Justin Pope has written top universities are catching up with the technology revolution and beginning to provide course work on line. The largest initiative is MIT’s “OpenCourseWare.” But Johns Hopkins, Tufts, and Notre Dame also promote open course ware, with Yale soon to come on board.
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If you are ending your junior year of high school and looking forward to a summer off, think again. There are things you need to be doing this summer if you are thinking of applying to college.
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Colleges are looking for passion. If you want to stand out as a college applicant, you have to be more than a great student and athlete. You also have to show your stuff beyond your school and beyond the classroom.
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The Gap Year is catching on. Long popular in Europe, the Gap Year is taking time between graduating from high school and before entering college to pursue personal goals or interests like travel, working abroad, or volunteering. Read more about the Gap Year at Collegebasics.
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What do University of Florida, Carleton, Skidmore, University of Vermont, and Syracuse have in common? They all require entering freshman to read an assigned book over the summer.
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In 2007, Richie Frohlichstein wrote another article about the new writing section in the SATs. He admitted the jury is still out as to the importance of these scores as shown by colleges like MIT that are testing their freshmen in writing in order to compare their results with SAT scores. But, he also noted that half of the 1,000 4-year colleges now use writing scores as a factor for admission. Even those that do not use the scores as an admission factor often look at the SAT essay to check it against the college application essay to evaluate consistency between the two, or they will use the SAT writing score for placement of accepted students in their freshman courses. It is interesting to note, as well, that only .6% of SAT test takers score a 12 or a perfect score in the writing section, meaning only 8,000 from the nation-wide applicant pool do as well, another indicator that could separate out the best applicants for the more highly selective colleges.
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In November, 2006, Nancy Hass, a contributor to The New York Times, wrote about the newly instituted writing, or essay, section of the SATs, which were first given in March, 2005. In this article it was clear the scoring on this new test was not going to significantly impact admissions decisions.
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Sometimes applying to college becomes more like a shopping spree spurred on by your friends’ and parents’ expectations. Finding a good college match should also involve some thought about the kind of work or the type of career you want as an adult.
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It might be worth your reading through the seven pages of the article “Tense Times at Bronxville High.” It follows the exhaustive application process of three high school seniors: Win Rutherford, Maria Devlin, and Alexandra Likovich, all students at the highly competitive high school Bronxville High in New York.
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In Naomi Schaefer Riley’s January 2008 Wall Street Journal article A Desperate Need for Acceptance, she makes the point with Michele Hernandez’s advice in Acing the College Application that colleges don’t want well-rounded students—ones who captain athletic teams, who get all As, or who are leaders in high school activities. They want a well-rounded freshman class. That means each student the college accepts must offer some unique appeal. Ms Hernandez calls it passion, but it boils down to an unusual talent, experience, or expertise. Someone might speak Mandarin fluently, might have played in a national recital, might have created her own on-line computer business.
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