College & Career Counseling Office

College & Career Counseling Office However, try to place your order on our website in advance in order to have more time for reading and revisions. EssayShark offers a great tool for college essay writing assistance â€" direct chat with the author. Using an online chatting system, you can apply to the writer anytime to specify your requirements and offer your suggestions. When admissions officers read your essay, it goes through a process. At top schools, like the University of Pennsylvania, the first readers condense the essay into a third of a page. They note the topic and quality of the piece, when they discuss whether or not to accept the applicant in admissions meetings. That is why the entertainment factor is so important. Our consultants visit schools in the U.S. and internationally in order to help you build essays that are on-point for each university. Keep in mind that the college personal statement is a very different beast than the five-paragraph essays that make up your high school writing assignments. Admissions officers are evaluating your essays in an exceedingly different light than your English teacher. To accelerate the process, they want you to talk on paper; let them get to know you by giving them a guided tour of your heart, your brain, and your life. If you succeed, they will look up from reading your essay, and be surprised you aren’t in the room; indeed, they will swear the chair next to them is warm from your having sat in it since Tuesday. While no lives are riding on your college application essays, this is a great time to revisit some of the rules of writing well. IvySelect’s counselors participate in national college conferences alongside admissions officers, who share their insights about their schools and their different admissions processes. We fly all over the country to take part in professional development seminars where we receive current information on college admissions. You can control the progress of writing all the time. In addition, you may ask a writer for a free preview in order to learn more about his or her writing style and performance. The College Essay Captain helps teens overcome their fears and limiting beliefs around writing college application essays, so they are free to authentically share their stories with admissions teams. I’m going to give you the rundown of what colleges are looking for when they read your application, and then I’m going to explain how the college essay fits into that equation. Transcripts, letters of recommendation, standardized tests â€" it’s the time of year when high school seniors are checking items off their college admissions to-do lists. And then there’s the all-important application essay, the chance to convey in a few hundred words why a dream school should extend an admissions offer. Although juniors may feel like they have a lot of free time right now, the reality is that most high school students are still taking classes â€" they've just shifted into an online format. Therefore, Sawyer says, this may not necessarily be the right time to start working on essays. In order to write multiple essays that are of the same elevated, high quality as your main essay, you need to spend the time, do the hard work and receive informed guidance. Unless enough time has passed since the experience, the essay can be too personal, too much of a rant, or just too hard to read. One rep said the general rule of thumb was no essays on the Four Dsâ€"Drugs, dating, death, and divorceâ€"but you get the idea. If you want to write about a personal challenge, emphasize what you learned and how you grewâ€"if you dwell on the details, the essay will not achieve its purpose. The best way to move forward is to see a college essay as a conversation. If they could, colleges would welcome you to campus and ask you questions for hoursâ€"but if they did that, no one would be admitted to college until they were 43. Experts say supplemental essays tend to be short, but St. John’s College bucks that trend, requiring a minimum of 400 words. That’s because the school is interested in seeing students write at length on a chosen topic. No college application is complete without the personal essay, which can be daunting for many students to write. Essays on negative life events can be very tricky. Try to write something distinct that will help you stand out from the crowd. At Duke, for instance, an admissions officer said her favorite essay a student wrote was about a pair of bunny slippers she always wore. At Wheaton High , it cost nothing for students to drop in on a college essay workshop offered during the lunch hour a couple of weeks before the Nov. 1 early application deadline. Cynthia Hammond Davis, the college and career information coordinator, provided pizza, and Leslie Atkin, an English composition assistant, provided tips in a room bedecked with college pennants. William & Mary, like many schools, assigns at least two readers for each application. Sometimes, essays get another look when an admissions committee is deliberating.