We’ve spent the past few weeks breaking down each Common App essay prompt one by one, and now it’s time for the grand finale: our ultimate guide to writing the Common App essay. Sure, there are seven different prompts, but at the end of the day, every school is looking for the same thing: a story.
Getting waitlisted or deferred from your dream school is hard. We know it’s hard! You feel rejected, but it’s this weird non-rejection rejection that can leave you feeling lost and confused. And while a lot of things in college admissions are totally out of your control, there is something you can do if you’ve been waitlisted or deferred to give yourself another chance. A letter of continued interest, sometimes known as a waitlist letter or deferral letter, is one of the few, actionable things you can control when admissions decisions seem so out of your control. It’s your only chance to make a good second impression, and we help students write them every single year.
Getting waitlisted is the ultimate limbo – it’s not not a rejection, but it’s not a full-on denial, either. And depending on your circumstances, you could be feeling everything from mild disappointment to full-on panic. Don’t get yourself into a tizzy just yet, because there are things you can do to give yourself a shot at getting off the waitlist and make sure that you have a plan in place for the next year.
Hey, look, sometimes ED doesn’t work out the way we want it to, and we have to change strategies. If you just got rejected or deferred from your ED/EA option, we’d like to introduce you to our good friend, Early Decision 2. ED2 is just as binding as ED, and it signals to the school that you are serious about attending that school, and guess what? Schools like when you’re serious about them.
Don’t forget to keep the narrative structure
The college essay should be a story, not a book report. You want to create characters and a plot arc that readers can follow along with. Much in the same way you would tell your friends a story about something that happened, you don’t want to go straight to the take home points. Instead, build up the story so the reader is emotionally invested and wants to know more. The story should come to a head and pay off for the reader.
Most people don’t remember when they learned about Harvard for the first time. Harvard looks and feels like “college.” With its red brick buildings and green quad, Harvard the movie magic, picture perfect image of a college. No matter who you are or what your various connections to the school may be, Harvard is a reach for almost everyone. is a school where a student falls towards the lower end of the indicated range, or any school that admits less than 20% of applicants who apply. Reach schools are incredibly well known and sought after—think Ivy League+ schools. In order to get in, you need something special. We can’t give you an exact formula for getting into Harvard, but we have developed unique strategies for helping students get to their reach schools.
As we’ve said, colleges aren’t just admitting your grades and test scores. They really want to know who you are and why you would be a good fit at their school. By your senior year, there isn’t much you can do to change the nature of your application. Unless you are retaking your tests, your grades and scores are basically set. There are only a few aspects of your application that you get to start from scratch at this point: your essays, your supplements, and your recommendation letters. Your teachers work with you everyday and can speak to qualities you possess that aren’t mentioned elsewhere in your application. The quality of your recommendation letter is extremely important, but we’ve found a lot of our students feel awkward when it comes time to ask their teachers. Here’s a guide to help you figure out how and when you ask your teachers for letters.
The Recommendation Letters are a hugely important and often overlooked portion the college application. Your grades and scores don’t tell the whole story. Unlike the essays, recommendation letters give someone else the chance to advocate on your behalf. You have the chance to have a teacher you admire tell a school what makes you stand out from other candidates. Of course, who you ask to write your recommendation is extremely important because it will affect how the admissions committee sees you.
The Common Application (Common App) has been a staple of the college application process for more than forty years. The Common App has done an excellent job of streamlining the application process and made it easy to apply to multiple schools. While not every college uses the Common App, it has become the choice of most top colleges in the recent past. However, in the past few years, there has been criticism of the Common App.
Over the past few years, standardized testing has become a heavily contested subject. Although some argue that it is an important data point and equalizer, more and more schools are moving towards becoming test optional. Test optional means students can choose to submit their test scores, and a lack of submissions won’t affect their chances. Here is a list of the top test optional liberal arts schools.
Early decision school applications are due in the beginning in November on either November 1st or November 15th. Early decision has increased in popularity over the past few years as many people believe that there is a significant advantage to applying early. While there are certainly advantages and disadvantages to applying ED, we always want to make sure our students know about the different testing deadlines. Can they take a November SAT and have it count? Do they have to send the scores directly?
We hope you get into your dream reach school, and we plan on giving you all the advice to make your dream come true. But the reality is that you need to have a solid backup plan just incase. In the beginning of the college application process, most of our students have the wrong attitude towards safety schools because they assume they will get into at least a few of their target and reach schools. Safety schools are never to be looked down upon. We find that students who do that end up picking their safeties at random. A safety should be a school a little below your target range that you still would love to attend. Although we’ve never had a student who hasn’t gotten into at least one of their reach schools, we want to ensure you’re prepared for that possibility.
You can write your college essay about anything, which is part of the reason it is hard to find a subject. Having no predetermined topic will undoubtedly feel overwhelming, especially since most high school students aren’t used to writing that way. You’re stuck looking for an answer to the question “what colleges are looking for?” The answer is, frustratingly, nothing. They’re looking for well-crafted, thoughtful essays that tell them something about you they can’t glean from your app.
The college admissions process can be just as stressful for parents as it is for students. Parents feel that they need to manage their child’s time, stress, schedule, and expectations, which can lead to tension. The college process requires students and their parents to be as unified and cooperative as possible. We’ve created a step-by-step guide for parents to help their children with the college admission essay.
As cliche as it may sound, high school is a marathon, not a sprint. Many students think that colleges won’t look at them unless they’ve had everything figured out since their freshman year. That is simply not true. Admission officers know that a huge part of high school is growth, which is important to convey this in your essays. But, your senior year is a great way to demonstrate what you’ve learned from your experiences in high school.
In the second installment of “Phrases to Avoid,” we have compiled 39 more phrases sourced from real college essays that you should never use under any circumstances. They include unnecessary hyperbole, awkward word choice, and tired cliches among their many problems. In many cases phrases like these are a red flag to an admissions officer, and using any one of them can help land your essay in the rejection pile.
The common app offers five prompts for the personal statement, aka the dreaded “.” Despite the fear the essay evokes, each option gives you the chance to be creative. While we encourage students to explore their quirkiest side, it can often be challenging to strike that balance between being creative and answering the question. The first obstacle is choosing which of the five prompts to answer. Today we’re going to explain some strategies for how to answer the second prompt on the common app.
The end of junior year can be one of the most stressful times of the college process. Everything begins to pile up at once and friends start to get competitive. You have to stay focused, organized, and do everything you can to alleviate your stress. To that end, here’s a list of the six things you should be doing at the end of the Second Semester to maximize your time and be efficient:
After reading hundreds of college essays, we have compiled a list of words you should never use in your college admissions essay. Some of these words embody the emptiness of vague or overly complex word choice, others are redundant, some are grounds for an almost automatic rejection. You only have 650 words max in most of your essays. Every single one should count.
You’re a leader even if you don’t know it yet. If you want to go to a highly competitive school, you already know how much your extracurriculars matter. But, it is the quality of those extracurriculars and your work within them that matters. Schools want leaders who are going to be excited about impacting their college community, not followers looking for a way to stuff their resume.
Dear Aspiring College Applicant,
I know you’re telling yourself you’re not going to get into college. Everyone around you is so much more qualified than you are. You could have higher grades, better test scores, more impressive extracurriculars. If you had just put one more hour into studying, you would have gotten an A instead of an A- in that class. That class is the reason why you’re not going to get into Brown. You’ve convinced yourself you’re going to get rejected from literally everywhere you apply, leading to shame, embarrassment, and regret.
In 1995, Reed College, one of the best liberal arts schools in the country, announced it would no longer submit data for consideration in the US News College Rankings. They made this decision based on the arguments that the ratings were deeply flawed and not representative of a school’s best qualities. In researching the system they found that just 2% of college counselors believed that US News’ methods were effective, and that 91% of colleges were manipulating their submissions to artificially raise their ranking.