Jan 222012
 

College Admission Tips from an Admissions Insider

Note:  This is  part 10 of the transcript of the information contained in the video from VanderbiltUniversity about Applying for College – an Insiders Guide for Getting Into a Good College and it’s about getting admitted to college.

For the previous segment click below:

Who Writes Your Letters of Recommendation for College?

If you’ve never applied to college before having a few college admissions tips from someone inside a college can help you understand what the colleges are looking for when they are admitting candidates.

As an admissions insider, what tips can you give to help me sound my best in my application?

I would make sure that you investigated the school and you know who we are because in a lot of the things we are ascertaining and asking you, how much do you know about us? Because it’s for the fit. I would clearly look at some of those base facts or base issues of does it read well, is it grammatically put together properly. Those types of things.

I will also make sure that your essays, as we’ve talked about already, are your authentic voice, they’re you coming through, not so pre-packaged. The other thing is that you are mature enough to follow the instructions that if we say 500 words, we want 500. We don’t want 1000. That you are mature enough that you pick recommenders that can talk about you as the person, not at the belief that you needed to pick the most famous person you know, or your parent’s neighbors knows.

So those would be the kind of tips that I will give. I would say if it is a little earlier before the application process, is I encourage student to do this a lot. If they are sophomore, is that one of the things, or junior, they’re starting to narrow – they’re looking at 20 schools or 10 schools at that point.

Go out and print out their application. Start looking a couple of years before you come. What looks like the questions that they are asking? So that you have a sense of what that value of that campus is because that can perhaps guide you in choices to prepare in application. I say that with a little bit of hesitancy though because you don’t want it to look like you have pre-packaged, you want it to be this authentic.

So those would be the kind of pieces that I would give and I always love to give an example of the school that I worked out once where they’re kind of arch-rival in the student’s essay. The essay was reading along smashingly well. I’m so excited, this is the dream school that I want to go to. Talking about the school that I was working at. Then in the final paragraph, they noted the other school because they didn’t change their word document. So you want to think about that you’ve done some of those base facts that you’re talking to the school and that wonderful search and replace, you do that.

If there’s anything that I can leave today, it is the application process - we look at applications to admit you, not to deny because we are building a community of learners in this wonderful building, this new freshmen commons – we’re building a sense of the class and we want those people that we admit, that we are trying to build that so that it’s a wonderful experience for all. And if you don’t quite really know who you are, it’s not going to work.

Hopefully you’ve gotten something out of this transcript of the video and these summary college admissions tips.  Please leave a comment listing your main questions about getting into college.  Share this post!!!