Collegewise

Former Collegewise students: Join our Wall of Fame

We’re going to be dedicating a wall in our Irvine, CA office to pictures and stories from our former students.  We may also be putting these same pics and tales on a special page of collegewise.com.  Whether you’re in college now or out in the real world, if you’re a former student of ours and you’d like to be featured on our Wall of Fame, we’d love to hear from you!  Just answer a few questions here and attach a picture.

Thanks so much! We’re really looking forward to hearing what you’re up to and to seeing your pics up on our Wall of Fame.

Ship it...or cancel it

January-April is our slower time at Collegewise.  Every year, this is when we tackle our projects—new ideas, improvements to our programs, updates to our materials, all the things we thought about during the fall but just didn’t have time to get to them.  And this year, we’re trying something new to see just how much we can get done.  For every project, we’re picking a date by which we’ll ship it (finish and put it to use), or cancel it.  No in-between, no half-finished projects with no resolution—it’s either done, or done away with.

We all came into 2012 with ideas/projects we wanted to try.  We picked our favorites to start with and did three things:

1. One person volunteered to ultimately be responsible for shipping.  This person doesn’t necessarily have to do all the work alone, but every project needs a champion who will see it through or pull the plug.

2. The person in charge picked the ship-it date. 

3. We all agreed on what the project has to do or look like in order to be good enough to ship.  The truth is that most projects don’t need to be perfect in the beginning.  In fact, you won’t know whether or not they’re perfect until you actually ship them.  So we decided ahead of time what “good enough” looks like.  We agreed on the acceptable level of funding and risk we could take for each project.  Then on the agreed-upon date, we’ll ship it if it’s ready, or cancel if it’s floundering.

The idea behind the cancel option isn't to just give up.  It's to give you an ejection lever to pull if a project starts to take too long, cost too much, or just can't be made good enough to ship.  In 1991, Duke Nukem was one of the most successful video games ever created, so successful that the company decided to make a sequel.  And every time it got close to shipping, someone wanted a new feature or had a new twist that would make it even better.  Nine years later, there was still no sequel and they cancelled the project.  Couldn't they have reached that conclusion a lot sooner (and cheaper)?

I’ll share the outcomes of several projects in future posts (whether we ship or cancel them).  But for now, we’ve got “ship or cancel” dates on the calendar and a lot of projects underway.  There's focus and energy knowing that a project is either going to launch or get scrapped and we’re pretty excited to see how they turn out. 

If you’d like some inspiration for your own projects, we got this "ship it" concept here.

What UPS delivery drivers know about focus

A UPS delivery driver’s day is done as soon as the truck is empty—never before.   That’s why they always seem to be hustling, and you never see their drivers hanging out together on an extended coffee break in the middle of the day.  At UPS, it pays to be focused.  The sooner that last package gets delivered, the sooner it’s quitting time.

The straight-A student who never seems to pull a late night, who claims to have “barely studied for the test” isn’t always smarter than everybody else.  A lot of those kids just do their work like the UPS drivers.  No Facebook, no phone calls, no texts or emailing or YouTubing until the work is done. 

Focused work gets things done a lot faster.       

Everybody isn’t doing it

Parents, if your kid did something he shouldn’t have done, would you accept the excuse, “Everybody's doing it?”  Most parents wouldn’t. 

You’d tell your kid he needs to be responsible for his own decisions and that he shouldn’t concern himself so much with what other people think.  Remember to follow your own advice as you’re going through your kids’ rides to college.

Other parents are going to insist on turning their kids’ college admissions process into a status competition.  They’ll wedge tutors and test scores and expensive summer programs into your dinner party conversations.  They’ll wage battles with teachers to get grades changed, fill out applications for their kids, and insist that an admission offer from a prestigious college is the only acceptable outcome for their children’s hard work in high school.  They’ll turn what should be an exciting time into something stressful for the entire family.

There will be times you’ll be made to feel like you’re doing something wrong if you don’t join in with those parents.  Don’t do it.  Don’t bow to parent peer pressure.   

Parents get to choose how you treat this time.  Make your own choice, one that’s based on what’s really best for your student.  Plenty of families find ways to make peace with the college admissions process, to be proud that they've raised a good kid no matter where that good kid goes to college.

“Everybody’s doing it” is usually a bad reason to do something. The truth is, "everybody" isn't doing it.

Putting college interviews in perspective

The first step to having a great college interview is to relax.  And the best way to do that is to recognize that the interview is the least important part of the process.

Interviews aren’t unimportant; you’re sitting face-to-face with another human being to talk about your college future. But as long as you’re engaged, mature and you don’t say anything stupid like, “I did community service because my mom thought it would help me get into your school,” it’s unlikely that anything you say will be held against you in the office of admission.

Colleges have three years' worth of information in your file, with transcripts and grades, lists of activities and awards, essays and letters of recommendation from your teachers.  A college interview is just a little snapshot from one meeting.  It’s not trivial, but good or bad, your interview isn’t going to trump the high school career you’ve summed up in your application.

So relax.  Have a good conversation and be yourself.  If you can just be a mature kid who’s pleasant to talk to, you’ll do just fine.  And if you want a little more advice, check out our college interview video here.  Good luck! 

Rejection just means redirecting

Last year, I wrote about an idea Arun and I had to present our college essay workshop at the big annual NACAC conference with two particular admissions officers we really like and respect.  We got them on board and polished every word of our session proposal before we submitted it to the conference planning committee.  And then we got rejected. 

Like a “No” letter from a college, the email that we got told us that there were just too many good sessions proposed from qualified presenters.  It turned out to be a good reminder to walk our own Collegewise talk.

College rejections can feel bitterly personal, but they’re not.  We tell students (and their parents) to maintain their perspective and not to treat a rejection like a tragedy or a miscarriage of justice.  That advice turns out to be much easier to give than it is to follow.   But still, we followed it.  We were miffed for a day and wondered how they could have possibly rejected us (“Who could do this better than us??”).   Then we moved on and even laughed about it.  One of the admissions officers we recruited ribbed us for “failing to get him a gig.”  

We also tell kids that one dream school doesn’t get to decide whether or not you have four years of amazing professors, interesting students, phenomenal personal growth and plenty of college fun (Harvard only gets to decide whether or not you do those things at Harvard.)  If we really wanted to share our workshop with counselors, we didn’t need one particular organization to say yes.  We just had to redirect and find another way. 

So I proposed the session myself—and it was accepted—at nine different NACAC affiliate conferences.  Arun and I both did workshops for English teachers at local high schools.  I published a book about how high school teachers and counselors can help their students with college essays.  And Arun ended up speaking at NACAC in a different session about Asian American students and college admissions. 

Most rejections don’t stop you from doing anything—they just make you redirect.  You can still go to the prom with somebody else, get a job someplace else, go to a different college or do a presentation at a different conference.  Don’t give one person, boss, committee or panel all the power.  If they say no, accept it, redirect, and move on.

How is college life going?

It’s that time of year when our Collegewise counselors email their former students who are now in college to find out how things are going.  We ask them to tell us about their college lives, what they’re up to, and to send us a picture showing us how they’re spending their time.  It’s not just good college research for us (college kids are better than any website or guidebook if you want to know about their school).  Not all that long ago, these students were researching schools with us, filling out applications, writing essays, and worried about who might say yes.  That's all behind them now, and it's fun for our counselors to hear how their college lives are going.

The best thing about reaching out to our former students is the near universal reminder that college kids are happy kids no matter where they go.  Not all of those students are attending the college that was their first choice back in high school.  But like romantic rejection, college rejection eventually goes away.  There’s too much to do, too much to be excited about on a college campus to dwell on who said no. 

If you’re starting the college search process right now, I know it might seem like USC or Duke or Brown is the only college where you could ever be happy.  It’s not necessarily a bad thing to fall in love with a dream school, especially if it keeps you engaged and excited about your college process.  

But try to remember that no matter what happens, this is all going someplace good.  You’re going to get into college.  You’re going to move into a dorm and meet new friends and take classes you actually want to take.  You’re bound to have a good report for anyone who checks in to see how your college life is going, whether or not your school is a famous one.  

Five guaranteed college admissions strategies

There are no magic formulas that will guarantee your admission to the school of your choice.  But there are things you can do that will always make you more competitive.  Here are five college admissions strategies that will make you a stronger, savvier applicant regardless of where you apply.

1. Seek information and advice from people who know what they’re talking about.
High school counselors, admissions officers, and good private counselors know more about how to get into college than any of your friends or neighbors do.  Who you ignore is just as important as who you listen to.

2. Take challenging classes and do your best. 
Before anything else, college is school.  Prepare for it by taking challenging courses and working hard without sacrificing sleep or sanity.  It’s OK to have an occasional late night, but if you’re up until 2 a.m. regularly just struggling to keep up, scale back.

3. Find activities you love, and make an impact while you do them.   
There is no magic list of activities that look “good” to colleges.  Whether it’s marching in the band, learning karate, collecting stamps or quarterbacking the football team, do it because you enjoy it.  Bring the kind of effort and attitude with you that will make people notice that you’re there contributing. 

4. Be a good kid.
Some of the highest-achieving and successful students get mediocre letters of recommendation because they’re arrogant, difficult, or just not all that nice to people.  The golden rule applies here.  Be the kind of student, son/daughter and friend that you’d like to have.  Remember that just being a nice, respectful, polite, responsible kid never goes out of style, even when you apply to college.

5.  Apply to the right colleges.
Don’t apply to colleges just because they’re famous or because they landed a good spot on the rankings list this year.  Think about why you’re going to college in the first place and what you hope or expect to gain from your time there.  Then pick schools that fit you where you think you can make those visions happen.

Don’t run your club like a big business

A lot of high school clubs and organizations run like big businesses—everyone goes to meetings, a few key people actually make decisions, a few other people actually do the work (it’s not always the same people who make the decisions) and ultimately, not that much actually gets done.  It looks like this:  

A French Club with 20 members is planning a bake sale fundraiser for next month.  The club meets once a week for six weeks to talk about the fundraiser, update the group on the progress, and delegate tasks.  Ultimately, 3-4 people end up doing most of the work because there’s just not enough work for all 20 people to do.

If those six lunchtime meetings were each 30 minutes, that’s not three hours of meetings to run the bake sale.  That’s actually 60 hours of meetings because 20 people each gave up time to be there.  It’s hard to imagine they’re going to sell enough croissants to justify that many meetings.  

What if, instead, the group did this:

1. Come up with four or five or twelve projects that might help the club in addition to the bake sale.  Accept ahead of time that not all of them are going to be successes.  But a few of them almost certainly will be.

2. Break up into smaller teams. If the bake sale really only needs 3-4 people to make it happen, recruit an interested team of 3-4 and put one person in charge.  Then let them get to work.  They can meet if they want to meet, but there’s no reason to pull the other 16 people into a room at one time to hear their updates.  Then do the same thing for the other projects.

Now you’ve got 5-6 focused teams, each working on an interesting project where they get to make real contributions instead of just sitting in meetings.

How much more would your club get done?  How much more engaged would your members be? 

Your club or organization isn’t a big business.  Big businesses are bloated, slow to change, filled with titles and meetings and middle-managers.  Be like a small business--agile, quick to give responsibility to someone who wants it, and able to try new things without worrying that one failure will ruin youl. 

For counselors: How to get students and parents to read what you email

I send a monthly “Collegewise Parent Email Newsletter” to families in our program who ask to receive it.  And our counselors occasionally send group emails to all of their students with important reminders, especially when it wouldn’t make sense to email each student individually to say exactly the same thing.   I thought I’d share a couple things we’ve learned through trial and error about how to get more of our families to actually read what we send.  I’m hoping it might be useful to high school counselors or other private counselors who are taking the time to send good information and would like even more of your students and parents to take the time to read it.

1. Send emails worth reading.

The best way to train people to read your emails is to send them emails worth reading.  I’ve made the mistake of sending out a monthly newsletter just because it was time to send it out, not because I had something particularly profound to say.   That’s always a mistake.  Every email you send trains people to either look forward to or ignore future emails from you.  So never send an email just so you can say you sent something—send it when you have something important or timely to share.  Nobody’s going to complain that you aren’t emailing them often enough.  And if they do complain, you must be doing something right—your emails are so good that people miss them when they don’t arrive.

2. Get permission.

You can send out something with great information your families can’t get anywhere else—but emails that people didn’t ask to get always have a faint whiff of spam no matter how great the content is.  So I only send our parent newsletter to families who specifically ask to receive it.  We let them register for it on our enrollment form.  And whenever I reference “Those of you who get my newsletters may remember…” during seminars, I always get a few more families who ask to be put on the list.   Making people ask means you’re always sending to people who want to hear from you.  And if they don’t read or like what you send, then you know it’s time to come up with a different strategy.    

3. Write for selfish readers.

Email is a selfish business—we all read messages from the angle of “What’s in it for me?”  If you send your freshmen the same email you send seniors with advice about writing college essays, your freshmen will delete it.  And worse, they’ll be less likely to open your next message.  So you really have two options.  One is to segment your audience so different groups get specific emails meant only for them.  If you can do that, great.  But that’s not an easy thing for a counselor with a large caseload to do.  The other option is to organize your content by group.  Write a short paragraph for each grade level (and let parents have their own paragraph) so people can skip what doesn’t apply to them.  If it’s a newsletter, write the short summary paragraphs and then insert a link that will take interested readers to a more thorough write up.  The key is to let people find the information that matters to them fast.  If they can’t, they’re going to delete it.  

4. Be brief.

If we send our students a two-page email with all of our best advice about how to start the Common Application, most of them won’t read it.  It’s not our fault (or theirs).  Long emails or newsletters don’t get read because kids and parents are suffering from e-information overload.  The best way to fight through the clutter is to keep emails to one screen (no need to scroll through to read them) and share only what’s essential.  You don’t have to list all 30 of the new scholarships your office has applications for.  Just mention that you have applications for 30 scholarships totaling over $40,000 in potential free money for college—the interested students will notice that.  Get right to the point and make it forcefully. 

5. Find a good subject line.

We’ve all spent the time to write a great piece we then introduced with a subject line like, “October Newsletter.”  A generic subject line screams, “generic email.”  Your subject line should entice your audience to open the message.  So give them a taste of what’s to come, but leave some room for appropriate intrigue.  “7th semester transcript and midyear report reminder” isn’t going to make people stop, click, and read.  But, “Seniors, your college apps are incomplete without these final forms…” does a better job.

Which semester is the most important?

Want to know which semester of high school is the most important?  This semester—that’s the most important one.

Whether you’re a freshman or a senior, in the fall or in the spring, the current semester is always the most important semester for college admissions.  Last semester is gone.  You can’t change what’s happened in the past.  And next semester isn't here yet.  The semester you're in today is what you should be focused on.  What you do this term, how hard you study this week, whether or not you participate and ask questions in class today—that’s where you can make a huge difference and change your potential college outcomes.  Now is what matters most.     

Make your current semester the best one yet, and only good things will happen.

How many cups of coffee a day can you sell?

There’s a 7 Eleven in Long Island that sells a company record of over 2500 cups of coffee a day.  Their secret is a cashier named Dolores who’s been there 18 years and greets all of her customers by name.  There are plenty of other places to get coffee, but Starbucks doesn’t have Dolores. 

It’s important to remember that you don’t have to be the star of the softball team, the lead in the school play, the president of the student council, the editor of the school newspaper or the first chair violinist in the orchestra to be important to the group and impressive to colleges.  Just bring a great work ethic and attitude with you.  Use whatever role you’re in as a chance to do your best work.  Don’t just go through the motions and do things so you can list them on your college applications.  Give a good show in whatever you’re doing. 

People around you will notice, and so will colleges. 

Fatherhood vs. the SAT

I learned today that a student I counseled through the college admissions process back in 2001 is now married—he and his wife are expecting their first child. 

Back in high school, he was one of those good students who worried a lot—about his GPA, his SAT scores and whether or not colleges would appreciate the community service he’d done.  He worried about the one B he’d gotten on his report card, whether or not his essays would be good enough, and if the colleges really would be able to decode the complex system of weighted grades his high school used.  He was a good kid who worked hard and wanted to go to a good college.   

How much do you think he’s worrying about those things now?

His grade in Spanish, his SAT score, and whether or not UC Berkeley said yes don’t matter anymore.  That’s all part of his high school past.  He's got bigger things on his mind now, like becoming a parent, navigating fatherhood, and saving for his child’s college education.

There’s nothing wrong with a student or parent worrying (a little) during the college admissions process.  Going to college is something that carries enough weight to deserve a little worry now and then.

But you can manage those worries a lot better if you remember just how insignificant most of them seem one day.

There’s a reason nobody’s ever said:

“My wife gave birth to our first son today.  I really wish I’d gotten a higher score on the math section of the SAT back in high school.”

There are good practices, but no maps

A lot of students are looking for a roadmap, a step-by-step plan that will get you into the college of your choice.  But that’s like looking for instructions telling you exactly what to do to have a great marriage.  There are lots of good practices and mistakes you can avoid that will improve your chances for success.  But there’s no roadmap.  No two couples who’ve been happily married for fifty years took exactly the same steps to get where they are, and no two students at a given college got in by doing exactly the same things.

A lot of the stress, confusion and frustration families feel surrounding college admissions comes from their search for the roadmap.  From picking which high school to attend, to choosing classes, to selecting test prep tutors and pursuing activities and making decisions about what to do over the summer, they want to know the exact steps to take to get them to their desired destination.

If there were such a roadmap, somebody would have decoded and profited from it already.  Read the colleges’ websites to see what they recommend.  Talk with your high school counselor about the colleges that interest you and what you could do to make yourself a competitive applicant.  That’s where you’ll find the good practices that will make sure you get in someplace that’s right for you and are ready to succeed once you get there.  

But don’t ask, “What should I do to get into Stanford.”  That’s a roadmap question, and nobody ever got into a dream school by following a map. 

What about saving for college?

The most important college financial planning strategy a family can employ is to save as much as possible.  The more cash you have on hand, the less you’ll have to rely on financial aid, the less you’re likely to have to borrow, and the more control you’ll have over your student’s college costs.  But where should you put the money?  Should it be in the parents’ name or the student’s name?  Is it worth it to save just so colleges can take the money, while families who don’t save get financial aid?  All are good, fair questions.

The college savings section of finaid.org (I have no connection to it--it's just hands-down the most comprehensive and well respected source of free college financial planning advice) includes advice on deciding how much to save, common myths about saving, the best investment strategies, and the advantages/disadvantages of the most common college savings plans (it even comes right out and explains why the 529 college savings plans are the best).

If you need advice about saving for college, start there.  You’ll be glad you did.