consultants Index
February 26, 2009
More than 4000 choices. Not sure of the price. Everyone telling you what to do. It's picking a college! It's amazing that anyone ever picks the right college. Let the PRO-fessors -- the folks who know -- give their best, insider advice about how to pick.
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February 13, 2009
Rick Pound, the Admissions.com student-athlete expert, talks first principles and encourages us to take positive steps and stick to a few strong beliefs, no matter our circumstances. If we do this, he says, the opportunities will be endless.
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December 08, 2008
Chess has always impressed me as a game that challenges two players to use all of their cognitive capabilities to outwit, outsmart, and outstrategize their opponent. The college recruiting process, like a game of chess, will challenge the individuals involved.
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November 06, 2008
We've all been to college fairs. You walk with crowds up and down rows of tables, grabbing brochures, without time to stop and talk because 50 people are behind you. This might be the only chance you have to talk with admissions representatives about the school you're interested in, but networking with them is impossible with thousands of other kids crowding into the school gym. EducationXpo was created to solve this problem.
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October 16, 2008
Have you heard about the secret ways to get into college? These generally focus on some lame way to send your application, or some special club you can join, or worst of all, some company to whom you pay a fortune. There's never any evidence that any of that works, other than a story about somebody who got in at some point by sending in their application that way, joining that club, or forking over that fortune.
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October 14, 2008
I hear from a lot of people who think the admissions process is unfair because they don't understand the goals that drive admission. Fair warning -- much of this post came from my dissertation research, so it is long, even tedious, and only for those really obsessed with understanding the admissions process.Most people assume that colleges and universities should just pick the student with the best profile. But many schools have goals beyond just academic talent.
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October 10, 2008
I've been answering questions that seem to be wildly misled about who actually reads your application. One site refers regularly to the ADCOMM -- admissions committee -- like it's some alien entity that always acts the same way, and not thousands of individuals. Questions like "how do admissions committees look at essays about my trip to Antarctica?" are almost as nutty as the answers: "ADCOMM's don't want to hear about your trips. They hear too many of those. Write about something else." Oh PLEASE. There is absolutely no way to predict how any one subject will be read.
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