Activities!

For many students, the Activities section of the Common App feels pretty high stakes. And it’s true, admissions officers do invest time in reviewing your activities to help give them a more clear sense of who you are outside the classroom and how you’ll contribute to the college community. 

But as with most things we talk about in our blogs, the activities list shouldn’t be cause for stress. Instead, see it as an opportunity to introduce yourself in a cool way: by giving them a peek into your actual life. 

Overview

The Common App allows you to list up to ten activities, ranked in order of their importance to you, from among the following categories:

• Arts or music

• Clubs

• Community engagement

• Family responsibilities

• Hobbies

• Sports

• Work or volunteering

• Other experiences that have been meaningful to you

In other words, whatever your interests are, the Common App has a place for them. And for each activity, there are 9 fields where you can provide some detail: 

1. Activity type (this is a drop down menu, so easy enough); 

2. Position/Leadership description (no more than 50 words); 

3. Organization Name (no more than 100 words); 

4. A description of the activity, including what you accomplished and any recognition you received (no more than 150 words); 

5. Participation grade levels (check box: 9th grade, 10th grade, etc); 

6. Timing of participation (during school year, all year, etc); 

7. Hours spent per week; 

8. Weeks spent per year; 

9. 8. Indication of whether you plan to continue the activity in college (yes/no).

If you’re like my own kids, this list can be anxiety producing. How should you rank them? What if the thing you care about most makes you look boring or selfish? Here are some ways to reframe some common worries:

I only do theater.

Maybe...but we bet there’s more to it than that. You may be involved in theater in your high school and in a summer program (2 different activities!). Maybe you mentor younger theater students (and, if you love theater and are a sophomore or junior, you might want to think about it). Maybe one of your hobbies is going to see one professional theater performance a year. These are all activities that tell a story about who you are. But don’t forget about the activities you engage in outside of theater. You may be an avid reader or work in a coffee shop or care for an elderly relative in your home. These help to round out an admissions counselor’s understanding of who you are.

I do too many activities to list. 

There are worse problems to have! When you’re a person engaged in a lot of activities, you first want to write them all out in a separate document. Next, group them by type so that you can think about the relationships among your activities, then rank them within those smaller groups. You’ll begin to get a picture of which are the most meaningful to you, and you can narrow the list from there.

Who has time for activities? 

If you’ve spent most of your high school years focused on academics or maybe an after school job, don’t worry. You still have room to develop a meaningful list. This is where the broader categories come into play: Family responsibilities, Hobbies, Work, and Other experiences that have been meaningful to you. 

Students with family and work responsibilities have a great opportunity to demonstrate that they are able to balance school with other demands. Students with interesting hobbies (kayaking, video game playing, D&D, running, traveling) can use the activities list to show they will be unique members of the college community. 

How am I supposed to rank my activities? 

Ranking is probably the most tricky part of the activities list, but it’s manageable if you approach it intentionally and honestly. Of course, your volunteer work seems like it should come first, but if you spend 10 hours a week on a TikTok account devoted to cake-making, guess what? Cake-making comes first. And that account says something meaningful about you: that you’re creative, tech savvy, committed, and that you will definitely be good roommate material!

We’d love to help you with everything from your activities list to college list building. Give us a call (617.851.9975) or send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s get started!

Using your voice.

In the blog post Let’s talk about grammar! I counseled students to “Talk like you!” when it comes to writing the Personal Statement. Here’s a little more on what that means.

“Never use the first person in a formal essay.”

Sound familiar? In my 20+ years as a college professor, I’ve heard hundreds of first-year students repeat this common rule of thumb.

The problem is that it’s not really a rule. In fact, there will be many times in your college and professional careers when writing in the first person is acceptable and necessary. Still, many high school students are told not to as a way to prevent them from slipping into informal language and to help them sound more authoritative.

What often happens as a result is that students lose trust in their own voices. They begin to write in another voice altogether, one they imagine their teachers or professors want to hear.

I call this The Newscaster Voice.

The Newscaster Voice is not yours, but it’s something you’ve kind of heard before. The Newscaster Voice uses unnecessarily complicated words. The Newscaster Voice will never use one word when five are available. The Newscaster Voice is fussy and formal, and when students use it in their writing, essays inevitably become what is called stilted, which means stiff or unnatural. 

I’ve spent a lot of my career convincing students that their voices are worth hearing, and this is especially true when it comes to the Common App Personal Statement. My advice to students is this: your writing should sound like you. Not you hanging out with your friends, but a more cleaned up version of you. 

So how do you do that?

1. Use words you know. This is not the time to bust out the thesaurus. Even if you use the right word in the right context, you might choose one that’s out of fashion or too formal for someone your age, and this can be jarring for readers. 

2. Avoid turns of phrase that you don’t use in real life. Same advice as above. Some phrases that sound like they should be part of The Newscaster Voice’s repertoire are actually tricky on the page. In which? Of which? To which? These phrases have three different meanings. Unless you use them regularly in your writing, skip it ...which brings me to a question I ask students all the time when they’ve written something a little confusing...

3. How would you say this? Trust yourself. You communicate pretty well. Write it the way you’d say it out loud. You can clean it up later. 

4. Tell it like it is. Ask yourself, did I really feel like that? Was that my genuine reaction? Sometimes students exaggerate their responses to situations and events. Did you gasp? Really? Are you a gasper? Or did you freeze? Did you clench your jaw? Do you not remember? This is your story. Be honest with yourself and with your audience.

The best thing you can do in your Personal Statement is be honest. That means dropping The Newscaster Voice and being you. It’s who the admissions officers want to learn about, and as we’ve told you before, you’re kind of a big deal. 

Give us a call (617.851.9975) or send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com and let us help you find your voice.

Does the SAT Still Matter?

I hate taking tests, always have. It didn’t matter how well prepared I was-- when the teacher handed out the blue test booklet or the multiple choice answer sheet, my heart would drop and my body would flood with panic. I had friends who loved tests, would sit up a little straighter with their sharpened pencils --that just wasn’t me. The panic would always dissipate a minute or two into the test, but I never could figure out how to skip that panic altogether. 

There are few tests that are as hyped, as panic-inducing, as written about as the SAT. It is a billion dollar industry (in 2017 The College Board--the “non-profit” administrator of the SAT -- generated over $1.1 billion in revenue. And that’s not counting all the private courses and test prep tutors that affluent families engage to improve scores). And for decades, The College Board and the elite schools that use the SAT to justify their admissions practices have argued that it is an essential part of assessing an applicant's potential for success. Their claim is that SAT scores are a better predictor of who will graduate from college than other factors. The truth is that there is a very minor correlation between SAT score and GPA and graduation rate, but the SAT on its own doesn’t actually predict much. 

A much bigger truth is that the SAT is fundamentally flawed and biased. Just Google “SAT” and you’ll find article after article examining its inherent bias and racism against black and brown students and its inherent favor for affluent kids. Go a little further and you’ll find that the data of The College Board shows these issues in clear black and white numbers. This has led to an ongoing movement to do away with the SAT and standardized testing in general. 

In the midst of the pandemic, almost all US colleges and universities went test-optional. Test date cancellations and testing center closings all but necessitated this. Most of these schools are staying test-optional for the 2021-2022 application cycle, in recognition that this year’s rising seniors faced immense disruption in their high school careers. And there’s also the not inconsequential truth that applications at competitive schools that normally require standardized tests went through the roof in last year’s admissions cycle (Colgate’s applications went up by 104%!). These record application numbers help out in the… you guessed it, rankings. (Though this is a bit of a catch-22 because rankings also love SAT scores.)

So when our clients ask us, “does the SAT still matter?,” we would really love to say no. Sadly, the answer, like standardized tests themselves, is murky. 

If you’re a rising senior, the SAT is likely to be optional anywhere you apply in the coming admissions cycle. We wish we could say that means don’t worry about it! But as we said above, it’s murky: most schools that were not test-optional prior to 2020 used the SAT for two purposes-- admissions and merit aid. They have secret formulas that they use to award merit aid, and SAT scores are almost always a factor. The murkiness comes from the fact that while they went test-optional for admissions, not all of them went test-optional for merit aid… and this information wasn’t shared. So there are lots of students who didn’t submit scores, got admitted to great schools, but were only considered for aid based on their FAFSA and other financial information, not their academic achievements and potential.

For younger students, it’s even more complicated. While the University of California system is no longer considering the SAT or ACT in its admissions process (this is a really, really big deal and advocates for doing away with the SAT and ACT altogether hope it’s just the tip of the iceberg), it remains to be seen if schools that went test-optional in the pandemic will stay test-optional long term. 

So what’s our advice? Well, that depends. Do you have a lot of test anxiety or are they no big deal? Are you likely to qualify for merit aid and is this an important piece of your college-funding plan? Are you planning to apply to schools that may start requiring SAT and ACT scores again? 

These are big questions and we would love to help you sort them out. Give us a call (617.851.9975) or send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s chat. 

Let’s talk about grammar!

Really? You read that and you’re still here? Okay…

I love grammar. A lot. I taught my first college class when I was 25-years-old. I was scared. I didn’t know what I was doing, but I knew grammar. Grammar was a concrete set of rules that no one could mess with. I may not have known how to make students better writers, but I could make them better grammarians, and no one could argue that I was messing that up.

I wasn’t exactly the best teacher back then. 

The truth is, most people don’t know their misplaced modifiers from their split infinitives, and this includes college admissions readers. Still, most students beginning their personal essays get hung up on essay format and grammar, when really these are the finishing details. The things to give attention to at the end. 

Remember, admissions officers already have your grades, test scores, and transcripts. They know what kind of student you are. They’re not judging your ability to write a perfect essay. They’re trying to get a better understanding of what kind of person you are and how you’ll fit into their college community. 

Your application details reflect you, the student. Your personal essay reflects you, the human, and most humans aren’t grammar experts, so relax. Don’t let the technical stuff get in the way of your ability to tell a great story about who you are. 

Some tips for pushing past writing anxiety:

1. Don’t think about grammar and structure. At least not in the first few drafts. The most important thing is for you to get things out of your head, and worrying about technical stuff is putting the cart before the horse. 

2. Talk like you. Ever had a teacher say you shouldn’t write the way you talk? What they probably meant was, write like a classier version of you. You with a suit on. You without cursing or saying “like.” But of course you should write the way you talk because you talk pretty good -- I mean well.  You’re applying to college, aren’t you?! Most importantly, as a college student and later, a professional, you will find that your professors, clients, bosses, and colleagues expect your authentic voice, both in person and on paper. 

   Be you. Always.

3. Read it aloud. You may not be a grammar expert, but you are exposed to a lot of speech and writing that adhere to the basic principles of good grammar. In fact, when you speak, you probably adhere to those principles too, so when you hear something that sounds off, weird, or wrong, it probably is. If your own work trips you up, stop and change it, or maybe circle it and come back to it later. Better yet, read it out loud to a parent or a friend. They can help identify things that sound awkward and help you brainstorm solutions.

   It’s easier to hear a grammar mistake than to see it.

4. Forget the 5 paragraph essay. It’s a great tool for elementary and high school writers, but it’s not useful for an essay like this. The personal essay is just that -- personal. Think about it like a conversation between you and someone who wants to get to know you better. Tell them a story about yourself that helps them get there. It doesn’t require a thesis statement and three distinct details in three distinct paragraphs. It requires something honest, specific, and representative of the awesome person you are.

We’d love to help you with all the stages of the personal statement. Email us at info@yourmayfirst.com or give us a call (617.851.9975) and let’s chat.

You’re kind of a big deal.

As we’ve noted in past blog posts, the current test-optional trend means that college admissions officers are spending more time evaluating the whole student-- including high school grades, course selection , and extracurriculars. The Common App Personal Statement helps tie them all together and give some insight into who you are not just as a student, but as a person, so it's an important piece of the application puzzle.

If you’re a rising senior, it’s hard not to have the personal  statement on your radar. You’ve seen examples of students’ successful personal statements on YouTube and TikTok. Your parents probably know that The New York Times publishes the best college essays each year. And a quick Google search will turn up hundreds of insider tips, do’s and don’ts, secrets, and pointers for how to write a successful essay. 

So you can be forgiven if sitting at a laptop to start this thing feels completely overwhelming -- but it doesn’t have to be.

You + the right list = a successful essay.

Here’s the thing: if you’ve narrowed and selected your college application list in a thoughtful way, taking into account who you are and who you hope to become, you’re one step closer to writing an essay that demonstrates why you’re a great candidate for admission. 

Applying to a school because it’s close to your house? Because it has an impressive brand name? Because your cousin went there? Because the basketball team is on TV? These aren’t great reasons. Think deeper. 

Is the school supportive of first generation students? Does it offer opportunities for community engagement? Does it have a robust coop program or study abroad? Does it support undergraduate research? 

Why is it a good fit for you?

What you want from your college experience says a lot about you. Approach the personal statement as an opportunity to show college admissions officers how your values and expectations align with the character and mission of those colleges. You -- and they -- are looking for a good fit. 

“I'm not that interesting.”

“Nothing’s ever happened to me.”

“My life is pretty good. I have nothing to write about.”

Sound familiar? We hear this all the time from rising seniors. This is why it can be so hard to begin writing. 

Start by giving yourself a break. You’ve spent the last 17 years figuring out who you want to be, and you’re not close to done. Whether you’ve had a defining life experience or not, you are still a set of amazing qualities. You might be a great team leader or someone who loves working with kids. You might be an experienced outdoors-person or a supportive sibling and friend. 

Don’t short change yourself. These qualities matter. They tell an admissions officer what kind of roommate, student, and community member you will be. Remember, that final list of schools will be lucky to have you. You just need to develop a concise, clear statement that communicates what makes you, you. 

We’re excited to get to know you and find out what makes you a big deal. Give us a call (617.851.9975) or send an email to info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s get started. 

I struggled in math. Now what?!

Last week we got a call from the parents of a student finishing his sophomore year. He’s a great kid and an excellent student-- hard-working but doesn’t take himself too seriously, engaged in his coursework, and curious about the world around him. In spite of this, he’s had a tough year in his math class. Where he earned A’s in all of his other courses, his final math grade is likely to be in the C+/B- range. He’s had some difficulties with the teacher-- they’re not a great fit for each other-- and Algebra is just tough for him.

His parents called to get our advice and thoughts on a few different questions:

1. How will this grade -- lower than anything else on his transcript -- affect his college applications?

2. What can they do over the summer to make sure he is prepared for the math portion of the PSAT (usually taken Fall of Junior year) and SAT (he’ll take it next Spring for the first time)?

3. How can they boost his confidence so the difficulty of that one course doesn’t affect how he feels about school or his ability to work through difficult academic situations??

Here’s what we shared:

1. The important thing to remember is that one less-than-perfect grade isn’t going to keep a great kid from getting into great colleges. While this class was a struggle for our client, we’ll help him build a narrative that tells the story of this struggle, including what he learned about himself and his ability to work through challenges. We’ll also strategize a plan for success in future math classes so that his transcript shows a trajectory of growth and improvement. 

2. While we think it’s a great idea to spend some time this summer getting familiar with the PSAT, SAT, and ACT and doing some healthy prep work for them, we think it’s equally important to take a break from stress and anxiety and get some breathing room. And this brings us to #3…

3. Take a break! This past year (really 15 - 16 months) was really hard, like really really hard. High school students suddenly found themselves at home. With their parents. All. The. Time. Some students started this year fully remote, some hybrid, and some full-time and in-person. Some had their academic schedules totally reshuffled and classes taught in longer or shorter blocs. Some students who struggled with a particular class for a ton of different reasons couldn’t get the support they would usually have access to in normal times. It added up to a lot of extra stress and a lot of extra unknowns.

So what does taking a break look like? 

In this case, we advised our client and his parents to focus on finishing out the year strong-- getting through final projects and tests with as much grit and grace as he could muster. And then, slamming the door on it for a few weeks, ideally a full month. 

He needs some time to let his brain rest, to have some fun, to get some distance from the stress he’s been under.  When he’s feeling restored, we suggested he start doing some twice-weekly work in math to review what he worked so hard to learn this year, to re-engage with what was confusing and keep working towards understanding, and lastly, to begin working with a test-prep tutor. While we expect most schools will stay test-optional for the coming year, it’s still a great idea to be prepared to take the SAT or ACT. There are amazing tutors out there who not only understand the tips and tricks for success but can also seriously help reduce test-taking anxiety, which always results in  higher scores. 

Whether you’re struggling with what to do after a tough course, want some advice on how to choose classes next year to strengthen your college applications, or want to build a strong narrative telling your story, we’re here to help. Give us a call (617.447.0186) or email us at info@yourmayfirst.com and let’s chat.