A very helpful article on getting into colleges.
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Rising Above The Crowd: How to get noticed in the college admissions race
MiamiHerald – March 2008
BY GIGI LEHMAN
COVER STORY
You’ve earned a 2200 SAT score, a 4.5 weighted GPA from Advanced Placement classes, and you’ve spent the summer building houses for the needy — when you weren’t playing the oboe or winning gymnastics medals. Think you’re a lock for the college of your choice?
Better think again.
In numbers alone, the competition is tougher than ever. Reasons include an increase in the number of college-age students and an increase in the number of college applications per student, thanks partly to the ease of submitting multiple applications online.
NEED A HOOK
So how can a student stand out in the crowd? Pam Proctor of Vero Beach, an independent college consultant, says every student needs what she calls a ”hook — the one passion or interest that is so strong that it will set you apart from all the other kids who are applying.” Her tips can be found in her 2007 book, The College Hook: Packaging Yourself to Win the College Admissions Game (Center Street, $21.99).
Many of Proctor’s ideas are echoed by guidance counselors — and students who have successfully negotiated the admissions process. Their advice: Beyond grades, test scores and activities, students need to have a strategy.
”For a long time colleges were looking for a well-rounded class,” says Ari Worthman, associate director of college counseling at Pine Crest School in Fort Lauderdale and formerly an admissions officer at Haverford College in Pennsylvania. “Now they’re looking for well-lopsided classes.”
In other words, ”schools are looking for students who are passionate about one thing,” said Alina Grandal, College Admissions Program advisor at Hialeah Senior High School.
For Jennifer Estimé, a senior at Southridge Senior High School, track has been her passion since middle school. In addition to competing, Estimé has spent many hours helping officials at track and field events. She also organized a track clinic for children at a winter break camp in a county park. Her efforts won her both athletic and academic scholarships to the University of Miami.
At G. Holmes Braddock Senior High, senior Dayme Sanchez has taken a similar route with dance. She is captain of the school dance team and has volunteered at a dance academy. When applying to Stanford University, Sanchez sent a video and a résumé to the dance department.
Get to know your teachers and counselors — and let them get to know you, experts advise.
‘I think more and more, counselor and teacher recommendations are important because schools are smartening up to the fact that many students’ lists of activities are contrived,” says Alex Friedlander, a Pine Crest senior who has been admitted to the University of Pennsylvania.
Students should realize their best recommendation may not come from a teacher in whose class they got an A, says Maria Mendoza, CAP counselor at Braddock High. ‘If a teacher can say, `At the beginning he struggled and at the end he got a B, but he didn’t drop the class and he came for tutoring,’ that is a good recommendation.”
SUMMER PROGRAMS
Don’t take the summer off.
Mendoza and author Proctor both recommend applying for summer programs at colleges and universities because they carry the most weight with admissions officers and because they can give students a taste of what college is like.
Many summer programs offer financial aid. For students who need to work during school breaks, programs at local universities could be an option.
Meet with visiting college representatives.
”If a student doesn’t bother to set up an interview, I don’t go chasing after him,” says an anonymous alumni interviewer quoted in The College Hook.
Friedlander says he struck up a good rapport with the Penn alumnus who visited South Florida, and he believes that meeting was one of the factors in his acceptance.
The essay is a great opportunity to stand out.
Conventional wisdom has been that the essay is a determining factor mostly for students ”on the bubble.” But with record numbers applying to colleges, almost everyone is faced with this uncertainty, so make your essay memorable.
DON’T MENTION IT
Some topics should be avoided, says Proctor and others. The top three no-no’s are religion (it’s too easy to offend the reader, unless you’re applying to a religiously affiliated school), community service (everyone does it and many write about it) and ‘’sports as a metaphor for life.” (It’s hard not to write in clichés about sports.)
Exceptions exist to every rule, though. An essay praised in The College Hook was written by a student whose penchant for sarcasm did not translate well when he lived in Costa Rica while helping to build a community center — a twist on the ”community service” essay.
And one of Friedlander’s essays for Penn was about his long involvement in kenjitsu, the art of Japanese swordsmanship. With evocative writing and an explanation of how kenjitsu illuminates aspects of Japanese culture, he avoided the pitfalls inherent in the sports essay.
Leadership is the new community service.
”Colleges really want to see leadership,” says Veronica Barroso, a Braddock senior who has applied to Harvard, the University of Pennsylvania, Duke and the University of Miami. “If you did a community service project, how many people did you touch?”
Because Barroso’s college ”hook” is her involvement in speech and debate, she volunteered to be one of two managers of a state debate tournament hosted at Braddock. ”I felt like I was the manager of a Fortune 500 company” by helping to organize the statewide event, she says, and it gave her leadership credentials to list on her résumé.
When it comes to narrowing your college choices, round up more than the usual suspects.
Large state universities and the University of Miami have been on South Florida students’ radars for decades. But other schools may be easier to get in.
”The University of North Florida has been Florida’s best-kept secret, but the secret is getting out,” says Joel Chaitovicz, UNF admissions coordinator for the region that includes South Florida. “Our applications are 15 to 20 percent higher than last year.”
Chaitovicz, a 1996 graduate of Homestead High School, knows how to sell UNF to local students.
”When I speak to a Miami teenager, I tell them they’re a teenager in a very rapid city where they feel very overwhelmed. Do they want to keep feeling overwhelmed in college? Smaller schools [UNF enrolled 16,000 students last year] have smaller class sizes. And we’re 10 minutes from the beach” in Jacksonville.
Lou Gilman, CAP advisor at Southridge High, is seeing more students apply to historically black universities and colleges like Florida Memorial University in Miami Gardens.
And author Proctor, a graduate of Mount Holyoke College, wishes more female students would consider women’s institutions like her alma mater. One student who did is Hanny Rivera, a senior at Hialeah High.
FOUR SCHOOLS
Rivera visited four schools through diversity recruitment programs that paid for her trip; one of them was Wellesley College, a women’s school in Massachusetts.
”I thought I’d hate it, but it wasn’t at all like I thought it would be,” Rivera says. Wellesley is now one of 11 schools to which she has applied.
Find a school that’s likely to want you.
Researching schools that recruit students like you is a good way to boost your chance of admission, says Proctor. For example, ‘Emory is really going global. Students who have a multicultural hook can play it up and use it for Emory. Colorado College is a very `green’ school that environmentalists can apply to.” Looking on a school’s website is an easy way to determine what a college’s ”hook” might be, Proctor says.
Natalie Reyes, a Braddock senior who wants to study mechanical engineering in college, has applied to eight schools, all known for their engineering programs, although some — Rose-Hulman Institute of Technology and Franklin W. Olin College of Engineering — are little-known outside the field.
”I researched Rose-Hulman tremendously,” Reyes says. “They ranked No. 1 for the ninth year [in U.S. News & World Report magazine] in overall engineering and mechanical engineering.”
Pine Crest senior Friedlander urges his peers not to sell their souls in search of that fat acceptance envelope.
In his own case, a counselor told him he was making a mistake when he quit lacrosse to concentrate on martial arts. She thought lacrosse would look better on his college application.
But, Friedlander says, ”I never did the things I do with the intention of looking good to a college,” and he was still admitted as an early decision applicant to Penn.
“I think that I would still be doing everything I’m doing even if there was no college at the end of the road.”
