Guest Post by Carrie Greene
Founder and CEO of CarrieThru
Students, especially ambitious one, are lousy at taking care of themselves.
- They routinely spend long hours studying or committed to extra-curricular activities.
- Ambitious students often beat themselves up for not doing enough or not doing it well enough.
- They feel guilty spending time relaxing when there’s so much work to do.
- They spend their day worrying about what they missed or what they “should have” done.
The problem is that when you don’t take care of yourself you can't take care of the things you have to do.
Let me be very clear here. I’m not saying that you don’t have to work and work hard to reach the ambitious goals you have set for yourself. What I am saying is that when you take care of yourself, your body and brain will work better, and you’ll enjoy what you’re doing.
Here are a few strategies for you to try. You may just find that by nurturing yourself, your energy and ability to do more and do better will grow in return.
1.Schedule mini vacations. Take a random day off once or twice a month. Give yourself permission to walk away from your work. Do something you haven’t done in a while that you’ve been meaning or wanting to do. Ride a bike. Go for a walk in a park. Sit on the beach for a day. Wander through a new store in town. Read a book simply for pleasure. Go to a movie or try a new restaurant. The options are endless.
2.Spend time with friends. There are lots of types of friends. What I’m talking about here are the friends that nurture you, not those that you really “should” get together with but those whom you “want” to get together with.
3.Nourish your body. Get enough sleep, eat foods that nourish you and get exercise. The better you take care of your engine the better it will work. Enough said.
4.Take a one-hour break every day. Step away from your work physically and stop thinking about it. Take the time to laugh with someone or cry if you need to. Make yourself a nice lunch, or go for a walk with a friend. Leave work behind.
And most important…
5.Give yourself permission to play. Playtime is creative time. When you let yourself play and don’t worry about perfectionism the fun will come back. You will find yourself excited and motivated to do the work you want to do.
The better you take care of yourself the better you'll be able to reach your goals.
Carrie Greene is a speaker, author, business coach and mother of three. She is a business strategist and productivity expert for entrepreneurs. For free resources and to learn more please visit
www.CarrieThru.com.
Story to College welcomes a guest post from Yue Ren, a freshman at Harvard College. Yue currently works at Argopoint LLC, a Boston-based management consulting firm.
Photo credit: Getty Images/George Doyle
I have found Carol’s work on Story to College to be amazing in helping prospective college students write great essays. Not only have I found her advice integral to writing great college application essays, but also applications for jobs, internships, and more. I would like to provide my thoughts on college essays to highlight the importance of these elements in the real world.
When admission officers flip through your application, they see your transcript, GPA, SAT scores, the quick descriptions of your extracurricular activities, perhaps a few AP scores and even a couple of awards, but all that seems very quantitative. What part of the application defines you? After writing quite literally over a dozen college essays and supplement essays, I have a couple of observations. Although I do not have all the answers, I believe these tips would have been helpful when I was writing my first college essay as well as subsequent essays for jobs:
- Express yourself with a story: In my experience, the best way to communicate an idea is to tell a quick, concise anecdote. Think about all those lessons you have learned in your extracurricular activities or throughout your life. What do these stories tell about your talents, aspirations, or character? I also believe the manner in which you tell a story, including your tone, mood, and attitude, reflects on how you react to certain challenges or successes. This provides just as much information to the reader about your character as the actual story you write. Therefore, word choice in your expression is crucial.
- Be Human: Why is talking to your friend so much more fun than reading an old biography? Construct your stories with feelings and emotions such that the reader can experience the breadth and depth of your happiness, anger, pain, or excitement. If you are ever wondering why your friend refuses to give any hints about his or her essay, it might be because it is personal; it might reflect intense emotions. A journey in a day in the life of you is filled with crescendos and decrescendos that may ultimately shape your outlooks. Do not be afraid to share them with admissions.
- Write Truthfully: Honestly, lying is hard. In all likeliness, the details of a real story derive much more substance to you that you can elaborate on, unlike in a lie. Save yourself the trouble of trying to write about stuff that you have never done, and just pour your heart and mind into those events you have faced. If you did a thousand extracurricular activities in high school, now is a perfect chance to talk about a few of those thousand topics.
- Seek Peer Critique: Although many people choose to not let anyone see their essay, I found that letting your teachers and maybe a close friend see your essay brings new perspective. Going back to word choice: some words simply rub people the wrong way, and it is probably best not to rub admissions the wrong way. You cannot control what your reader thinks or how your reader interprets your essay; you can control how you express your ideas. Therefore, express them wisely and always be conscious of your audience.
Remember that the essay is just one part of your application, but I would recommend treating it as the part of the application that truly identifies you. It is an opportunity, not another barrier keeping you from clicking that submit button.
Carol’s Story to College blog is truly awesome. I would check “How to get started on my college essay”, “7 Things Admission Counselors Are Looking For”, and more for great advice on college essays and applications. I know I found them abundantly helpful when I was writing my essays. Her advice extends beyond just the scope of college essays. I would like to stress that for courses, jobs, or internships, I found these tips equally as applicable and useful as they are for college essays. In fact, when I wrote my cover letter for Argopoint, I specifically used examples of past experiences and extracurricular activities in anecdote form to highlight my skills and abilities. I also sought help from peers who have experience with applying to jobs, and who helped critique my cover letter. Of course being frank and honest is important. Therefore, I found Story to College to be helpful for college essays as well as for applications in your future.
Guest Post by Hiten Samtani
Past the metal detectors and the group of police officers at the entrance of the W. H. Maxwell Career and Technical Education High School in East New York lies a cavernous auditorium. Inside it, 24 students were being taken through an exercise.
“How would you describe yourself? ” asked Alyssa Molina, a 17-year-old with an upturned nose and impressively curly hair.
“Opinionated, passionate, and optimistic,” replied 17-year-old Lizeth Navas, adjusting her purple glasses perched on her nose and grinning to reveal her braces.
“Open minded, to an extent,” Alyssa suggested.
The banter was part of ‘Story to College’ a narrative writing and storytelling workshop, conducted for high school seniors from the Scholars’ Academy, a screened middle and high school in Rockaway Park, Queens that was severely damaged by Hurricane Sandy. The school, which is known for its college readiness program and holistic embrace of technology, remains shuttered. Its high school students and staff have been temporarily relocated to W.H. Maxwell, which was removed from the list of turnaround schools in the spring but continues to see low graduation and attendance rates coupled with the effects of being in a relatively high-crime neighborhood.
Carol Barash, the founder of the workshop, said she feared the storm could jeopardize the college prospects of the students, many of whom are applying to selective schools that require supplemental essays. “I don’t want them to be stopped at the five-yard line,” Ms. Barash, whose own home in South Orange, N.J. lost power for a week, said.
Next, students were split into groups of two and three. Taking turns with an audio recorder were Sabrina Borno and Jeanné Gilliard, both 17. They joked, teased, and listened to each other to help uncover what workshop instructor Jack Scotti called “a moment—that single, telling incident that reveals something about you.”
Sabrina, who during the school week lives with her grandmother in Ocean Village in The Rockaways, evacuated to her uncle’s home when Sandy struck. She described the storm’s aftermath as “mindblowing.”
“It resembled a third world country,” she said. “The National Guard was out there. There was no power and people were looting homes.” In her application essays to visual arts programs at the School of Visual Arts and the Pratt Institute, she hopes to reconstruct what she saw.
Sabrina and her classmates talk to CNN about the aftermath of Hurricane Sandy.
Though Sabrina is acclimating to her new stomping grounds, she said she misses her campus and especially its gadgets. “We had Smart Boards and iPads in every classroom,” she said. “To go from that to writing down notes on a piece of paper, it gets pretty frustrating.”
Ana Solares, a bespectacled 17-year-old clad in gray, said that her family and others around her underestimated the impact Sandy would have.
“We’re Rockaway people,” Ana said, speaking in the measured tones of the lawyer she aspires to be. “We stayed.”
She wrote her college essays-- she’s applying to Cornell, Vassar and Macaulay Honors College—with the aid of a generator, she said. She described the challenges of switching
schools.
“You feel reassured,” she said, her stoic demeanor cracking slightly, “when you see your teachers at the end of the metal detectors.”
Some of the students present said they escaped the brunt of Sandy’s wrath. Others, such as Lizeth, weren’t as fortunate. The storm gutted her home, and she had to cope with seeing floating remnants of her furniture and Christmas ornaments. Though she now lives in a RV, she spent days bouncing around homes of relatives and friends, she said. “They had Netflix, so we watched movies and the news. I saw the damage to the main strip, 116th street. It’s where I take the bus, buy my milk. That’s when I realized that ‘Holy Cow, this is real!”
Ms. Barash, who founded Story to College in 2010, said writing had helped her come to terms with her own traumatic childhood experiences, including being raped at the age of 13. “I realized for myself how much liberation happened from writing about it,” she said.
Indeed, Michelle Villa, Scholars’ Academy’s counselor and director of the college office, said that many students wanted to change their essay topics and write about their experiences in the storm’s wake. She added that the workshop would help put students back into college application mode. “The hurricane threw off their priorities,” the visibly pregnant Ms. Villa said. “They had to focus on rebuilding homes and helping out their neighbors.” Many students still didn’t have the Internet at home, she said. “They were doing their apps at night, from Starbucks.”
The transition to Brooklyn had been a challenge, she said, but added that the school had been helped by both public and private sources. The city paid for private busing services to transport students to the temporary location, donated laptops through the iLearnNYC and offered virtual learning programs to displaced students. The teachers’ union also donated supplies, and Ms. Villa said that an elementary school “adopted” Scholars’ Academy and gave them a Thanksgiving feast. Remarkably, even on the first day back after the storm, attendance was at 86 percent, she said.
Though they temporarily share a building, students from Scholars’ Academy and W.H.Maxwell have little interaction. Scholars’ students enter the building from a separate entrance and are sequestered on the fifth floor. Michael Ammirati, the assistant principal in charge of discipline at W.H. Maxwell, said that there was some initial concern about the logistics of shepherding 402 extra students.
“We also wondered if our students would feel infringed upon,” Mr. Ammirati said. “None of that came to fruition; our kids have been very supportive. Sharing the space with Scholars’ Academy, Mr. Ammirati said, was akin to living with “the quiet roommate that doesn’t really bother you.”
But Scholars’ students said they felt out of place in the new building. “We’re kind of not wanted here,” Lizeth said. “We’ve just colonized.”
Still, there were positives to take from the devastation. The students took stock of their situation and adapted, and many gained a fresh perspective on what they hoped to achieve at college. Moreover, being uprooted from the comfortable humdrum of pre-Sandy life in The Rockaways and having to deal with dramatic upheaval did something to the class. “There’s a sense of community,” Sabrina said. “Everyone’s walking together, pulling through, closer than we ever were before.”
By Carol Barash, PhD, founder and CEO, Story To College
Two weeks ago Jack Scotti and I had the opportunity to lead a Story To College Essay Development Course for 24 seniors from Scholars Academy, a vibrant, high-achieving NYC public school in Rockaway, Queens that was destroyed by Hurricane Sandy. You can listen to the students’ stories on CNN.
Scholars Academy is thriving on the fifth floor of W.H. Maxwell Vocational and Educational High School in Brooklyn. There’s a storeroom with clothes and food for families who need them; a parent who runs a rental company donated tables and chairs; the assistant principal’s husband sends in hot cooked lunch for all the staff.
On the elevator we ran into a girl who was just getting back to Scholars Academy. In the two weeks since her home and school were destroyed, she attended another school and kept up on course work. “How is that possible?” I asked Michelle Villa, the head of College Counseling. “We were committed to keep the school going for the students. We used our online tools to send out lessons and review students’ work; we gave students a lot more responsibility for their own learning.”
The students learned that school is much more than classes and assignments. As one of the students said to me, “It was such a relief to get back to school. Just to be with my friends, to go to class. To go to school means that things will be fine. We’re students. School is what we do.”
The students said that the storm had changed them; that they looked at their college applications differently. They didn’t want to write about the storm directly—for most of them it was just too close—but it had changed their perspective, and they wanted their essays to reflect that change.
Whatever they are writing about—a Miss Teen India contest, working in a soup kitchen, or a lifelong devotion to the Yankees—their essays have a sense of focus, purpose, and clarity. Here are three lessons about successful college application essays every senior can learn from their resilient peers at Scholars Academy:
- Write about doing something: As Sabrina says in her interview with CNN, “You can’t just sit around…and look at the destruction. You have to get up and do stuff’: Take the time to explore the times when you learned tough lessons. What you did after that learning reveals your character.
- Get out of your thoughts: The worst college application essays are abstract and general. For instance: “I’m passionate about the environment, and I realized that I could be a leader in sustainability. We all need to do the little things that will reverse climate change.” Unpack these general ideas into specific moments that show your commitments in action.
- Bring your moment to life with details: To share your unique perspective with other people, show them what the moment looked like to you. Go back into the moment and paint a picture for your reader with actions, sensory descriptions, and the actual words that people said.
The best college application essays show who you are as a human being; we’ve had a lot of opportunities to see what that looks like lately. We want to know how you were changed and what you did; add your story at www.stcstoryup.tumblr.com.
Carol Barash, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Story To College (www.storytocollege.com), a company that teaches high school and college students tools to advocate for themselves in college admissions, job interviews, and life in the twenty-first century. She is a graduate of Yale and Princeton and an award-winning professor and admissions reader at Rutgers University. She advises students, parents and schools on how to expand educational access and college writing readiness.
By Carol Barash, PhD, Founder and CEO
Story To College
Student debt is slamming the upper middle class. Families with incomes from $94,535 to $205,335 are the fastest growing sector of educational debt. Fear not: merit aid decisions are often made in the admissions office, and you can determine whether you sink or swim based on your college entrance essays.
We’ve seen this college debt crisis coming, with savvy parents seeking out colleges where their children will receive merit scholarships and graduate debt free–or close to it. Many colleges (like Kenyon College) are adding funding for full tuition scholarships to attract top students, and there is a growing industry of consultants who advise middle class families how to qualify for more scholarships, including the ones that are need-based.
Let’s call it the 20-80 strategy: Take your hopes down 20% from your top schools, leverage your grades and SAT or ACT scores, and research where you can get 80% or more of your tuition and expenses paid by the school.
Across the economic spectrum, and at all types of colleges and universities, students who use college entrance essays to make a case for why colleges should invest in them tend to receive more admissions offers than students who write bland and generic personal statements. Showing who they are as people today, and what difference they will make after they graduate, can also net more merit scholarships for students.
Here are 5 steps to shape college entrance essays that show how you add value in a college community:
- Make your list with fit and money in mind: The core of your college list should be places where you have a strong chance of both admission and merit-based financial aid. Wondering where you might qualify for merit aid? Check out Zinch.com and Cappex.com.
- Treat each application as a separate conversation: Get to know each place you are applying; make sure your academic background and extracurricular passions are a strong fit. Go ahead and admit yourself, and write your college application essays–especially “Why I Want to Attend Your College”–from that place!
- Apply for all the aid you can: Sometimes this is as easy as checking a box that says “YES please consider me for merit aid.” Other times you need to fill out a supplemental essay.
- Optional essays are not optional: Use every chance you get to show a college another facet of what you will add to their community.
- What should I put in an essay for merit-based aid? Tell a story of a time you made a difference. If a college invests its educational resources in you, what will you give back to the community and the world at large?
With lowered job expectations, and a stagnant economy, there are clearly a lot of people struggling to make the college financial equation work. We are at a crossroads for higher education in this country. Over the next 20 years, technology will transform higher education, including pushing the cost of education down for everyone. For now, if you want to pay for college with scholarships, rather than debt, remember to tell compelling and authentic stories in your college application essays, the one part of the process you completely control.
Want free help on your essays? Sign up for our webinar on Tuesday, November 13. We’ll show you how to personalize your essay and connect with admissions readers.
Carol Barash, PhD, is the Founder and CEO of Story To College (www.storytocollege.com), a company that teaches high school and college students tools to advocate for themselves in college admissions, job interviews, and life in the twenty-first century. She is a graduate of Yale and Princeton and an award-winning professor and admissions reader at Rutgers University. She advises students, parents and schools on how to expand educational access and college writing readiness.
By Carol Barash, PhD Founder and CEO, Story To College
With less than two weeks until the first Early Decision and Early Action apps are due, there’s hype all around college admissions. Reporters dubbed it the College Admissions Arms Race, and the weeks leading up to November 1st can seem like a battle waged against your applications.
All this media attention can blind students to the fact that you have what you need to complete your application essays and the whole application – in your experiences, your perspective, and your unique voice.
The Common App essays are your chance to show admissions who you are and how you will make a difference in college and in life. The essays are the most important part of the application, after grades and SAT/ACT scores. The essays are more important than class rank, teacher recommendations, and your activities resume. Admissions officers describe the essay as a “deal breaker.” They use your essay to add nuance to the numbers and to distinguish between students whose records otherwise look alike.
So, how are you going to deal with this critical piece of your application? Take any one of the topics below and write a first draft of 500-1000 words about it. Eventually, you’ll want to prune it back to 500 words. But the idea here is to get past your usual responses, to get to the heart of what’s important to you. So just let your pen go. If you find your ideas going all over the place, that’s great; you’ll come up with a bunch of ideas by writing freely:
- My favorite pair of shoes
- If I were vice president
- The painting comes to life
- Toto, we’re not in Kansas anymore
- Wacky weather
- Tea with Eleanor Roosevelt
- What I do after midnight
- A lie my parents told me
- Things I left behind
- The most important thing no one knows about me
And here are three topics that are almost always a mistake – because they make you sound smug, or privileged, and not someone who will be a positive member of your college community. Here’s how you can turn one of those around, and get your essays and yourself back on track.
- Why I don’t drink (or something else that’s pretty standard high school behavior). If you started Safe Rides at your high school, that’s important!
- My best friend. They essay should be about you, not someone else. So perhaps explore how that person has shaped you, and what you have done as a result.
- Traveling to another country and feeding my leftovers to a homeless person. To this person you are making a difference, and that is a great thing. But as JFK said, “To those whom much is given, much is expected.” If you are in the position to see the disparities and make this sort of difference in one life, what are you doing closer to home with those insights, or perhaps on a broader scale?
Good luck with your essays.
Let us know what questions you have and what obstacles you run into, and we’ll do our best to get you unstuck!
Guest post by Suzanne Raga
Senior fall is no doubt a stressful, hectic time. Between starting your last year of high school, taking a slew of new classes, and navigating your college applications, when are you supposed to take care of yourself?
The good news is that you don’t have to stay up until 2AM, struggling to stay alert enough to write the latest draft of your college application essay after a long night of homework. Working harder isn’t the answer. You can achieve balance and take care of your emotional and physical needs while you embark on the beginning of senior year.
Schedules are your new best friends. To stay focused and keep track of all your responsibilities, write a master to-do list. Think about your daily, weekly, and monthly tasks (like specific homework assignments, projects, and test prep), and add them to your list of college application deadlines. Your goal is to do your assignments as efficiently as possible – knock them out so you can move on. Don’t spend all night studying, either – decide on a reasonable time limit and set a timer.
You may want to keep separate schedules for school, college apps, and social activities, or one master schedule, but in either case don’t schedule all your time! It’s nice to have some free time to daydream, take a spontaneous weekend trip, listen to music, and watch movies.
Do fun, cool things that interest you. Have fun. Seriously – that’s an order! What do you love to do outside of school? What experiences have you always wanted to try but were afraid of in the past?
Step outside your comfort zone. Play the drums with your band for a huge audience, organize a charity event, or climb a mountain. Besides having fun and getting a break from doing schoolwork, you’ll have some pretty awesome topics to write about in your college application essays!
Keep Calm and Carry On. All your friends may be freaking out. Your teachers and counselors could be pressuring you. Your parents might stress you out. Don’t panic! Patience and perseverance can help carry you through the rollercoaster that is senior fall.
Remind yourself that this time in your life is not permanent. Senior spring is only a few months away. Having a positive attitude and showing gratitude for the opportunity to attend college will help you. You might even look back fondly on your senior fall; as Aeneas says to his crew after enduring a terrible storm in Virgil’s Aeneid: “Perhaps, one day, remembering even these things will bring pleasure.”
Suzanne Raga is the author of You Rock! How To Be A Star Student & Still Have Fun. A graduate of Princeton University, she also runs the music blog After The Show.
By Carol Barash, PhD
Founder, Story To College
Seniors, if you haven’t started your college application essays, it’s time to get going! If you are stuck, confused, down on yourself, or otherwise flustered, I can definitely empathize.
When I told my guidance counselor my first choice was Yale, she said, “No one from our school has gotten into Yale for 9 years. You will definitely not be the one to break the curse.” Thankfully my AP US teacher, Mrs. Bressler, said, “That’s ridiculous, you are a top student. Write a great essay, and show them who you are.” When I showed my essay to my mother, she thought I should not use the word “pejorative” in my first sentence (because she didn’t know what it meant).
I stuck to my guns, used “pejorative” in my first sentence, and submitted an essay about being a strong girl in a high school where “feminist” was a curse word. It was my own and I ended up breaking the Yale curse.
So if you’re stuck somewhere between all the people who push you in all the ways that parents, teachers and counselors will lovingly do, here are 4 steps to get past where you are stuck, to find an essay topic that is totally your own, and meet all the deadlines coming up this fall:
1. Refresh: Before you start writing—especially something as important as college application essays—take some time to set aside your doubts and self-criticism (just write them all down and throw the list away), so you are starting with a clean slate. Imagine you have been admitted to your top choice college, and the job of your essays is to let people know what you do once you arrive.
2. Build a Bridge: For each of those things you will do in college, what have you done in the past and what are you doing in the present that reveals your knowledge and readiness to take on the next challenge in college? If you haven’t done it exactly, what have you done that gets you close, or how else can you show you are ready?
3. Transform Scripts to Stories: Many high school students start with the same big ideas they want colleges to know about them: I’m a leader, or I’m ambitious, or I work really hard. To write a college essay that distinguishes you from lots of other students who look alike on paper, you want to get past the scripts of being a leader or ambitious and start telling stories that reveal your character and show what difference you want to make in the world.
4. Choose a Moment: Once you have explored your attributes and aspirations, and written down the experiences that reveal them to others, explore specific moments that show those attributes and aspirations in action. Committed to green energy? How did you gain that passion, and what are you doing with it right now? Want to run for Congress one day? What courses will you take in college to set you on that path?
You may be thinking, “I just want to tell them what they want, and get this thing done.” Bad news is also the good news here: There is not one essay topic that is right for everyone, or what a particular college is looking for. But the best essays flow from moments in your own life where you have learned, or changed, or made a difference—and no one knows your life better than you! Have fun, and let us know if you have questions.
Coming up next: How can I shape my college application essay to reveal my unique character? Sign up here to receive College Essay email updates from Story To College.
Story To College teaches students tools to tell their own stories and advocate for themselves in college admissions, job interviews, life and learning in the twenty-first century.
By Carrie Greene, CarrieThru, LLC
I was surprised when Story to College asked me to write an article. I typically work with entrepreneurs, helping them grow their businesses to six figures and beyond. I help them with marketing and productivity. What do I know about helping teens get into college? After a bit of thinking I realized that getting into college is about being an entrepreneur.
One of the biggest challenges an entrepreneur faces is that there is no road map for what they want to do because it’s their dream that they are following. They don’t have a boss telling them what projects to work on and no teacher giving them homework assignments, teaching them what they need to do, or showing them the steps they need to take. Entrepreneurs need to dig deep into themselves. First to uncover their dream and then the hard part, they need to get motivated, stay motivated every single day, and take risks to make it happen.
You are at the beginning of your dream right now. You probably have some ideas about what path you’d like to follow. Are you a science person? A history buff? Do you love literature? You have ideas and now you’ve got to take it to the next step. You’ll go to college (I promise you, you’ll get in). BUT in order to get in you have some work to do and while it might not be easy it is really important that it gets done and gets done well.
When I’m working with my entrepreneur clients who are building businesses one of the biggest challenges they face is being overwhelmed. There is so much to do, and frankly a lot of it they are simply not good at. They find it very hard to get anything done. It’s so much easier to just put it off for tomorrow or another day.
You’re likely in a similar position. There’s a lot to do and it’s all new to you. There are so many colleges out there. So many essays to write. So many recommendations to get. So many decisions to make. So much you don’t know. And then there’s mom and dad nagging you. Where are you going to apply? Have you written your essays yet? When are you going to ask Mr. Smith for the recommendation? It’s overwhelming! All you want to do is go to college right? Why do you have to deal with all of this?
The truth is that you have to deal with it. You’re not the first person to be overwhelmed by all the pressure and unfortunately you won’t be the last. The good news is that there are strategies you can use to help. Here are the most important strategies that I share with my clients. These strategies put money in my clients’ pockets and it will help get you into an amazing college without killing your parents along the way!
Do a brain dump. What do you really have to do? Make a list. Put it all out there so that you can see it and know what you’re dealing with. Even if the list is big and scary knowing what you have to do puts you in a position of power and control.
Create deadlines. You’re not going to do everything in one day (or even a week). Look at what you need to do and set deadlines for yourself. When do you want to have that first essay done by? When do you want to give your teacher the forms for your recommendations? When do you want to have your list of colleges to apply to complete?
Break it up. The deadlines are important but what do you need to do to reach them? What are the steps that you need to take to write that essay? What forms do you need to print out in order to get them to your teachers? Who do you need to talk with to help you decide what colleges to apply to? Make a list of these steps and decide when you’re going to do them.
Don’t go it alone. Ask your friends, teachers, and guidance counselors for advice. See if you can take a class to help you with your essays. Ask your friend to join you for an “essay writing party." Schedule time with your parents to go on campus tours. And do yourself a favor: share your plan with your parents and guidance counselor. It will keep you honest with yourself and also (as long as you’re sticking to your schedule) keep them off your back.
Most important:
Trust your instinct. You really do know what’s best for you. Consider the advice and input you’ve gotten and think it all out. What do you think is best? Now go and do it!
Author Bio:
Carrie is a speaker, trainer, coach, and author of the book Chaos to Cash: An Entrepreneurs Guide to Eliminating Chaos, Overwhelm and Procrastination So you Create Ultimate Profit. Carrie is a master at cutting through the chaos and confusion that surrounds business owners so that they can stop procrastinating, take action, get more clients, and make more money. Carrie can help you get focused, create systems and structure, make decisions, set your priorities, and most importantly carry through so that you can achieve the success and profits you want for your business.
For free resources and to learn more please visit www.CarrieThru.com.
By Carol Barash, PhD, Founder and CEO
Want to write a personal statement that really stands out in college admissions? Whatever your topic, when you start to stray into abstract statements – e.g. “That was the day I realized that all people are connected” – stop right there, before you go any further!
Instead of veering into generalizations, which are boring and send your reader packing, dig for details, dialogue and description to draw your reader into the experience and leave them asking for more.
What’s that? Don’t college admissions officers want to hear about my big ideas and great global experiences? They may want to know what you’ve experienced, but not what happens in your mind! Admissions officers say they want to see what you’ve done; they want to experience your unique perspective through strong writing with a unique point of view.
The details, dialogue and description you remember make your writing vivid and your own. The 3 D’s add spice to your writing, just as surely as plenty of salt and pepper keep you in the kitchen on Top Chef.
Here’s how to do it:
Details: Share the experience with your reader through vivid sensory details: What colors were the leaves? What sounds came with the pounding rain? Which vegetables could you taste in your grandmother’s soup? What perfume was she wearing? Those scratchy trousers you wore to your first interview – were they polyester or wool?
Dialogue: It’s much more powerful to recreate the exact words of the conversation. Which of these draws you in and makes you want to read more?
“We talked about Manhattanhenge.”
or
“That is the biggest sun I have ever seen,” Charles said, pointing west across 53rd Street.
Description: These are the journalism questions: who, what, when, where, with the occasional why woven in. What year was it? What season? What was going on historically? Who else was there? Set the scene for your reader, so he or she is ready when you appear and take action.
And one more D for the road: it’s much better to go into depth with your application essay, and to talk specifically about one specific moment, than to try to convey your whole life history in 250-500 words!