Posts Tagged With: College Admissions

Advice For Prospective Penn Students

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Number one, every student at Penn knows you are a prospective student. Not because you are gawking at all the buildings or you're with your parents (although these are good indicators). It's because you all walk around with a little white bag with a blue Penn crest on it. If you want to look like you fit in, ditch the bag. Number two, don't take pictures next to the Ben Franklin on a Bench on 37th street and locust walk. We giggle when you do so. Frat boys get drunk on the weekends and decide Mr. Franklin would make a great urinal. Number three, realize that (almost) everyone at Penn is extremely career driven. In Wharton and in Engineering it's expected that you will get a high-powered internship every summer. Less so, but barely, in the College. A Penn degree is a means, not an end. Number four, when you are trying to get to know a school, the tour and the admissions lecture should be just a start. You are going to commit four years of your life to one school or another; make sure the choice is the right choice for you. Have a long talk with someone who goes to the school. If you don't know anyone, ask your parents politely to scram and then find someone to tell you about their experience at Penn. I would suggest going to the dining hall or the library. If you're a preppy, pick someone wearing Ralph Lauren. If you're a hipster, find someone who looks like they belong in GQ. If you're an athlete, find someone wearing sweats. Aim to get this person (or group) to talk to you for at least an hour, but don't tell them that up front. This is possibly the best way to find out if a school's right for you: to talk to someone that's been there. Bullshit testimonials or blogs on an admissions website don't count. (I would be more than happy to show you around and talk to you, especially if you are friendly. This is a photo of me: http://gocards44.wordpress.com/wp-admin/upload.php?style=inline&tab=browse&post_id=203&_wpnonce=d327b6ff24&ID=204&action=view&paged If you are resourceful you can get in touch with me.) Number five, make sure you are nice to your parents. They are paying for (most of) you and while they may be embarrassing you in front of your peers it's probably only because they are freaking out about only being able to coddle you for another year. Your parents have invested a lot in you, be nice to them. Best of luck! Let me know if you pick Penn for next year.

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Harvard Ends Early Admissions: Overbearing Parents Everywhere Freak Out

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Sometimes someone does something so obvious, so smart, but so out-of-character that it takes you aback. Today, reading that Harvard decided to end its early admissions program, I enjoyed one of those moments. Early admissions benefits borderline students because many schools have higher admit rates for students willing to apply early (Penn famously admits half of its class early decision - around 1200 students out of 3500. Regular decision candidates compete for a further 2400 admits, but against a pool of around 18,000 candidates). Students like it because they think they have better chances of admission, and also because they can be finished with the college search by mid-December. Schools like early admission because it lets them increase their yield rates and pick students specially interested in the school. However, this unfairly benefits marginal students who've made up their minds at the expense of better qualified students in the regular pool that haven't decided on a college. Furthermore, as the Harvard admissions officers noted, lower-income students could not compare financial aid packages if they committed to a school early. By making everyone apply regular decision, everyone is judged against the same standard. This is bad news for parents eager to do anything to get their kids to an Ivy, but good news for bright lower-income students who deserve to go to the best schools. Early admissions increase the odds that a wealthy marginal child will get admitted. I think Penn should end its early decision program and judge everyone in the applicant pool against the same standard. Penn admits half its class early, partly to keep its yield rate high, and partly to reward students who are committed to Penn. The admissions department must recognize that its reasons for wanting to keep the yield rate high - to attract more applicants in coming years, and to maintain a high ranking in US News & World Report studies - are flawed. Penn's admissions goal should be to attract the nation's (and increasingly, the world's) best and brightest students to campus, in all races, genders, and income levels. It has taken a step toward this by switching to the Common Application, which decreases the time-cost to lower-income students who want to apply to Penn. It could take a step further by reducing the influence of the SAT, a test which has proven racist and coachable, and by ending its early admissions program.

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Penn ‘Slips’ to #7 in US News Rankings

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The 2007 US News & World Report Rankings are out, and Penn has fallen from #4 to #7 in rankings. US News ranks colleges on the following criteria: Peer assessment score, freshman retention rate, performance vs. expected graduation rate, % full-time faculty on payroll, student SAT scores, admit rate, alumni giving rank, student-faculty ratio, and freshmen in the top 10% of high-school class. In essence, the criteria for ranking colleges are how succes-driven the students are, how many students apply, and how good those students are. Unfortunately, these rankings are popular for the same reason that colleges use SAT scores - they provide a criteria for comparing two things, no matter how skewed, and the people/colleges that score highly are too proud and happy that they don't want to criticize it. All of these criteria are only secondary ways to measure how good of an education School X is offering. The criteria for evaluating schools must be the education the school is able to impart to the student, not a measure of the students, because some schools attract more gifted students than others. Better, more direct criteria would include student evaluations of teacher quality, student evaluations of their academic experience, peer college evaluations of teacher quality, (for engineering schools) ability to do research, average class size or % classes above 50 (the one criteria I would keep from the above), the success of students at getting into graduate level programs, number of Fulbright/Rhodes scholars produced compared to schools with similar admit rates, and perhaps the average starting salary of graduates, divided by field. I would also under no circumstances rank engineering schools alongside liberal arts schools, because there's no way you can quantify that going to MIT gives you a 'better' education than going to Amherst - those schools that will instruct you in entirely different fields. In my opinion, Penn falling is great news. I think that anyone who chooses colleges based on a ranking system as skewed as this one has not done an adequate amount of homework about the colleges they apply to. I wish Penn would choose, like Reed College, to stop sending information to US News & World Report, and liberate themselves from the frivolous pressure of a faulty ranking system. Ben Franklin wouldn't have stood for it, and neither do I.

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Princeton Review

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Princeton Review is the best website I've found for people concerned about college admissions. It's clearly written for students by people who understand what students need out of a college site. It has great advice for freshmen through seniors about how to prepare for college. It's also got the best automatic college-finder on the Web. While a machine can't generate the perfect match for you, it's a good way to remove the brand-name-bias that we all have when picking colleges. Moreover, Princeton Review's got one of the best SAT prep courses on the market. Read this damning interview by Jon Katzman, the course's developer, to learn more about what makes Princeton Review great. I'm not being paid to promote Princeton Review. I'm writing highly of them because the people that work there have their heads screwed on right, unlike most I've found in the college game. More on the SAT and college admissions to follow soon.

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Applying to an Ivy League this fall? Start working.

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If you are thinking about applying to any school with an admission rate of 30% or below, you need to start thinking about and working on your application now. If you really want to get in to your college, be prepared to work your ass off on the application. The harder and longer you work, the better your reward. Talent is over-rated and hard work is under-rated; if you don't believe me, read this article. I do not care if you got 2400 SAT's and are valedictorian and have twelve extracurriculars. There are no locks for schools that admit less than 30% of applicants. UPenn, the school I got into, admitted 394 of 1035 valedictorians, about 1 in 3. That's the competition. Sure, some people have better chances than others, but no one is a guaranteed shot. Everyone needs to put thought into the essay. You need to put yourself in the mindset of the tired admissions officer who has read so many applications they run together like words when you're half asleep. One of your key tasks is to market yourself. You need to make sure an admissions officer can summarize you in one sentence - for a friend of mine, it's that his parents are Iranian but Jewish. You need to find that one or two things that make you unique. This, and developing a great essay, are your two most important tasks between now and December 31. You are evaluated in five or six main areas: personal essay, transcript, SAT scores, extracurriculars, recommendations, and possibly an interview. It is crucial to realize that on your application there are some things you can control and some things you cannot. You can't control what your teachers say about you (but you can pick ones that will say good stuff). You can't control what your grades were in freshman, sophomore and junior years. You can't control how strong your school is, or whether it offers AP's or whatever. You can't change your extracurriculars to show you've practiced ballet for the last 10 years. These are out of your control. You can control your SAT scores by means of coaching, you can control your interview through practice and self-confidence, and most importantly, you can control your essay. I was planning on taking a year off before college, mainly because I hadn't gotten in anywhere I wanted (I was waitlisted at University of Pennsylvania, along with 1400 others, and 20 got in. Don't write shitty essays, and figure out a way to market yourself). Anyway, if I hadn't gotten in, I was going to do a writing regimen this summer. I was going to write 5 new essays, just get diarrhea of typing and get them all out, and then pick the two best and refine and rewrite and refine and rewrite them until they're fantastic. I would recommend that each of you do this. Two things. Don't write to admissions officers. Write like you're going on the editorial page of the New York Times. Your writing is more compelling that way. Admissions officers don't want to hear anything about hard work, they want to hear what you want to talk about. The other piece of advice I have is to get a great reader, someone who works in admissions or writes for a living or a teacher. I would recommend "On Writing the College Application Essay" by Harry Bauld if you want to write a great essay. So, this summer, start working on your essays, and start thinking about your one-sentence summary. See you in the fall.

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