What type of education best develops a person’s capabilities, allowing him to become self-reliant, curious, and capable of handling an assortment of challenges? Better still, what qualities are best nurtured to create independent and critical thinkers? These are the types of questions that Laura and Jeff Sandfer wanted to tackle.

It’s important that every student applying to college fill out a FAFSA form.  If you’re wavering, or if you assume you won’t qualify for any scholarship assistance it’s still a good idea to submit a FAFSA form. Let me list some of the reasons.

By default, the UCPIS is important because there are not many ways to evaluate applicants: no recommendations unless requested by a specific campus; no SAT or ACT scores. This leaves an applicant’s activity list (containing up to 20 activities); your transcript which you input into your application; and your four UCPISs.

For graduate school a statement of purpose for the admissions process is generally a requirement. There are, however, undergraduate schools that ask for a SOP.

The statement of purpose question can appear in a variety of forms. The University of Pennsylvania, has a 450-word SOP: “Considering the specific undergraduate school you have selected, how will you explore your academic and intellectual interests at the University of Pennsylvania?” Cornell has a 650-word SOP. University of Michigan’s is 550 words and University of Wisconsin, Madison, is 650.

Imagine going to college without sitting in a 500-seat lecture hall , or working on problem sets alone in the library until the wee hours, or writing mind-numbing papers after a couple of meetings with a marginally engaged professor.

Instead, consider being part of a team experimenting on methods of capturing carbon dioxide and storing it deep beneath the earth in carbonate minerals. Students want challenges: projects that introduce them to problems that have no clear answers, and that require experimentation and exploration. This is why colleges are offering extensive experiential learning.

Many students and parents first encounter Open Curriculum when investigating such schools as Brown University, Amherst College, Hamilton College or NYU’s Gallatin School of Individualized Studies. As with any initial encounter with a new concept, there is always a bit of confusion.

The ACT is in the throes of redefining how its test might best accommodate students and serve admissions offices in evaluating student capabilities and preparedness.

Driving this redefinition is a battle going on between the ACT and SAT for dominance in student testing.

Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.

The traditional path to medicine begins in a competitive pre-med program, taking the MCATs the end of junior year, submitting many applications to medical schools (playing the odds as admissions are around 2-3%) and possibly getting a few interviews.

The UC admissions readers need a well-wrought set of activities to appraise your application.

A candidate can submit 20 activities with up to 500 characters to describe each. An activity list can possibly reach a maximum of 10,000 characters, around 1,600 words or 3.5 pages. Now imagine being a UCLA admissions reader at 2am on a Saturday morning coming upon her 1007th description of an ASB council member heading up a beach cleanup? Yes, it’s part of the job description, but show a little mercy.

An article in the 19 February 2020 Harvard Gazette, contains one of a series of articles called ‘Focal Point’ in which Harvard faculty respond to a fundamental question: ‘If you were to write a letter to your students, what would you want them to know?” In this edition, the faculty member is a lecturer in the physics department and a co-director of Graduate Studies for Physics, Jacob Barandes, and his remarks warrant reading and can be found at Harvard Gazette.

Often students are asked about their passions: exercise, the LA Dodgers, the German language, or coding in C++?

However, a better question, according to an article by Jon Jachimowicz, Three Reasons it’s so Hard to Follow Your Passion, in the Harvard Business Review 15 October 2019, is what is your purpose? Central to the article is a Deloitte Survey of 3000 full time workers across all types of job levels. It found only a fifth were ‘passionate about their work.’

In 2019, two researchers, one from Harvard School of Education, Jay Mehta, and the other from the School of
Education at UC San Diego, Sarah Fine, visited 30 high schools representing a wide demographic and geographic mix to observe deep learning  in four distinct high school curricula: project-based, ‘no-excuses’, International Baccalaureate, and ‘conventional’.  

Harvard secured the top position on the US News list of top undergraduate economics programs.  Consequently, it is closely profiled below to model the demands of a rigorous curriculum. Yet, one program does not categorically represent the diversity of offerings provided in such an extensive field as economics. That’s impossible. So, to gain a better sense of the scope of the major we’ll also look at how economics is offered  at UC Berkeley, Northwestern, and the University of Minnesota: all top 20 programs.

A good way to gain a sense of how to approach this type of essay is with samples of essays that have successfully addressed this question. Here are portions of successful essays to give you a taste of some effective approaches.

There are no wrong approaches as long as the essay matches your interests with what the school is offering in a particular major. Make that connection well and you’re well on your way.

An essay prompt found often on applications is ‘Why us?’  Why do you want to come here and what will you do once you arrive?

One of the best ways to attack this question is to learn as much about the college as you can to really gain a sense of the place. If you can’t do this don’t waste the college admissions office time, and more importantly your own, by writing generalities about the school’s size, location or reputation.

About forty miles west of Boston, past Framingham, the starting line for the Boston Marathon, right off the I-90, is Worcester, Massachusetts. Contained in this town of 168,000 citizens are 38,000 students attending nine schools. While it’s not Boston, it shares in Boston’s rich fabric of higher educational institutions, including the medical school for the University of Massachusetts, and a branch of MCPHS (the Massachusetts College of Pharmacy and Health Sciences), whose main campus is in Boston.

No one is every organized enough to deal with the pressures and demands we constantly face. Here are some good tips on handling the slings and arrows associated with organization and time management.

TOP TIPS: ORGANIZATION AND TIME MANAGEMENT

Hot off the press!  We've had a chance to review the Fall 2018 admissions data released recently by the University of California and thought it would be helpful to summarize it and share our key findings.  

Overall freshman admission rates are up for non-residents and down for residents as the University of California continues to settle on a new normal that accommodates a larger mix of out of state and international students.   If you're an out of state or international student, pay close attention...there continues to be a window of opportunity to take advantage of favorable odds at several UC campuses.

Straight-A students from some of the best high schools in the country become unhinged at the thought of crafting a 600-word essay in response to such a prompt: “Indicate a person who has had a significant influence on you. Describe that influence.” (Recent Common Application, Question #3).  It’s not surprising-- very few students learn the craft of essay writing. It’s become such a neglected art that Harvard, among many of the most selective schools, now requires all its undergraduates, without exception, to take an expository writing class.  Knowing that the state of essay writing is in the doldrums, what might you do to attack this very daunting task?

With the average student loan debt in 2017 ranging between $20,000 and $25,000 and the amount of outstanding student loans exceeding $1.5 trillion nationally, it’s becoming imperative for students to understand basic financial literacy before they graduate and have to set budgets to pay back their share of this growing debt load.

Mahir Jethanandani’s California high school offered only a few classes related to business and finance – disciplines he was interested in exploring. So, he turned to massive open online courses, or MOOCs, offered through Coursera to learn on his own.

“It came with an extension of knowledge and fundamental concepts that I felt improved my understanding of subjects that I claimed that I loved” but didn’t have much exposure to, says the 18-year-old. MOOCs also led him to explore other disciplines he was curious about, including law and neuroscience.

To take your independent reading game to the next level, consider selecting books that take center stage on university lists. The following books have been recommended to current classes at UMass Amherst, Duke, Stanford, USC, Washington State, and Occidental College. Pick up one and see what you’re missing. You might just become addicted.

To Tina Ellerbee, a former college swimmer, it was apparent when her 11-year-old daughter Allison Goldblatt began besting Tina’s collegiate times and  qualified for the Junior Nationals that Allison was on track to swim on a NCAA division 1, Top-20 team.

Cal Poly San Luis Obispo, (SLO) nestled on the California coast, lives and breathes its motto, its core philosophy, ‘Learning by Doing,’ in engineering, business, architecture, viticulture, and all newer majors such as statistics. Classes emphasize activities and discussions, lab and field work, hands-on projects, and collaborative work experiences.

At the end of December of last year, Alex Roa, an undergraduate researcher at UCLA, pulled together a well-reasoned set of arguments as to why one should never be shamed by attending a community college. In fact, from a standpoint of return on time and money and personal growth, community college might just be the best payback.  

The current medical school system in the US makes it quite expensive to become a doctor. According to the AAMC (Association of American Medical Colleges) the median current debt of graduating medical students is just under $200,000 and the doesn’t include debt incurred as an undergraduate. Compound this with the opportunity costs, not joining the workforce until many are in their early 30s, and the debt burden truly is substantial.

Any place that has the Banana Slug as its mascot will either attract or repulse. At the University of California Santa Cruz,  for those who are allured,  there is distinctly a countercultural element, initially signaled by the Banana Slug, that is  better developed as one explores what the campus has to offer.

DARPA (Defense Advanced Research Projects Agency), the inventor of the Internet, has a full portfolio of high-tech ventures from accelerating molecular discoveries for new medicines, coatings, and dyes to Adaptable Navigation Systems so users (particularly the military) can navigate should GPS based systems get jammed  or are not available because of geography.