the college app jungle
College Advising, Superb Application Essay Development
recent posts
- College App Jungle College Advising and Essay Editing is on Hiatus for 2025-26
- More Ivy League Schools Drop SAT/ACT Requirement; Princeton Drops Early Admissions
- How to Write the University of California Personal Insight Essays in 2020-2021
- How to Write the University of California Personal Insight Essays for 2021
- How to Write a Successful Cornell University Essay for 2020-2021
about
Category: Common Application Essays
-
Or at least some of them are out early. This post will introduce some of the essay prompts for Ivy League and elite universities this year. We are off to an earlier than usual start for this year’s prompts, probably due to the increased number of early applicants; many of the important schools are…
-
In my last post, I took a look at trends in admissions–finding, most notably, that admission rates at the most competitive schools are continuing to trend downward in the single digits. This post will give three year results for all of the Ivy League universities, below, as well as results on other universities that were…
-
Yes, folks, it’s time to get your essays started. If you think that this is premature because most universities haven’t yet released their applications for next year, I simply point to the Common Application prompts, which are unchanged–and most of you will be applying to at least a few Common App universities. Use this link…
-
College Counselors, College Application Services and Test Prep Companies: An Overview and Evaluation
There are four main categories of individuals and businesses currently offering college advising and application essay services. I will take them in order to describe what they offer and the advantages and disadvantages of each. The first category is individuals and companies offering themselves as “College Counselors” or “College Application Advisers.” Many of the individuals…
-
One of the greatest challenges in writing an application essay is the length demanded by the Common App and most universities: 500 words (or less). For many applicants, this is akin to writing a perfect Italian sonnet about their lives–or boiling their lives down to a haiku. But if your initial essay has “good bones,”…
-
This is the inaugural post on the topic of books and intellectual development for the 2012-2013 application year. I have previously written about this topic in a number of posts; for writing about books specifically, you should start at The Harvard Supplement; Or, How To Write About Books Part 1 , a post from last year. I will…
-
College App Jungle’s Rules of College Admissions: 1. There are no secrets to admissions though each university does have priorities which shape admissions. Beyond looking at the information colleges provide about how they evaluate applications, spending time trying to figure out if there is a “secret handshake” which will give you admittance is a waste of…
the college app jungle 