Summer is a great time to kick back, relax, have fun…and write your college essay. Just think about all the schoolwork and applications you will have in the fall. The summer is the perfect time to get one big thing out of the way.
At Campus Bound, we typically don’t advise students to focus on specific colleges until junior year of high school. We provide more information about that in this recent blog post. However, some eager sophomores may want to get a jump start on certain things, including the college recruitment process for student athletes. In this blog post, we explain why an early start is helpful and the tasks that can get done now to ease the process down the road.
Recommendations are usually an important part of the college application process. Many selective four-year colleges require them as part of the standard application. Typically, colleges require two teacher recommendations and one counselor recommendation. You can read more about that in this previous blog. But one of the questions we get often is what to do if a student wants to send in an additional recommendation: one from a coach, rabbi, art teacher, etc. We will explain what to do in this blog.
It’s admission decision season! Once upon a time, applicants were either accepted or denied to a college. Then came the waitlist. Now, students can hear one of many different “answers” from colleges, and it can be confusing. It can also make the final decision process more difficult. In this blog we will try to shed some light on these different college responses and point out the potential pros and cons of each one.
You’ve worked hard on your college list and applications. You researched schools, visited as many as possible and have even written your essays and submitted all, if not most, of your applications. But this time of year, the inevitable “What if?” can set in. Parents can succumb to it just as easily as students. “What if the ideal college is out there and we just haven’t found it?” “What if I don’t get accepted anywhere?” “What if we don’t get any financial aid?”
You’ve been at college for one semester now, or maybe longer, but you are thinking it’s just not the right place for you. Here are some things to consider if you are thinking about transferring.
It truly seems unfair that many colleges have January 1 application deadlines. In fact, many schools have pushed these deadlines to January 5 or January 15 in order to give students a break from having applications due on New Years Day. But even so, for students with deadlines in December, January, or even February, the holidays can be a challenging time of juggling family obligations, schoolwork, and college applications. The good news is that there are things you can do to make this time a little bit easier and less stressful.
From time to time, we like to utilize the well over 50 years of combined college admissions experience of the Campus Bound staff to provide students and parents with some inside scoop. These counselors have been on the other side of the desk, so their advice is priceless.
This time, we asked our former College Admission Counselors, “If a student has less than stellar grades, how can they enhance their application in other ways?”
Here are their responses.:
What is Superscore?
Superscoring is a policy some schools have by which they will consider a student’s highest section scores from any test date of the same test. Many students take college admission tests more than once. If a college superscores, they will take the highest scores from Reading & Writing, and Math (from the SAT, for example) to calculate a new total score.
There is no such thing as two students who go through the college process in exactly the same way. Some students apply Early, and some do not. Some students apply to local schools, while other students apply to schools on the other side of the country.
However, the majority of students are going to follow a common trajectory in the college admissions timeline. They will research schools, visit, interview, apply, wait, etc. But, there are a handful of special populations who will likely go through a very unique college process. Campus Bound Counselors are knowledgeable and skilled to help any special students navigate the process. Below are some of the special populations we serve and how we help them.
- 1
- 2