Tuesday, November 07, 2006

Application Time is Upon Us

We are right in the middle of the application crunch. Many people are aware of the looming deadlines and have either already submitted all their applications or are working on them presently, or perhaps are waiting until Thanksgiving to get started. If I had one suggestion it would be not to wait. This process is stressful enough as it is. Waiting till the last minute may be your modus operandi, but consider what you are doing.

Applying to college is probably one of the more important milestones in your life up until now. You are making a determination about where you will spend the next four years of your life. This isn't math homework, or even a history project. This is your future. As an example, let's think about the personal statement. Writing a personal statement that is not a laundry list of everything you have done, but instead a coherent essay that addresses your motivation, challenges faced, and evidence of sustained engagement in academic and non-academic activities takes a lot of time and thought. Astute application readers, and most of them are fairly good at what they do, can tell the pretenders from the contenders.

Likewise, given the often limited space you have on a college application to list activities you have been involved in is not something to be taken lightly. If you only have one line left to list an activity and yet have four more activities you would like to list, what do you do? Do you put Powder Puff, Math Club, Lion's Club, or Student Newspaper? To answer that, you need to carefully consider what else you have listed and which activity conveys the true spirit of who you are.

Too often students try to create a false image of who they are to the admissions committees instead of accurately portraying themselves. They believe that in order to get admitted, one needs to be involved in particular types of activities or organizations. There is nothing wrong with listing Powder Puff, provided that it is something you are passionate about and have participated in for years. As someone who has read applications, I want to know who you are, not who you think I want you to be.

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