Your Biggest Frustrations
Last week, I asked you for your biggest frustrations with your applications, and I bet a lot of you can identify with these:
The one that just about broke down the whole family: we didn't know there were "optional" videos for my kid's ED and EA applications until we hit "Submit" with a huge sigh of relief.?He was quick to say he should have remembered/known that, but the fact was we had no energy left for that news at that moment.?Our high school counselor is a bit retro, and was not on top of this "new" trend, which I might argue she should have been.?Two breakdowns later, the videos are indeed submitted.
I feel that! Some colleges don't send you the requirements for supplemental materials like videos or portfolios until after you've submitted the application. Ugh.
Similarly, one of the challenges with the Common App (and some other platforms as well) is the "dynamic" nature of the way the questions are displayed.
For example, if you don't select Major X in the "Academic Interests" section earlier in the application, it won't generate or show you the corresponding "Why Major X" essay that pops up further down in the application only once you've selected the major.
So you might look at the application before you've filled everything out and assume you know how many and what essays you'll need to write, but that's not always the case.
On our team, we call those the "hidden" essays and we have to scour the supplements for those every year to make sure we don't miss any.
And not all colleges park their essay prompts in the "Writing" section of the application supplement — sometimes they park them with the other application questions. If you look for the essay prompts only in the Writing section, you can miss a few essays that way too. Although at least, in that case, the platform won't let you submit without the required essays.
We're constantly looking for the dog that doesn't bark, Sherlock Holmes style.
Another:
SO MANY ESSAYS.
Yup. Sometimes I think individual colleges all think they operate in a vacuum and that their own essays are the only ones you have to work on. (I'm looking at you, Stanford, with your eight essay prompts!)
Multiply those essay sets across X number of colleges and you better have the fierce spreadsheet skills of a middle manager to keep track of it all — the different prompts, the different word counts, which ones overlap and can be reused, which ones you have to start from scratch, etc.
And:
My big frustration as a parent.?We have taught the kids that their hard work and effort is important and will pay off.?We have taught them that they need good grades to go to college.?Yet they can do all that, then engage in this ridiculous crunch to perfect applications, and in fact their rejection will in almost no way reflect on those efforts.?We are telling them they have to do all this to "earn" a spot, but even if they do it all right, there is a 95% chance they will not get that spot at some schools. If my kid doesn't get his beloved ED admission, he will always think his essay wasn't good enough or his (optional) video was too blurry.?It is just cruel.?And it's cruel to really, really good kids.
It is indeed cruel.
On the one hand, admissions officers ask you to unveil deeply personal aspects of yourself and ask all these questions designed to peer into your souls, but then if they deny you, they tell you not to take it personally. I call that wanting to have it both ways on the admissions side of the table.
All the more reason that we need to rally around the message that it's them, it's not you.
There are much bigger forces at work in the background that you can't control (one example here), and getting too emotionally invested in any college (ED or not) can cause real heartbreak.
That's precisely when the grownups need to reinforce the message that there are lots of great colleges out there, and if any given one doesn't want you, you can laugh all the way somewhere else.
And on that note, I loved this recent tweet:
领英推荐
?? News You Can Use
1 - I finally created an archive of my newsletters: You can read the back issues here.
2 - First-gen students deterred by sticker prices: A new study finds that "76% of first-generation students are rejecting colleges on sticker price, and they may not be aware that many of those colleges would offer generous aid packages if the students applied.... The problem is that most first-generation students do not understand the concept of discounting, as practiced by many colleges. 'You don't go to a restaurant and get a cheeseburger for $5 while your friend gets the same cheeseburger for $2,'" said the author of the study.
3 - 51% of high schools nationwide now offer at least one computer science class: We've finally reached that tipping point, but access isn't equal.
?? My Favorite Things This Week
1 - Ditching the old way of grading: The Los Angeles and San Diego school districts are rethinking how they grade and reward student learning. Lots to think about in this piece.
2 - Gaming, in kids' own words: I love how these kids are talking about their gaming experiences here. It's not quite the dystopia that the olders make it out to be.
3 - Our Country Friends: The new novel from Gary Shteyngart is finally here, and not a moment too soon. I'd read anything he writes.
?? Quote of the Week
Twenty years after my own graduation, I have come gradually to understand that the liberal arts cliché about "teaching you how to think" is actually shorthand for a much deeper, more serious idea: Learning how to think really means learning how to exercise some control over how and what you think. It means being conscious and aware enough to choose what you pay attention to and to choose how you construct meaning from experience. Because if you cannot exercise this kind of choice in adult life, you will be totally hosed.
From "This is Water," the 2005 Kenyon College commencement address by David Foster Wallace
?? This Week's Video
??Oldie but goodie: More on financial aid and tuition "discounting"
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We should accept students by lottery.