the college app jungle
College Advising, Superb Application Essay Development
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Category: Harvard Application Essay
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Harvard does not tend to post their “additional” supplemental essay prompts prior to the Common Application site going live on or around August 1st of each year. But Harvard uses two portals for applications. That second portal is the Universal Application, the latest in the competition to overthrow the Common Application. And the universal application…
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Who should read this: anybody interested in writing a Princeton Application Essay, or the Harvard Application (that book/intellectual interest prompt, still going strong) or the Stanford Interest short essay or . . . you get the picture. The broad scope of writing an essay about a quote means some aspects of this post will work…
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Who should read this post: Anybody applying to Harvard; Anybody applying to Harvard and the University of California system; Anybody applying to a Common Application School; Anybody writing more than one application essay. So step one this year is not to just sit down and write an essay. And why not? Because most of you…
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Or to the past, because Harvard’s prompts are a blast from the past, especially if the past is the old Common Application Prompts. The prompts that Harvard has up this year are a mix of old Harvard prompts and the prompts that your older friends or siblings wrote for the Common Application if they applied…
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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…
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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,”…
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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…
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Most university application essays or supplements present at least the possibility of writing about books. Several applications ask directly that you write about a book or a series of books. If that sounds like you, read on, after you have a look at my last post which opens up the conversation which I will continue below. After…
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This post specifically addresses a Harvard application essay about a book, but this discussion is on writing about books in general. The advice here is also good for the 2015-2016 Princeton prompt on books and for other colleges asking you to write about a book in some way. I continue this thread for several…
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