College interviews can be stressful to some students. But what you need to realize is that this is a relatively easy part of the college process. If you follow these few basic bits of advice, you can ace your interview and leave the stress at home.

DO:

• Prepare by practicing with a friend or parent.
• Get a good night’s sleep the night before – dozing off mid-interview may in fact count against you.
• Be natural, be yourself.

DO NOT:

• Over-prepare and psyche yourself out. One or two practice runs are plenty.
• Arrive late.
• Arrive too early. Showing up more than 5 minutes prior to the interview is considered bad form – especially if it is at the interviewer’s workplace, since it could interrupt her schedule and disrupt her work.

Commonly Asked Questions

Before the interview, you should prepare for some common questions that the interviewer may ask, such as:

• Why do you want to attend this college?
• What is your favorite/least favorite subject in school?
• What is your favorite extracurricular activity?
• What is your favorite book/author?
• What do you want to do after college?
• What is your biggest strength/weakness?
• Who is your biggest role model?
• What is your biggest achievement to date?
• Tell me about an obstacle you’ve overcome.
• Tell me about yourself.

You don’t have to memorize an entire answer for each question; just put some thought into each question and make sure you won’t be surprised or stumped by any of them.

Prepare Your Own Questions

Just as important as preparing for the interviewer’s questions is preparing your own. The right kinds of questions can not only leave a good impression, but also be informative for you. Take the opportunity to ask specific things about the school, such as your intended major, campus life, athletics, and study abroad opportunities. If you can engage in really substantive conversation on your particular interests, you can impress the interviewer with your passion and knowledge.

Dress Code

What to wear to interviews is a point of contention between some college advisors. But when it comes to dress codes, there is no one-size-fits-all rule (the pun was intended!). The key is adapting to your surroundings. If your interviewer wants to meet at his law firm, you absolutely should wear business attire. But if she wants to chat at the neighborhood coffee shop, you can probably dress more casually (guys – ditch the tie; girls – leave the pantsuit in the closet). There is definitely a lower limit when it comes to casual though – I would not recommend t-shirts, jeans, shorts, or tank tops in any situation.

One thing you can do to determine the right dress code is to do some research. If the interviewer asks to meet at his office, you should Google his company. Is it an old-school insurance company where everyone wears a suit and tie? Or is it a young startup internet company where someone in a suit would stick out like a sore thumb? Which brings us to the next point:

Research Your Interviewer

Athletes know the value of home field advantage. It isn’t just the thousands of fans cheering you and booing your opponent. When you are playing in a familiar environment, you are able to worry less about the little things and focus better on the game.

The point of researching the interviewer is not to creepily dig into his personal life, but gather some basic information and make yourself familiar with his background. A basic LinkedIn search will reveal these key pieces:

• Picture
• Graduating year (and approximate age)
• Occupation
• Company
• Responsibilities at current job

Knowing these few things about your interviewer will give you a better sense of how to approach the interview. If her current occupation is of interest to you, it will provide useful conversation points.

After all, the interview has a dossier full of your background information – why shouldn’t you have the same?

Extra Credit

• If you have a strong online presence, this is the perfect time to talk about it and send the interviewer off with a “leave-behind,” something he/she can look at afterwards. I strongly encourage business cards. If you leave the interviewer with a card containing your name and website/blog, she will most certainly take a look at it later. If you don’t have your own business cards, no problem – just write down the url on her card.
• Thank-you notes after interviews are a definitely plus. Ask for an address where you can send the note, and send a brief, dead-simple note thanking the interviewer for her time. Email notes are okay, but paper is preferable, since it may end up in your application file.

In Summary: Style Points

Remember – interviews isn’t about answering questions correctly, or saying exactly what the interviewer wants you to say. In the end, they are more about style than substance. All the interviewer wants to see is someone who is curious, intelligent, personable, and can carry out a decent conversation. As long as you are comfortable during the interview and show genuine interest, you’ll come across well.

Here’s an interesting development: some colleges are requiring submission of a graded writing sample. According to the Scripps College website, all applicants must submit a 3-7 “analytical essay” with the teacher’s comment and grade written on the physical paper. By “analytical,” they mean a paper that “makes an argument or analyzes an issue or work of literature.” It specifically states the essay cannot be creative in nature.

In addition:

• You can’t just print out a new copy from your computer; you need to submit the copy that the teacher graded. If you didn’t save it, Scripps advises you to submit a clean copy and indicate the grade you earned.
• If you only have 1-2 page papers, you can submit two of them.
• If you only have 8+ page papers, you can submit it, and Scripps will read enough of it to “evaluate your abilities.”

Scripps argues that the graded writing sample allows them to see what the grading standards at the student’s school is like.

This requirement only further complicates the college application process. True, it does not involve any additional work on the student’s part, provided he/she has saved past papers. However, it punishes students who are not so diligent with archiving schoolwork.

Personal statements cause enough stress for students. Let’s keep it simple, admissions officers!

via MyCollegeCalendar.org

pic from funnyexam.com

According to a recent story on the New York Times, most admissions officers discourage students who try to “friend” them on Facebook and other social networking sites.

That advice might be good for most of the applicant pool, but if you have been following our advice on establishing a killer online presence, you might think differently. In this article I’m going to describe how to “friend” college representatives the right way and boost your chances for success. Proceed with caution, though, because one wrong move could jeopardize your prospects.

If you are confused about Score Choice on the SAT, check out this brief overview from CollegeTreasure.com. In a nutshell, Score Choice allows you to selectively send your highest SAT scores to colleges, protecting you from the dreaded “bombing.” The article suggests that you use Score Choice carefully, noting that some college admissions officers frown upon applicants who take the SAT too many times (although they don’t see scores you don’t submit, they do see how many times you’ve taken the SAT).

Don’t take the SAT over and over just to raise your score by a few points. If you think you truly underperformed, definitely take it again. If not, submit it with confidence!

The Quick Review

AcceptEdge is a just-launched (but still in beta) website that aims to predict the college that best fits your academic profile and personal interests.  The problem? It doesn’t work! As far as I can tell, none of the information you enter in has any bearing on the results, which for some reason always seem to favor George Washington University.

Academic Profile

This is obviously supposed to be heart of the product: enter in your GPA, class rank, and standardized test scores, and it should give you schools that are appropriate for you academically. To test it, I first entered extremely high scores, while entering “I don’t care” for school preferences like size, greek life, and urban vs rural:

Unweighted GPA: 4
Weighted GPA: 6.1
Class Rank: Valedictorian
Number of AP Exams: 5
SAT scores: 800-800-800

As you can see, AcceptEdge returns very high Academic and Personal Index scores of 930 and 850 (more on these later), and an “Edge Score” of 890. It also recommends GWU, Carnegie Mellon, and Northwestern as the top choices. Not exactly the schools I would have expected for the given academic profile, but fine.

Next, I plugged in these low values:

Unweighted GPA: 1
Weighted GPA: 1
Class Rank: Bottom 50%
Number of AP Exams: 0
SAT scores: 200-200-200

As you might expect, the index scores (310 and 388) as well as the Edge Score (349) are low. But look at the schools they recommend: the first six choices are exactly the same!

Facebook Connect and Personal Interest

If the perfunctory Academic Profile feature hasn’t turned you off already, the Personal Interests section doesn’t work either. At first glance, it sounds cool: enter in your interests, such as favorite books and movies, and it will compare them to the Facebook profiles of students who currently attend these colleges. It will even automatically fetch your interests through Facebook Connect if you enter in your Facebook login.

But again, it doesn’t work. I entered completely different personal interests several times, and it returned the same college results each time – even the same Personal Index!

This is a shame, too, because the personal profile can definitely go a long way in helping you decide your best-fit college. The student’s current high school, for example, can be a great indicator if it is handled correctly. College admissions officers give students at more competitive high schools, such as Phillips Exeter or Horace Mann, more consideration over students at lesser-known schools with similar GPAs. AcceptEdge could someday incorporate in this bias, based on the relative GPA averages of students from different high schools who attend the same college.

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Right now, it is way too premature to start making wishlists for new features. AcceptEdge needs to fix their broken product, and now. I realize it is still in beta, but this is the peak college application season, and students are looking for any tools they can get their hands on to help them decide where to spend their next four years. Let’s hope they don’t use this one, at least until it’s ready for prime time.

AdmissionsAdvice.com has published a blog post on college advice from actual college admissions officers. No surprises here if you’ve read our article on How to Write a Great College Essay, which emphasized setting yourself apart and letting your true personality emerge. Yale’s Director of Outreach and Recruitment put it this way:

“I’m interested in this person as a 17-year-old. The best essays are not the ones with perfect punctuation or that cool Ayn Rand quote that they think makes them sound like an intellectual, but ones that are honest and real because that’s how we get a sense of who the student is.”

He went on to talk about the importance of being consistent with the rest of the application and teacher recommendations. For example, with if a student write about the situation in Darfur:

“I would expect that that student’s teacher recommendations would talk about her concern for others, her leadership skills, or her passion for politics, and that her extracurriculars might highlight similar things. If the teachers don’t mention any of these things, and her only extracurricular is some minor club, the essay wouldn’t resonate with the rest of her application.”

He also warned against allowing your essay to get watered down through endless revisions by parents and tutors.

“Parents want to protect their children. They want to hold their hands and make sure that the child doesn’t fail…Sometimes, when I’m reading essays, I wonder who the real writers are because they don’t sound like a 17-year old wrote them.”

The lesson here? Colleges want to learn about you as a person, not as a savvy applicant. Write about what you think colleges want to read about, and you’ll be guaranteed to write a boring essay. As long as you write honestly on a topic you’re passionate about, you’ll be fine.

Even President Obama knows how important it is to be careful your online presence! As Reuters reports, the president said this during a question and answer session with 14- and 15- year old students:

“Well, let me give you some very practical tips. First of all, I want everybody here to be careful about what you post on Facebook, because in the YouTube age, whatever you do, it will be pulled up again later somewhere in your life.

And when you’re young, you make mistakes and you do some stupid stuff. And I’ve been hearing a lot about young people who — you know, they’re posting stuff on Facebook, and then suddenly they go apply for a job and somebody has done a search.”

POTUS is absolutely right: you should be careful with your online presence. But while the president emphasized things you shouldn’t post, he did not mention the things you SHOULD post to your online profiles, such as your academic achievements or your passions/interests.

Colleges are going to look at your profiles. A blank profile is preferable to an obscene one, but why not create a impressive profile?

Read the following article on establishing a stellar online presence through Facebook, Myspace, blogs, Twitter, etc:

What is Your Online Presence? Making Your College Application Stand Out

Good luck!

There is a lot of talk among students and parents about internet tools like Facebook, MySpace, Twitter, and Google, which make it easy for college admissions officers to find out personal details (often scandalous) about candidates. If fact, Regan recently wrote about how to hide yourself on Facebook.

But while you should definitely hide photos and mentions of alcohol/drugs/sex from your online profiles, there are some things you may want to show, even highlight. In this article, I’m going to show you how to use the internet to your advantage. Instead of hiding, you can create your own online presence and put your best foot forward publicly, making sure nosy college admissions officers find out about your most impressive qualities.

Why Do I Need an Online Presence?

It’s no secret that colleges look at the whole candidate, not just test scores and transcripts. They look for candidates who are passionate about their interests and are proactive enough to follow through on them. Most importantly, they want people who stand out.

Most of you have interests you’re passionate about. They may be academic (poetry, computer programming, political science) or not (movies, comic books, fashion). You probably have friends who are interested in the same stuff, and you spend a ton of time talking about it or doing things related to it.

In the pre-internet days, there was no way of showcasing your various activities, short of writing your college essay about it. Now, you can use the internet to publicize them and truly stand out. A website for your debate team, a food review blog, a MySpace page for your band – these are all things that will create a complete picture of you as an applicant and separate you from the thousands of faceless hopefuls.

Getting Started

It’s pretty simple. Start a blog on Blogger.com and start writing about whatever interests you (I wouldn’t recommend building a full-on website unless you’ve done it before). You can start it alone, or with a group of friends who all contribute to the same blog. If you like movies, start posting reviews. If you are into politics, start commenting on current events. And if you pick up any individual accomplishments along the way – if your football team wins the regional championship, or if you win a school essay contest – definitely post about them!

Remember, the goal here is not to become “huge” and get millions of followers of your blog – it’s to establish an online presence. Just tell your family and friends about it so that they can read it and leave comments occasionally.

The Order of Investigation

Once you’ve created the blog, you then need to make sure it’s discoverable. Here’s it’s important to understand the “Order of Investigation,” which is the order in which a college admissions officer goes to various online outlets to learn more about you:

1. Facebook/MySpace
2. Twitter
3. Google (where they can find your blog, website, etc.)

They know that most students have Facebook or MySpace pages, so they look there first. Although some might dig further into Google to find your blog, most won’t. Even if they do, they may not find it.

Therefore, you need to direct the viewer from your Facebook or MySpace profile to the more substantial blog. When you edit your Facebook profile, go to Contact Information -> Website and put in the url for your blog. In MySpace, show your blog url in the “About Me” section, which appears at the top of your profile.

Then, make the your profile’s Basic Info and Personal Info public from Privacy Settings -> Profile. Now, I know most people would shudder at the thought of making any part of your profile public. But as long as you hide your photos/videos/wall and delete any incriminating details from your profile, you’ll be fine.

When Applying

Talking about your blog in your college essay is one way to get the admissions officer to visit it. Even if you just mention it in passing, include the url in parenthesis next to the name of the blog.

You should also put the blog (with url) into the Extracurricular Activities section of the application.

In Summary

Think of your website or blog as free advertising. If you send a stellar term paper you wrote, most admissions officers will toss it in the garbage. But if you include a link to your blog on your Facebook page, they will probably check it out, maybe read a few articles.

Most importantly, have fun. Blogging about stuff you’re interested in shouldn’t add to your already full schedule or stress level. If you follow these instructions, you will create a strong online presence and gain a huge advantage in your college process, without too much work.