by Jessica Brondo

I recently launched an “In Their Shoes” survey that was distributed through a multitude of channels asking successful young professionals in their 20s and 30s basically everything you wish you could ask them about the path they took to get into their current position. I can’t tell you how many times my students ask me questions such as: Which classes/major is the best bet to get into PR? What should I do with my summers in order to become an architect? What do investment bankers actually do and do they like it? Is law school worth it if I’m not sure I want to be a lawyer? Do SATs really matter? And the list goes on and on.

I figured, what better way to answer these amazing questions than go right to the source, so I’ve collected tons of anonymous responses that paint a fantastic picture of what they did right and what they would have done totally differently.

Today, we’ll look at the top tips in general for what they would have done differently in high school, but each week we’ll be profiling a different profession to get a sense of what you really need to do to be a “fill-in-the-blank-with-something-really-cool” when you grow up. So be sure to subscribe to get all the tips in the coming weeks.

1. Study More for the SATs

Contrary to what you might be thinking, I did NOT pay people to take this survey, but over 75% of the respondents said they wished they would have studied more for the SATs. Not only does the SAT (and ACT) have an impact on where you get accepted to school, but some people pointed out that they missed out on tons of scholarship money by 10 or 20 points on the test. Others responded that they missed out on certain competitive investment banking programs or fellowship opportunities because their scores didn’t make the cutoff.

YOU DO NOT WANT TO BE THAT GUY (or girl). I know it seems like a tragedy to miss out on the latest Gossip Girl episode or not spend that quality time driving around in someone’s new car, but seriously, with the SAT 1 week away, buckle down, turn off the TV, go “Facebook-less” for a week, stop texting, and STUDY. Because this 1 test score will stick with your forever, so #makeitcount.

2. Learn at least basic computer science skills

I know your school doesn’t require it, but computer science is becoming the #1 sought-out skill for really cool amazing start-ups in the US, and guess what! There aren’t enough people to fill these really awesome positions. So where are people looking? India, Russia, Macedonia. Countries you’ve never even heard of because there just aren’t enough people with comp sci skills here. So when you’re deciding between that random art class or creative writing versus basic programming for your elective. Maybe take the path less traveled and try something new AND worthwhile.

3. Do something that forces you to speak in front of others

So many of the respondents said that they WISHED they had taken something like drama, public speaking, or science research that forces you to present or speak in public. Almost every field requires you to speak in front of at least some people, whether it’s presenting at a meeting or even just at a group interview and having overwhelming anxiety is about the worst thing that can happen. People who DID take these classes in high school said it helped throughout all 4 years at college and throughout their career and would not have traded that for a second.

4. Don’t waste your summer

Over 65% of the respondents said they wished they did something meaningful with their summers in high school instead of spending it on the couch playing video games or working on their tan by the pool. Summers are an ideal time to do amazing things because YOU DON’T HAVE HOMEWORK! OR CLASS! It doesn’t matter what you do, but the worst thing you can do is waste your summer. Whether you get job, travel, volunteer, or internship experience or explore a new subject in an interesting class, make sure you DO SOMETHING.

Hope this helps. Happy studying this week for all of you SAT-takers. We’ll be back next week with more tips from the “professionals.”

By Jessica Brondo

The Common App just released its application for the 2011-2012 year.  There are still some parts missing (like individual school’s supplemental essays), but August is the the BEST month to get a jumpstart on filling out the applications.  Below is a sample timeline to get started early:

Week of August 1:

• Register on www.commonapp.org and begin to fill in your student data and add your preliminary schools.

Week of August 8:

• Add all of your activities, create your activity sheet (e-mail info@edgeincollegeprep.com for a great template), and draft your 150-word short answer question about “the activity most significant to you.”

Week of August 15:

• Brainstorm/free write/first draft of your personal statement.  It’s a great idea to speak with family members about this because you can get some good ideas of things you might want to include.
• Make a list of ALL supplemental essays you will need to write for your schools.

Week of August 22:

• Edit your personal statement
• Fill out student data for all school supplements
• Group together supplemental essays that can be used for multiple schools
• Begin writing supplement 1

Week of August 29:

• Draft your second and third supplemental essays and make edits to the first one.

This will give you a MAJOR headstart going into your senior year with the majority of your application completed.  Good luck and as always drop a comment or a question for help with specific issues on your application.

The Edge in College Preparation has launched its newest office in Buenos Aires, Argentina. Our two latest Edge Directors (and expert instructors), Nora Leary and James Williams, come as part of a Princeton in Latin America fellowship program and will be spending a year in BsAs. James and Nora are offering the full Edge experience in Argentina, including admissions counseling, SAT/ACT/SAT II preparation, essay review and private tutoring. The two have been focusing on private tutoring for the past three months, but will be launching SAT courses at the beginning of February to prepare students for the May SAT exam.

For more information on upcoming courses, contact them directly at james@edgeincollegeprep.com or nora@edgeincollegeprep.com

By Ashley Wellington

Standardized tests were once the heart of a college application, and most schools relied heavily on the scores to determine their incoming classes. Now, that might be changing. While the SAT continues to be required at most colleges and universities, it is no longer the single most important factor when it comes to selecting the incoming class. Some schools are going “SAT-Optional,” meaning that they’ll no longer require standardized scores, and will focus primarily on the essays and transcripts instead. Admissions officers are steering away from the “objective,” quantitative decision-making they’d used in years past, and have begun taking a more personalized approach. All schools have their own unique personalities and cultures, and it’s essential that an incoming freshman be a good fit for the campus. Currently, the SAT-optional movement has garnered support from over 850 participating schools, 35 of which come from the US News and World Report’s top 100 liberal arts colleges. These institutions include Bates, Sarah Lawrence, Bowdoin, Pitzer, Bryn Mawr and Smith, all small enough to devote significant time to each application they receive.

So what does this mean for you? It is certainly good news if you are a poor test-taker with an otherwise stellar transcript. Unfortunately, though, you’re not off the hook just yet. Sure, the SAT and ACT have their flaws, but sorting through applications at a large school would be even more haphazard and arbitrary without the benchmarks and organization that standardized test scores provide. If you dream of attending an Ivy League school, keep doing SAT prep work. It simply isn’t realistic for the schools that receive 20,000 applications or more per year to eliminate test scores in the near future. However, this does mean that these scores are starting to be given less weight, and that having strong credentials across the board [as well as compelling essays] is what counts right now. Even if Sarah Lawrence is your dream school, take the SAT anyway; your safeties will probably require it.

I love the reasoning behind this movement, but I think in order to make it work, the SAT must be replaced by another, fairer barometer of intelligence and academic potential. If that test is ever developed, we’ll be standing by to help you ace it. In the meantime, sign up for college counseling sessions with The Edge, and let us help you put your best foot forward!

Have a wonderful week!

By Ashley Wellington

I intended to write this week’s blog about the national admissions statistics for the class for 2014. I wanted to evaluate percentages and point out various developments, but it doesn’t take an expert to interpret these facts. Almost all the competitive schools received more applications than ever before (Yale being the exception), and as a result, they accepted an even smaller percentage of students than they had in previous years.

Just to give you an idea of the numbers, here’s a chart with data gleaned from each school’s website. It’s certainly not a comprehensive list since it’s missing many top-notch schools (UC Berkeley, Swarthmore, Pomona, Lehigh and Washington University in St. Louis, just to name a few), but it’s a good representation of what’s happening at the top tier:

College 2010 Apps 2009 Apps % admit ’10 % admit ’09

Harvard 30,489 29,114 6.90% 7.00%
Yale 25,869 26,000 7.50% 7.50%
Princeton 26,247 21,963 8.18% 9.80%
Stanford 32,000 30,430 7.20% 8.00%
Brown 30,136 24,900 9.30% 10.80%
Penn 26,938 22,808 14.20% 17.10%
Duke 26,770 23,875 15% 18%
Cornell 36,337 34,381 18.40% 19.00%
Columbia 26,178 25,428 9.16% 9.79%
Dartmouth 18,778 18.007 11.53% 12.04%
MIT 16,632 15,661 9.70% 10.70%
Northwestern 27,615 25,300 23% 27%
Williams 6,633 6,015 18% 20%
Vanderbilt 21,800 19,350 16.30% 18.90%
Amherst 8,088 7,679 15.20% 16.00%

I certainly don’t want to scare anyone away from his or her lifelong Ivy League aspirations, but it’s important to be aware of the challenges so you can put your best foot forward. I have been watching these statistics for almost ten years, and can confidently say that this trend of increasing difficulty isn’t going to stall any time soon. According to a 2007 New York Times article, “Twenty-five to 40 colleges that have traditionally been perceived as being a notch below the most elite have seen their cachet climb because of the astonishing competitive crush at the top… The logjam is the result of supply and demand. The number of students graduating from high school has been increasing, and the preoccupation with the top universities, once primarily a Northeastern phenomenon, has become a more national obsession.”

When I was going through this process in the fall of 2001, the strategy was to apply to seven or eight schools, including one reach and one safety. Now, students are advised to apply to upwards of fifteen different institutions, and since the common application is gaining momentum, it’s possible to accomplish this with the simple click of a mouse. The competition for financial aid is also on the rise (particularly in this economic climate), so it’s smart to seek assistance from as many schools as possible and compare the packages they offer.

So how do you market yourself? Colleges want to see how a student stands out from the crowd. They want insight into personality, spark, drive, sense of humor, kindness, and other skills and characteristics that don’t manifest themselves in a transcript. A well-written essay can make the difference among applicants with similarly high grades and scores. Additionally, the essay gives students with lackluster grades an opportunity to write their way to a fat acceptance envelope. As a result, the essay portion of an application is quickly becoming the most significant factor in admissions.

Luckily, The Edge offers summer SAT and College Essay Bootcamp programs, happening in August. These provide a great opportunity to jumpstart your applications and prevent unnecessary stress when the school year resumes. Check them out on the website!

By Ashley Wellington

When I first started tutoring, I would naively assign long lists of vocabulary words for students to learn each week. Unfortunately, though, my good intentions yielded one of two results: either the students would feel overwhelmed and do nothing (in which case, I’d receive an apologetic shoulder shrug at best), or the students would simply memorize the definitions for our next session and forget everything shortly afterwards. I’m not sure which scenario is worse. I understood why my students were so unmotivated; after all, knowing sophisticated vocabulary words really only helps with the twenty or so sentence completion problems, and even then, it’s possible to excel by simply using process-of-elimination techniques. Sure, you can get by without actually knowing the words, but improving your vocabulary will absolutely help you understand the Critical Reading passages and recognize grammatical errors in the Writing section, so you might as well try to learn a few new words.

Start by picking up the newspaper and reading an article or two that you find interesting. Circle any words you don’t know, and write them down in a “vocab journal” – this can be anything, from a spiral notebook to a word document. In fact, keep track of any unfamiliar words you encounter in school or conversation as well. Then, make a point of looking up all the words, and revisit them occasionally to make sure you’re retaining the information. Seeing words in context is infinitely more helpful than memorizing an isolated definition, so exerting this small bit of effort each day will slowly (but effectively) make you a better reader and writer.

Next, take a look at some Greek and Latin root words. Have you ever heard the rumor that learning Latin will help you ace the SAT? There’s definitely some truth to it. This is an especially helpful site:

https://www.msu.edu/~defores1/gre/roots/gre_rts_afx2.htm

Knowing that “chron” signifies something time-related can help you eliminate “anachronistic” from your answer choices when you’re looking for a word denoting weariness, even if you have no idea what the word means. Familiarizing yourself with these prefixes and suffixes is an efficient way to learn new vocabulary, and it certainly offers a more realistic approach than attempting to memorize thousands of new words before the test date.

Overall, keep this aspect of your preparation gradual and manageable.

By Jessica Brondo

Spring is in the air and while most of you will want to spend your weekends hanging out outside with your friends, it is a great time to get in some college visits before summer is here and college campuses are empty. You can usually see about two schools a day, so if you plan your itinerary wisely, you can definitely get in a good number of visits before school is out.

Your First Visit

Most schools will offer an information session, which will give you valuable info about academics, student life, campus/dorm life, financial aid, and admissions statistics. This is normally followed by a campus tour, which gives you a great idea of the type of students who attend. Both of these are must-dos on your first visit to the campus, and you absolutely MUST sign in at the admissions office. They definitely track how many times you visit the school and appreciate students who visit multiple times because it shows a sincere interest in the school. In addition to the info session and the tour, you can also try to have lunch or coffee/tea with a current student to get a more personalized account of what the school has to offer. You can try to arrange this through your high school (if there are alumni from your high school at the particular college you want to attend) or you can do this through mutual personal interests. For example, if you are on the tennis team or mock trial team in high school, you might want to go to the tennis team or mock trial team website of the the university you are looking at and get the contact info for one of the officers. If you shoot them a polite e-mail, giving them enough warning, they will probably be willing to make the time to meet with you.

Subsequent Visits

There are many things you can do on your second, third, or even fourth visit to a school. At this point, you don’t need to sit in on the information session or go on another college tour. Instead, you want to make it more personalized. To show your academic enthusiasm, register to sit in on a class in one of the departments you are most interested. You most likely will not be able to say anything during class (and I’m sure you’d be too intimidated to anyway), but stay after class. Introduce yourself to the professor; tell him what you liked about the class; make a connection! You should also try to do some sort of activity that gives you a glimpse into student life. Go see a show or a game or participate in a conference or music event on campus. Normally, the admissions office will pair you up with a campus buddy who can take you around campus for the day.

If you really want to immerse yourself into the campus culture, schedule an overnight. These can be done through the admissions office (or more informally through friends and friends of friends). Try to do one weekday and one weekend day (Thursday/Friday or Friday/Saturday…..BUT some (or actually MOST) students try not to take Friday classes so if you are doing a Friday/Saturday visit, make sure you can sit in on a class). This will give you a total picture of what a typical day is like for a student and will also give you a better picture of what the nightlife is like so you can make sure that it is something you are comfortable with.

However, the MOST important thing to do is sign in with the admissions office (AND have fun!). Just remember that you’re probably going to hate some of the schools you visit and you’re going to fall in love with some of the schools. Both experiences are going to help you finalize your college list. Sometimes it is just as important to figure out what you DON’T like about a school as it is to determine what you DO like. Take Notes! You can use them for your discussion with your college counselor.

If you can’t find the time to go on college visits on your own, The Edge offers a service during the summer and throughout the year called Edge On Tour. It is a 2-5 day program that takes groups of students on college visits throughout the Northeast, Mid-Atlantic, or Southeast. Contact us at info@edgeincollegeprep.com for more information.