yes, most applications ask…
Because of the Ivy League’s level of prestige and high-esteemed academics, competition for its coveted few freshman class spots is fierce. Hundreds of thousands of students apply each year to the Ivy League from around the world – for the Class of 2027, over 400,000 students applied across all eight Ivy League schools. This Article…
Political Science, Government, English, Criminal Justice, History… when it comes to majors commonly associated with law school, you may think of these most readily. And, for good reason. Such majors often include courses in their curriculum that align well with legal studies. Yale University’s Political Science program, for example, requires courses to be taken that…