College 101

College 101 Citizens and Permanent Residents OR students, regardless of citizenship, currently attending high school in the United States. My parents are pretty good writers, however neither have been to college in a long time or have ever worked as admissions officers. She helped me form my list of colleges, edit the applications, and connected me with great tutors for the ACT and subject tests. Jen's spirit and passion for helping students is unparalleled. She provided support and motivation and she really truly cares about the students that she works with. Thanks to her, I got the ACT score that I wanted and am going to be attending my dream school next year. We are extremely satisfied and grateful Great Expectations customers. We have used its services for several years, including to advise and assist our son with applications to high school and college. Great Expectations provided invaluable assistance with test preparation, essays, the common application, UC applications and other application hurdles. Thousands of families have turned to Great Expectations to manage the process, from the first standardized test to the last college essay. Programs Rice supports include the College Prep Conferences and the National College Match program which runs October through December. The following week, I ask students to read what they wrote to their groupmates. I encourage them to use the VWT's text-to-speech function to help them with their pronunciation. Some essay examples below are by students who chose to write about a challenge, while other examples may be helpful if you’re looking to write about yourself more generally. Students will have the chance to walk in the shoes of an admissions officer from a day. They get to read through real applications and decide how and if to admit students. I had Jen Kaifesh as my college counselor, and it truly was the best decision I have ever made! Some read regionally which means that one officer reads all the applications from all the high schools in a certain geographic region. Often they are read in committee where several officers might look at one essay. If you want to know how you will be assessed at any given school, you should feel free to ask the admissions office. Your students’ college essay is their opportunity to reveal their best qualities and to show an admission committee what makes them stand out from other applicants. Work with your students to help them with this important piece of their application. It is always worth an applicant’s while to write as strong an essay as possible, but its role in the process is a variable one. This is a tough question to answer as there is no way to know for sure. At a smaller school, it is more likely that the admissions officers will have the time to look at each essay, whereas at huge universities it would seem less likely. In terms of how many officers read each essay, that also varies from school to school. They do not know anything about the Common App essay format. One of the best ways I have discovered to incorporate an online grammar checker into my ESL lessons for my non-fluent learners is to create a series of steps in a collaborative narrative writing project. Both my Actively Engaged on the Job and Actively Engaged at College textbooks involve collaborative narrative writing projects. Each student creates a fictional character, describes him or her using the first person, and makes his or her character interact with the other students' characters within the context of the shared story. Throughout the otherwise daunting process, founder Jen Kaifesh and other tutors at Great Expectations have been consistently well-informed, thoughtful, patient and tactful. If you find yourself overwhelmed with standardized testing and the college application process before it’s even started, you are not alone. Depending on the level, the characters live together as roommates or work together as colleagues within the collaborative narrative. Each week, I ask students to plan one episode of their story with the help of their groupmates. For homework, I ask them to write the current episode in the story, eliminate all avoidable errors using the Virtual Writing Tutor, and submit it to me for points. Writing that contains avoidable errors is penalized for not having applied the necessary revision strategies.