Location, location, location . . . last?

For high school students, a thought experiment:

Suppose you found your ideal college for its people, programs, and facilities--friendly, interesting, fun students; the classes you need to advance your educational and career goals; great housing options; good scholarship opportunities for you; and on and on.

Would it matter where the school is located?

Maybe you want to stay close to home to be near your family. That's a legitimate reason to consider location. Maybe you want to keep travel expenses low, another legitimate reason to consider location.

Otherwise, how much should location matter?

I cannot go to a college with cold winters? Yes, I can. I can buy a heavy jacket, warm boots, and gloves.

I cannot go to a college in the South. Yes, I can, if the school provides the academic and social experience I am looking for.

Consider how a prospective college can serve your aims for being educated and having fun. Then consider location. Try not to make it the deal killer for your college search. 

Need help starting your application essays?

College-bound high school seniors face a double-whammy: the end of summer vacation, the start of the application essay marathon.

Where to begin?

Read some sample application essays from highly selective schools: Connecticut College, Johns Hopkins University, Tufts University, and Hamilton College.

Again and again, these samples drive home a key point: Preach less, describe more. Tell the story with vivid, concrete language.

How to start composing your own essay?  No perfect method exists for launching application essays, once you have your topics. However, here are some ideas to keep you moving forward.

Start writing whatever comes to mind about the topic, using free-writing guidelines such as these. Keep the pen moving or the keyboard clicking for at least 30 minutes. Students using this method are likely to spend 10 to 15 minutes foundering a bit until they discover the experiences they can most successfully employ to develop the topic.

A high school senior once asked me, “What should I write about?” I told her to start writing about an activity she enjoys. About a half hour later she returned with her draft, about her favorite activity, golf. The first half page was filled with random observations about the activity, but midway through the page, she found her groove, you might say. She started writing about why she started playing golf. It was an interesting story. Her big sport had been softball, but she found the pressure from the team and coach overwhelming. So, she switched to golf, a sport that allowed her a much larger role to motivate and coach herself.

Writing is a discovery process. If you have no idea what to write for a college essay, that is fine. In my experience, you won’t know until you start writing about the topic and discover what you have to say. Once you have a draft, you can always shape it up afterward for its organization, diction, clarity, succinctness, and formal correctness.

More tips:

• Divide a piece of standard printing or notebook paper lengthwise. In the left-hand column, briefly describe an incident that relates to your topic. Directly across from the incident, write a comment—your opinion—about what happened.  Fill this page, even a second page or more with such descriptions and comments. See what your comments have in common. What has emerged that you can use for the essay.
• Make a list of words that relate to the topic. Then, describe an experience that relates to each word.
• Don’t know how to start your essay? Well, don’t start it! Write the middle first—or any portion you think you are ready to write. See what happens from there. You don’t have to write the parts of the essay in order. You can piece them together later. In the age of the word processor, strictly linear composition is for the birds!
• Draft a conclusion to the essay. Work back from there.
• Pretend you are drafting the essay as a letter to a close friend ten years your senior. This approach should help you to find the right tone.
• Describe an experience that relates to the topic. Then another.  Then a third. By this point, a workable approach to the essay is likely to emerge.
• Make a list of nouns, action verbs, and even adjectives that apply to the topic. Assemble the pieces into descriptive sentences. Then, sentences into paragraphs.

After your draft is done or significantly underway, then what?

• Edit like mad for brevity. Omit needless words. Replace clumsy noun constructions with action verbs. (“It was my decision to join.” à “I decided to join.”). Also, the more concise your sentences, the less likely they are to have grammatical errors.
• Even though this is a personal essay, avoid overusing the first person. As much as possible, describe events according to their component parts. (“I became afraid.” à “Fear overwhelmed me.” “I noticed that the room was untidy.” à “A sea of clothing, strewn and dirty, covered the floor.”)
• Avoid long-winded sentences. Break some of them up by using phrase modifiers. See http://www.jccc.edu/student-resources/tutors-accessibility/writing-center/files/modifiers-combined.pdf.
• If you are clicking away at your iPad or laptop, take a break from time to time. When you return to your computer, reread your entire essay, from the beginning. Edit as you do. Reacquaint yourself with the flow of the essay.

I pray this advice lightens your essay whammy.

Upcoming Opportunities in the Houston Area / Lists of Multicultural Fly-ins

Colleges That Change Lives: College Fair

Saturday, August 12, 2017
10:00 AM

The Westin Galleria Houston
Consort Ballroom
5060 West Alabama Street
Houston, TX  77056

"College That Change Lives" is a consortium of over 40 geographically diverse, American liberal arts colleges that foster community and scholarship. Schools in this group include Reed College in Oregon, Southwestern University and Austin College in Texas, Beloit College, and Lawrence Univerity in Wisconsin, Eckerd College in Florida, Denison University in Ohio, and many others. These institutions offer friendly, attractive campuses; dedicated faculty; small classes; research opportunities; study abroad; enviable records for job and graduate school placement; and, yes, strong financial aid.

What's not to like? 

United States Naval Academy Admissions Forum

Saturday, September 16, Second Baptist Church

Seeking Opportunities at Rice (SOAR) weekend visiting program, Saturday, September 30 to Monday, October 2, 2017 for prospective students. The program is part of the University’s effort to attract a“broadly diverse student body which increases the intellectual vitality of education, scholarship, service, and communal life at Rice,” but students of all backgrounds are welcome to apply. The application deadline is August 18, 2017.

Also . . . 

I just discovered this data base of multicultural fly-in programs for seniors to a long list of colleges: http://collegelists.pbworks.com/w/page/83783176/Multicultural%20Fly%20Ins

Typically, a competitive application is involved. For many, applications are still open, but not for long.

A new college ranking, strictly speaking

I have a new college ranking system. It rates schools based on their students' speaking skills!

So far, two colleges top the list, each earning Five Cicero’s, the maximum score. The institutions are the University of the South in Tennessee and Hillsdale College in Michigan.

Last year I visited both schools for two days and spoke with many students, none of whom said “um,” misused “like,” or concluded any sentences with “and stuff.”

How can this happen?

Both schools are academically intensive liberal arts colleges with small classes in which you are expected to participate and in which peers and professors listen to what you say and respond and put you on the spot. In this environment, it’s best to express yourself clearly and intelligently.

My goodness! Is it possible that liberal arts colleges can teach a marketable skill, like speaking smoothly and smartly? I suppose so.

My new ebook

My new ebook, The Independent Teenager's Guide to College Admissions will be available for purchase by the end of this week. 

Website Review: COLLEGEdata delivers!

To college-bound students, COLLEGEdata offers a cornucopia of free resources:

1. A tool for predicting your chances of admission at over 1,900 colleges. To use this instrument, you have to create an account with the web site. For its calculations, the web site appears to rely on admissions data from the colleges and from a huge and growing volume of application results shared by students. The tool is easy and fun to use, though for safety's sake, I would discount its estimations of your chances by about 10%, especially at highly selective colleges. Employ this gizmo, but always check with your college counselor to make sure you are applying to enough "backup" schools.
2. Another tool, for college matching, that helps you track down prospective colleges by your preferences for location, size, institutional type, difficulty of admission, cost, availability of aid, sports, student background, and majors offered.
3. A vast trove of articles on paying for college. This section also links to a scholarship finder, a calculator to help estimate need-based financial aid and the family's expected contribution, and a device for comparing financial aid awards. For interactive features, this web site is hard to beat. Just remember that financial aid calculators provide estimates only.
4. An online magazine awash with articles from students about their own college application experiences, with postings about managing time and money in college, and with tips from college admissions officers about navigating the application process successfully.

And much more, which you can discover by visiting the site. No single resource can give you all the accurate answers you need to navigate your college search, but COLLEGEdata is well-organized, informative, concise, lucid, and, as I have already mentioned, fun to use.

Realism about athletic scholarships

Families who groom their children to compete for a collegiate athletic scholarship should be aware of the risks, which this article and this article explain:

1. Expecting that participation in high-level youth sports is the path to a lucrative athletic scholarship, parents can spend $5,000 to $10,000 a year taking their child to compete in elite, year-round tournaments, money that could have been saved for college tuition.
2. Only about 2% of high school athletes receive NCAA athletic scholarships annually. In other words, a student has a statistically better chance of getting admitted to Harvard, Yale, or Stanford than of getting a sports scholarship.
3. Most athletic scholarships cover less than what it costs to attend the school, often much less.
4. To maintain a scholarship, the typical NCAA athlete spends over thirty hours a week in season training for his or her sport. That means less time to study, rest, make friends outside the team, join non-athletic organizations on campus, and even pursue summer internships, as most sports require year-round training.
5. All this training invites serious athletic-related injuries. Another article explains how the athlete's family, not the college or the NCAA, pays the medical expenses resulting from the injuries. If they permanently sideline the athlete, the school can revoke the scholarship. 

Here is a less stressful way get a scholarship and still play sports in college. Don’t take the child to tournaments every weekend. Take the kid to the library. Many colleges offer merit scholarships, essentially tuition discounts, for students with high grades and standardized test scores. Many of these schools have fine NCAA Division III teams, which typically demand significantly fewer hours per week for practices and competitions than scholarship-granting programs require.

This article explores the advantages of playing sports at an NCAA Division III school.