College 101

College 101 Prestige and rankings are another topic to avoid. Yes, Yale is very prestigious and consistently ranks among the top three universities in U.S. Your familial connections may also factor in, but they shouldn’t be your sole reason for applying. Finally, if you can find pretty much all the reasons you give through a cursory look at the website or brochure, that’s a sign that it’s time to dive a little deeper. We remain dedicated to serving you during these challenging times of COVID-19. Even if you didn’t visit, you can still establish a strong connection to the school. That means every college has a pool of applicants with similar grades and test scores. is a published poet and a high school English teacher. She has a BA in English from Skidmore College and an MFA from the Warren Wilson Program for Writers, where she studied poetry. Before earning her graduate degree, she attended the New York Summer Writers Institute, The Breadloaf Writers Conference, and the Five Powers of Poetry Conference for Teachers. Risk-taking is an interesting element of creative writing. Done well, it can lift your presentation from the mundane and safe to the provocative and insightful. Smart College Visit is the educated way to search for college, find campus visit dates, get directions for college trips, and book hotels near campus. We’ll make sure you get the right guidance at the right time. Students use their grades and test scores to select where they apply. Finally, when you think you are finished with your essay, dare to make it great! First, attempt to reduce your word count by 10%. Doing so will force you to examine every word, thought and article of punctuation. Even if you are not able to reduce by 10%, making an honest attempt at it will make your essay better. Don’t worry about the word count until you have developed a complete draft. Staffed by professors and peer consultants, it offers a supportive environment to practice and refine your writing. Risa C. Doherty is a copy editor and education and parenting writer whose work has appeared in The New York Times, Working Mother and Boston Parents Paper, among others. In a 2007 Boston magazine article, Harry Lewis, former dean of Harvard College, drew a parallel between professional essay editing and hiring an imposter to sit for the SAT. “All this scribbling has almost nothing to do with whether the student gets in,” he wrote. Word and character counts can be paralyzing if you allow them to dictate your approach to an essay topic. Then, take a step back in order to gain perspective. As you begin to edit and refine the idea, challenge your word choices. In that case, you might share a story about why you’re interested in studying a certain program that you can only find there â€" grounding it in an anecdote from your past â€" or a professor you want to study with. You don’t have to solely focus on academics, although you should make them a main point of your essay. You can also include traditions, extracurricular activities, and the campus itself. Are they essential to conveying the key messages? Doing so is unnecessarily redundant and can limit your ability to take a more expansive approach with your essay. Find creative solutions to conveying ownership of your thoughts. Don’t use the word “I” to start sentences any more than is necessary. You don’t need to remind the reader at the start of each sentence. Demonstrate the synergy between yourself and the institution in response to the “Why do you want to come here? Reveal an awareness of instructional style and independent learning opportunities. The “Why this college” or “Why us” prompts are fairly common. For lots more information on applying to college, see the links on the next page. Did you know that Babson has a Writing Center on campus?