Admissions tip: An interview is a two-way street

Usually when applicants prepare for their admissions interviews, they spend their time trying to figure out what questions will be asked and how they can best answer them. This is important and a good idea. But it’s not the only step to prepping for an admissions interview.

An interview is a two-way street.

Your interviewer will ask you questions and listen your answers, and then will turn the asking over to you. When your interviewer says, “Do you have any questions?” you don’t want to shut the interview down by saying, “Nope, I’m set” but want to keep the flow of the conversation going by taking the reins of the interview into your hands and asking some questions of your own.

There are two things you can do before your interview to help you come up with intelligent questions:

1. Familiarize yourself with the program’s website and other literature. Never ask a question that can be answered easily online.
2. Review your application. Your questions should be specific to your unique situation – your skills, interests, and goals. Questions about the faculty or clubs, for example, should relate to your own education, career, and goals.

Since your goal should be to come up with questions that are specific to your situation, I can’t give you a list of must-ask questions without knowing who YOU are. But here are a few sample questions that you can review and tweak so that the questions are more appropriate for YOU:

• How difficult is it to enroll in a popular class like XYZ? (Insert a class that appeals to you. Not a required course.)
• Do recruiters from XYZ (a company or a particular field that interests you) visit the school? How do students get interviews with recruiters?
• Are business plan competitions (or something else that’s relevant to you) open to all students, or are there certain requirements to qualify?

If you are interviewing with school alum or a second-year student, then you should ask questions about their experiences, for example:

• Who were some of your favorite professors? Favorite classes?
• What is/was a typical day like for you?
• Are there clubs or activities that you would recommend for someone interested in XYZ? What clubs are you involved in? How important do you think it is to be involved in extracurricular activities?
• If you could change anything about your experience at this program, what would it be?

You get the idea. You want to come up with questions that personalize you and that show you have an interest in your interviewer’s experience (if relevant). Be specific, show that you’ve done your research, and most importantly, relax!

Good luck and let us know how we can further help you prepare for your interviews!

Accepted.com ~ Helping You Write Your Best

Dealing with transcripts as a homeschooled college applicant

This is the second post in a series for homeschooled students and their parents.

Attend any college information session, on campus or in your hometown, and you will likely hear about the importance of your high school transcript.  It makes sense that the most important piece of the college admission puzzle is the summary of the work a student has completed over the four years of high school.

For a homeschooler, this might pose a difficulty.  Often homeschooled students have pieced together a curriculum that meets their needs.  It might include any combination of the following:  self-study, online courses, pre-purchased curriculum, and traditional courses in a local high school or community college.  This summary of learning might not provide a GPA, almost always lacks a class rank, and doesn’t necessarily lend itself to looking like the same path a student takes at your local high school.

Is that OK?  Absolutely.  One of the advantages to homeschooling is the flexibility a student often has to pursue his or her own interests.  The choices you have made, in concert with your parents and other guiding adults, are intriguing to the admissions committee. If you try to look like traditional students with traditional transcripts, you are probably selling yourself short.

However, you do want colleges to recognize the breadth and rigor of your studies.  At the most basic level, an admissions committee does want to see that you have met their basic curricular requirements for admission, which in many cases include multiple years of English, math, social studies, science and foreign language.  If you are applying to specialized programs such as engineering, the arts, or nursing you may need to provide evidence of other types of coursework as well.

A transcript-type format does make it easy for colleges to understand that you have pursued a high school education that has prepared you to be successful in college.  If you have taken courses through an online program or in a traditional high school, you will have transcripts from those institutions, and I encourage you to submit an official version of each of these documents with every application, even if you create a single transcript that encompasses your entire high school experience.  As you account for coursework that you have developed on your own, make certain that you have accounted for the relative number of credits – is this the equivalent of a full year course, a semester course, or a trimester?  A full year course is the relative equivalent of 4+ hours a week of instruction, over the course of 36 weeks.

Rigor is more difficult to quantify.  Many homeschooled students sit for AP exams, which do provide a benchmark to the colleges.  For classes below the AP level, the secondary school report, which will be the subject of a future blog post, can best establish rigor.

Developing a transcript for a homeschooled student is paradoxical: It challenges and rewards.   Demonstrating the breadth of your studies and the significance of your  accomplishments is similarly and simultaneously satisfying and daunting.  In a holistic college admissions review, members of the admissions staff take great care to understand a student’s record, regardless of the format – high school transcripts can vary greatly too!  However, given the vast number of applications that many colleges review annually, if you are a home schooled college applicant, make sure you cover the basics so they are easily apparent, and then let the distinctiveness of your record shine through.

By Whitney Bruce, who has worked in college admissions since 1996. She has served as a Senior Assistant Director of Admissions (Washington U), Application Reader (University of Michigan), Assistant Director of College Counseling (private prep school in St. Louis), and an independent college counselor. She is happy to advise you as you apply to college.

How’s your punctuation and capitalization? If you don’t know the rules, check with your English teacher.  There are also easy-to-use books out there. Among my favorites are the The Least You Need to Know About English series, written for ESL students by Paige Wilson and Teresa Ferster Glazier. The books are expensive since they are textbooks, but the rules are expressed in language that is easy to understand and easy to remember, and a review wouldn’t hurt as you prepare for college.

Now look at your margins, line spacing, and font. Make sure they conform to what the schools are asking for.  Look at the way you have done paragraphing — if you haven’t indented the beginning of paragraphs, you must make an extra space between paragraphs. If you have indented the first line of each paragraph, you do not put an extra space between the paragraphs.

Find a Picky Reader for Final Proofing

Even though you’ve gone over the essay with a fine-toothed comb, it’s time to have someone’s hawk eyes take a look. If they find polish editing to do, don’t take offense. Learn why they are suggesting the changes they are suggesting.  Feel lucky if they find typos or missing words and punctuation.  But do remember to stick to your guns when you truly feel what you have presented works and there is no reason for change. It is usually a body sensation that lets you know — there’s a feeling associated with realizing you know what you know, and there is a different one associated with thinking you thought you might have made a mistake, but didn’t investigate it and now someone is confirming it. If you’ve worked the process up to this point, this final editorial eye will not be asking for major changes in the essay.

In fact, leaving this final polishing editorial help to the end of the process assists you in expressing yourself earlier as you outline, write, and rewrite using reader response. You fix the final essay and not all the drafts in between because this kind of editing can get in the way of creating the very best story you can tell.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

The trap of marginal thinking in admissions

Are you considering padding your resume or record as you apply to college, graduate school, or a job? Think again. This past week I came across several articles at different times and on different topics that you should know about.

Obviously there are the stories about Yahoo CEO Scott Thompson’s embellished college record. Just a few hours ago Yahoo confirmed the inevitable: Scott Thomas is now the former CEO of Yahoo. Non-existent degrees on resumes are a hard thing to claim “oops!” about. He is out.

What does a falsehood from thirty years ago reflect on his competence to run Yahoo today? Whether he had the degree or not, don’t his recent accomplishments speak more loudly about his abilities than some stale studies from three decades ago?

That phony degree in computer science may not reflect one iota on his managerial skill, but it speaks volumes about his integrity. In all likelihood if he had just told the truth, he would still have been chosen to be Yahoo CEO, and there would have been no easy target for activist shareholder, Dan Loeb, the CEO of Third Point, to go after Thompson, much less win three seats for the Third Point group on Yahoo’s board.

But Thompson didn’t tell the truth and apparently hasn’t been consistently telling the truth about his academic record for years. Consequently, he is no longer CEO, and could be facing problems with the SEC, and his reputation is in tatters.

That leads to the second story I saw this week. It didn’t generate the headlines of Yahoo’s board shakeup, but the questions and conclusion are surprisingly similar.

Back in January prestigious Claremont-McKenna College acknowledged that a senior administrator had falsified data reported to U.S. News for its highly influential college rankings. The administrator resigned in disgrace. Claremont apologized and hired O’Melveny & Myers LLP to provide the correct data and to detail the extent of the misrepresentation since 2004. Per the Morse Code, the blog of Robert Morse, director of data research for U.S.News & World Report, and based on the newly verified data, Claremont McKenna’s 2012 rank is correct and will not change.

That’s mind boggling! That administrator lied, lost his job, damaged a top school’s name and for what? Nothing. The ranking with the lower, accurate data is unchanged.

While the saints among us may be feeling very smug at this point — “The bad guys got their due, and I would never make up something on my resume.” — I’d like to point out a third article I read this week – this one from Harvard Business School’s Working Knowledge. In the fascinating “How Will You Measure Your Life?” Dr. Clayton Christensen writes about the “trap of marginal thinking” both on bottom-line and ethical decisions. In his attempts to teach students how to live a life of integrity he writes, “The marginal cost of doing something ‘just this once’ always seems to be negligible, but the full cost will typically be much higher.” He is so right.

Applicants (and applicant parents): Please, please, put your best foot forward in your applications BUT make sure it’s your foot. Don’t embellish. Don’t falsify. Don’t lie. You should have learned this in kindergarten, but if you didn’t, realize that the long-term cost of these falsehoods can be far higher than whatever pain or small cost is exacted by simply telling the truth.

Scott Thompson just learned this lesson. That Claremont McKenna administrator learned this lesson. It would be wonderful if applicants and their parents could also learn this lesson — before their names find their way into the headlines for some long-ago “inadvertent error” that clearly was intentional.

By Linda Abraham, president and founder of Accepted.com and co-author of the new, definitive book on MBA admissions, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools.

This article originally appeared on Technorati.

Tips for nontraditional high school students applying to college

This is the first post in a series about homeschooled students and the college admissions process.

In the beginning, college applications seem fairly straightforward:  start by filling in your biographical information, add extracurricular activities, and request a transcript.  Write about yourself; ask others to write about you.  For students following a traditional high school path, this seems to make sense.  Every year, however, I hear variations on the following:

• Why was a student at my high school accepted at x college with an SAT score 200 points below the average?
• If the college requires 3 years of foreign language and I took Spanish 1 in 8th grade, have I fulfilled the requirement by 10th grade?
• Is Art History considered an art course or a history course?
• Is AP Economics considered as rigorous as AP European History?
• When the college allows for an optional essay or recommendation, should I submit it?

Very often, the answer I give to each is “it depends.”  It depends on the high school environment, the college in question, and the student.  If you are a homeschooled student, the open-ended variables loom even larger.

Homeschooled students make up only a small percentage of students applying to college in any given year, but that percentage is growing.  Like traditional students, they are applying to highly selective colleges, small liberal arts schools, and flagship state universities.  They are gaining admission and winning merit scholarships.  In most every admissions office, there is someone who can answer questions about homeschooled applicants in great detail.

Homeschooled students have a very different set of concerns when applying to college:  Have I taken the correct classes?  Does my taekwondo class count as a PE credit?  Can I use my research project in immunology as a science class?  Should I prepare for and take AP or additional SAT II exams? How many recommendations should I plan to submit?  Who should write them?

As a student with a self-designed education, the burden of proof is on you to demonstrate both your mastery and your passions. Doing this effectively takes considerable thought and time. A complete and thorough application may include additional curricular information, more extensive testing records, extra letters or recommendation and essays.  As you plan your application, give yourself the necessary time to file complete college applications.  Over the next few months, I’ll discuss in future blog posts the primary aspects of the college application with a specific eye to the homeschooled applicant. I’ll reveal the steps and tactics to showcase your distinctive and outstanding qualifications.

However, for now, just know that if you are completing high school in a non-traditional environment, early planning is essential to your college applications.  No doubt, you will identify colleges that you believe are a great match academically and socially, but prepare to spend extra time ensuring the admissions office fully understands your high school experience.

By Whitney Bruce, who has worked in college admissions since 1996. She has served as a Senior Assistant Director of Admissions (Washington U), Application Reader (University of Michigan), Assistant Director of College Counseling (private prep school in St. Louis), and an independent college counselor. She is happy to advise you as you apply to college.

After You Get Feedback on Your First Draft…

Using the responses you got and took notes on, go back to the beginning of your essay and rework what you think needs reworking.  Do the best you can. If something sounds awkward but it is the best you can do, leave it in for now.  If something sounds silly to you but is just the information a trusted reader asked for, leave it in.  If you can’t think of the right detail exactly, think of something close that will do for now. Just keep fixing the draft — don’t worry about word limits yet. Get a story on the page that compels readers to keep going so they can learn more about you, and to exit the essay feeling like they’ve been on a reflective journey with the speaker and know more about life and the speaker at the end of the essay. You don’t have to take on weighty subjects for this to be true — we can learn a lot about someone and life from an essay about taking care of a sick cat or resolving to do better in a physics class or losing two front teeth.

Get More Response

You know the drill. Go back to your first trusted reader or readers or find new ones and read them this second draft. Get response in exactly the same three steps. You will figure out if your revisions worked or if you need to keep working on them. Most likely, you have done a lot of good work. but may find that some of what you have introduced hasn’t done what you want it to yet.

Remain quiet as you hear the responses. Take notes to use when you sit down to rework your draft.

Rework Your Second Draft

After you read this one to trusted readers you should be pretty close to having the essay you want. But you might have exceeded the length, character or word limit.  Using your outline should have helped you find a focus from the get-go so you didn’t have to use space with too much set up and meandering around for your entrance into your topic.  However, many of us write in “loose” sentences. We use more words than needed to convey information.  Sentence tightening is a bit of an art, but you can get the hang of it.

Start by checking adverbs and adjectives — are the ones you used really necessary, or do words you have modified already contain the meaning you are emphasizing by using the modifier? For instance, many people write “very unique” when, if something is unique, it is one-of-a-kind. How much more one-of-a-kind can it be?  Often the word unique is not needed either — the details show rather than tell.

In fact, the next thing you can do in tightening is look for sentences that retell what the images already showed and therefore the reader knows:  “We came out of the ocean shivering with 30-degree water dripping off our skin. We were very cold.”  It’s obvious, isn’t it? You may find you have done a lot of this kind of writing — the design part of your mind is working in images and the logical side wants to sum up what the images already said. Not necessary.

Next find out if you used a phrase when one word would have said the same thing — i.e. the phrase “in order to” can usually be replaced by the single word “to.”

Look for ways to use verbs instead of nouns:   The phrase, “I decided on vanilla ice cream” uses fewer words than “I made the decision to have vanilla ice cream.”

Look for ways to make dependent clauses instead of using all independent clauses. In other words, the lines “My father became a dentist and he used his small motor dexterity to make model planes with me” can become “Using his small motor dexterity, my dentist father made model planes with me.” The second sentence represents a five-word savings. It doesn’t seem like much, but if you do this throughout the essay, the deleted words can add up.

Then you start seeing that some sentences merely repeat what the reader already knows just because it sounds good. Keep the sentence that comes first or the one you like the best and chop the other one.  Here’s an example:  “When Kelly and I came around the corner, our mouths opened in surprise. We were so surprised!  We could hardly talk or even laugh. It was awesome.”  How about stopping after the first sentence and getting on with the story? There is no need to build suspense and keep the reader, who wants to charge ahead, waiting. And there is no need to remind the reader that you know the whole story and the reader doesn’t yet.

Finally, you’ll see that some of the words you’ve used, thinking you had to connect events, aren’t necessary because the reader intuitively relates them: “I went into the kitchen and when I heard a loud noise in the living room, I quickly walked toward the kitchen door and into the hallway that leads to the living room.” This can be: “When I heard a loud noise coming from the living room, I ran to see what had happened.”

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

Birthday Book Sale Ends Tomorrow!

Yesterday was my birthday, and today is your day to celebrate with super bookstore savings! Today and tomorrow are the last days of Accepted’s birthday blowout book sale, during which you can save 50% on ALL Accepted books with promo code SAVE50!

Browse our growing collection of books, choose the ones that match your admissions goals, and save 50% by using SAVE50 at checkout!

This is an important time for all of us – I’m one year older and wiser, and you’re one step closer to gaining admission at your top choice undergraduate or graduate program! Congratulations to us all!

Choose your MBA, med school, law school, grad school, or college admissions books now!

The Accepted.com staff wishes Linda a very happy birthday!

By Linda Abraham, president and founder of Accepted.com and co-author of the new, definitive book on MBA admissions, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools.

Birthday Book Sale!

To celebrate my birthday (May 10th) we’re giving you a present!

Buy any Accepted.com books between now and Sunday, May 12th and save 50% when you use promo code SAVE50!

Browse our bookstore to choose the best admissions books for you!

• MBA Admissions Books
• Medical School Admissions Books
• Law School Admissions Books
• Graduate School Admissions Books
• College Admissions Books

Note: My new book, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Top Business Schools, is included in the sale!

Happy birthday to me, and happy book sale to you!

By Linda Abraham, president and founder of Accepted.com and co-author of the new, definitive book on MBA admissions, MBA Admission for Smarties: The No-Nonsense Guide to Acceptance at Top Business Schools.

Get Responses from Trusted Readers or Listeners

When you have brought the draft as far as you can or as far as you feel like doing for this round, read it to someone who has heard it before, or better yet to someone new. Ask this person to give you response in these three steps:

1. What words and phrases jumped out and stayed with them
2. How they felt while reading the essay
3. What they are curious to know more about

They do not have to, and actually shouldn’t, give you any reasons for their responses. The less they explain the better since it is your job to hear the problem areas and figure out your own way to fix them. The more you remain silent listening and taking notes on what they are saying, the better — in the end, your writing will not have you with it to explain itself, so you want to hear what the response is to the writing so far, not to what you have to add that is not on the page.  After this response, you’ll continue working on your essay, and the next time around, the response you get should show you that you have fixed areas that were not yet working.

You may want to select another two or three trusted listeners or readers. Taking notes from a variety of responses can assist you in finding the words that will help you keep your ultimate readers interested. You will start to see patterns concerning missing elements, and also see a variety of ways to fix problems for your readers — where to give them more information, where to clarify something in a sentence, where to put a clear referent in for a pronoun, and where to break long confusing sentences into two or more sentences, for instance.

In Step One, readers’ memories make you realize that your writing, even it its early form, has made an impact, been listened to. There is no more powerful lesson about writing — what we say is what people hear. If we don’t say things fully, they don’t hear fully. Belt it out on the page!  That they heard as much as they did is proof that you are worth listening to. This feeling gives you confidence and willingness to listen attentively to the Step Two and Step Three responses.

In Step Two, when readers tell you how your writing makes them feel, they have two categories of response. I call them Feelings A and Feelings B.  Feelings A are those feelings you think the essay wants you to feel — excitement, pleasure, happiness that the writer made it, the sincerity of the writer, sometimes sadness, for instance. Everyone likes hearing and saying Feelings A — it is in keeping with the idea of being heard.  Then there are feelings B:  where the reader was kept from full satisfaction — feeling left out of knowing, disappointed not to have a description of something so they can see, hear, feel, taste, and touch it, confused. When they tell you their feelings as “I” statements, it is almost always fairly easy to see a way to put in the information readers need. Since we know what we have lived through, our minds don’t always feel the need to put everything out there on the page, but will when we learn others need the information we have omitted if they are to experience what we are talking about.

Lastly, your readers should tell you where they are curious to know more.  They will probably pose many questions. You have to decide if what they want to know belongs in this essay or, if you fixed the essay according to the Feelings B responses, readers wouldn’t complain of digressions. A very common writing problem in early drafts is that the author writes his or her way to something important and then never shows or says what it is — i.e. if a writer claims a particular fight parents had affected the way he views education, but he doesn’t talk about the fight because he thinks it is too personal, he is going to leave his readers curious to know what the fight was. If someone claims that the turning point in her life was losing a friend to a car accident, but doesn’t say how old they were or how she heard about the loss or the ways she has missed that friend, readers will be curious to know more about her relationship to her friend.

Honoring the readers’ willingness to immerse themselves in your experience is half the battle of writing a good essay. This kind of honoring allows you to offer the tangible details of experience — what you heard, saw, smelled, tasted, and touched — because you know that others are interested. So often, especially when working against word and page limits, it is tempting to generalize and sum up to save words and often to sound more scholarly, more serious, and more important. Usually, this is a grave error — the admissions committee readers want to know you, and they can best learn about you by seeing you in your life.

What makes the details of the essay interesting is the way they collect meaning and become a way of expressing what you are learning from writing: that you are a skilled team player, a person who is able to communicate well with others, that you are interested in a social group made up of people from diverse backgrounds, that your family’s background has instilled important values, that making up your own mind is the most satisfying of experiences, or that you have made an impact on others in your community. Whatever it is, the details of your specific experience are what allow the reader to gain insight along with you as you write about your topic.  When your writing is alive with insight that seems fresh — wrought from the details of the experience as a consequence of writing about them — readers feel interested and moved.

So remember, when readers are curious to know more, it usually means the writer has generalized where specifics would have told the story, or the writer has stopped before the story ends, or the writer has left out a chunk in the middle. When you have told readers too much, they will report in Feelings B that they are overwhelmed or confused, and you will decide which details are the right ones to take out. Another thing to remember is that taking out is usually easier than finding examples and details to put in. So, when you draft, put a lot in. You’ll have more to work with and so will your early responders.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”

If you get stuck, start describing something that has to do with the part of the essay where you are stuck. For instance, in one sample essay, a student describes losing his tooth at a Red Sox game. Perhaps he was writing and got stuck at the point of describing the game because he didn’t know how much detail to give. Instead of writing a lot of detail, he became afraid it would throw him off track. But then he didn’t know what to write.

In cases like these, start describing the event or place or activity that you have come to in detail. You can decide later what to leave out if anything. In one college application essay, the student wrote:

I ran down the aisle several rows and put my hands up as if I saw all the nearby fans doing. As the ball sailed towards the seats, I did not react fast enough and was not ready when it came at me. The ball struck me straight in the mouth and knocked out two of my teeth, lacerated my tongue, and put a hole in my lip. My friends quickly found one tooth and fans rushed me to the first-aid room where the doctor pushed that tooth back into the hole in my gums within minutes to be sure it would adhere to my bone. He checked my mouth, reported one tooth still missing and told my friends to return to our seats to find my other tooth so he could push it back in.

As a reader, I like being privy to the emergency. It has more impact on me than just hearing that his teeth were knocked out and he went to the first aid booth — showing us his friends helping is part of the experience of resiliency.  Details tell the story. When in doubt put them in. When you get response, your readers will tell you whether they got overwhelmed or bored — and if they did you can easily trim.

Put the Document Away for At Least One Hour

Printing out the document and putting it away overnight is even better. Mailing it to yourself by snail or email (and printing the attachment) is also a way of putting some distance between you and the draft. When you come back to it, you want to see it with fresh eyes. Having someone read it with you even if they don’t say a word and/or reading it aloud are also ways of being sure you get a new perspective. The writing goes into the world separate from you and it has to perform its magic with its readers without you there to fill in gaps or answer questions. There is something about letting it go into the world as a draft that helps you see what it is missing, what it needs to succeed by itself. You will realize there are details missing or sentences that don’t say what you meant them to. Now is a good time to fix what you find.

Thanks for joining us as we continue with Staying Sane through the College Essay Writing Process, an ongoing series that offers college applicants and their parents advice on how to stay on track for completing Ivy-worthy essays…without flying off the handle. We hope you enjoyed this next part of the series, and STAY SANE!

By Sheila Bender, former Accepted.com editor and founder of Writing it Real, a “community and resource center for writing from personal experience.”