Anna Ivey gives you ruthlessly practical admissions advice
Please say hello to David Jewett, a new addition to our college admissions team. David most recently served as an admissions officer at Tufts and has also taught in the Boston Public Schools. He majored in Earth and Planetary Sciences as an undergrad at Harvard (smartypants, I mean really), and outside of work loves theater, carpentry, and sailing. Welcome, David!
Learn more about David here.
Did you know that Columbia is the most veteran-friendly school in the Ivy League? Go Lions, and thank you veterans! Take a look:
(Photo: New York Times, from the linked article)
Foster children "age out" of the system at age 18. Transitioning from high school to college is hard enough without having to deal with that transition, too. Foster Care to Success is an organization just for college-bound foster kids.
These kids are amazing, and this is a great organization. Thanks for letting us guest-post!
Working on your personal essay for the Common Application? Want to avoid the critical mistakes that too many applicants make? Then steer clear of what I call the 7 Deadly Sins!
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Your essay is expected to be your work, and if an admissions officer figures out that your essay is not your work, she will reject you.
Did you catch Bones (a Fox TV crime solving drama) on November 18? If you didn't, it is must-see TV for parents and students in the college admissions process and you can watch the full episode for free on Fox's website.
Woven into the episode is a subplot in which Cam, one of the main characters, is wrestling with the question about how best to parent her adopted child, Michelle, as Michelle goes through the process of applying to colleges.
It all started with one senior in Texas, who submitted his Common Application within 3 hours of the Common Application going live - one little application that would have gone unnoticed except that the New York Times decided it would be a great feature story ("Pulling an All-Nighter for the College Application").
Just like that we have a stampede — all the seniors applying to selective universities are suddenly in a frenzied rush to submit their Common Applications.
Forbes has just released its annual ranking of America’s Best Colleges for 2010 (online at www.forbes.com/colleges and in hard copy in the August 30, 2010 issue of Forbes now on newstands).
Some of you probably waited until the last minute to complete your CSS Financial Aid Profile on the College Board's site. If you did, you may have found yourself caught in severe slowdowns and intermittent outages on Sunday, January 31st. According to the College Board, the problems started at about 5.30p EST and were not resolved until midnight (in other words, right at the February 1st deadline).
If you were one of those students affected, you need to confirm with each college that your PROFILE application was processed and submitted by the deadline.
How much do things like determination and grit correlate with future success? It's a big question, and one that intrigues me as a former admissions officer. After all, the gatekeeping function of admissions is to scour all these imperfect proxies (some might say tea leaves) to try to predict the future success of all those wonderful applicants.
On that subject, a recent article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic Monthly caught my eye.
