It’s December, and there are still regular college application deadlines around the corner. What do you do when your students show you application essays that just don’t seem ready to go? This is the point in the process when professionals and other well-meaning adults can overstep their roles. No worries. We’re going to share our simple Read More

Counselors like you have busy and important jobs. In a given day there are always too many things to do, not enough time to do them, and a deeply important mission to help your students. Counselors prepare students to enter the world and to meet a variety of important milestones, from standardized tests to college Read More

I have been working with students on college essays for decades. But I wasn’t as good at it in the beginning as I am now. As the writer-in-residence for my friends, family members and neighbors, my dining room became a coffee shop office for anyone applying to college who needed help with an application essay. Read More

I just finished working with a smart high school senior who has dreams of attending a Big 10 university next fall. In her Common App essay, she wanted to show admissions readers just how creative she is. She succeeded, anchoring her story around a photo montage she crafted from her travels and hung on her Read More

Many schools ask a variation on the question, “Why us?” This prompt can be one of the most challenging for students (and for counselors trying to help them). The questions often look like these, from current and past years’ applications: Northwestern University: What are the unique qualities of Northwestern — and of the specific undergraduate Read More

At Wow, when we use the term voice, we are referring to the tone, sound and feel of a college application essay. The most successful essays sound like the people who wrote them: your students! Many students submit essays to us for review that do not sound like them. Your job is to make sure Read More

As admission to the nation’s most selective schools becomes increasingly competitive, the college essay has risen in significance as well. There’s a lot of information on the web and in books, and many well-meaning adults are out there trying to help our kids. That can be confusing to the students, and can make your jobs Read More

Lately, I’ve found myself shutting off the water when I brush my teeth. I try to not run the dishwasher until it is completely full, either. I got this idea from one of my college application essay students who told me about a life-altering volunteer experience while we brainstormed college essay topics. My student changed her own Read More

Last fall, during the National Association of College Admission Annual Meeting in Salt Lake City, Duke University Dean of Admissions Christoph Guttentag told me he would like students to answer questions, rather than write beautiful prose in a college admissions essay. He and I had been chatting about all the misinformation on the Internet, inside Read More

As high school counselors, you already know the competition to get into the nation’s top colleges gets tougher ever year. But do you know that’s not because students are smarter or more qualified than they were five or ten years ago? It’s a simple matter of impossible math. Year after year, more kids apply for Read More