Gifted Issues Discussion homepage Forums General Discussion Planning summers around college application essays

http://www.nytimes.com/2011/08/06/nyregion/planning-summer-breaks-with-eye-on-college-essays.html
For a Standout College Essay, Applicants Fill Their Summers
By JENNY ANDERSON
August 5, 2011
New York Times

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Students preparing to apply to college are increasingly tailoring their summer plans with the goal of creating a standout personal statement � 250 words or more � for the Common Application in which to describe �a significant experience, achievement, risk you have taken or ethical dilemma you have faced and its impact on you.� Specialized, exotic and sometimes costly activities, they hope, will polish a skill, cultivate an interest and put them in the spotlight in a crowded field of straight-A students with strong test scores, community service hours and plenty of extracurricular activities.

A dizzying array of summer programs have cropped up to feed the growing anxiety that summer must be used constructively. Students can study health care in Rwanda, veterinary medicine in the Caribbean or cell cloning at Brown University, or learn about Sikkim, India�s only Buddhist state.

For those who lack the means to pay for an essay-inspiring trip, at least one scholarship program exists to help. Ten 11th-grade New York City public school students won the Palazzo Strozzi Renaissance Award, which entailed traveling around Italy for a month this summer to study the culture, philosophy and arts of the Renaissance. The students were required to keep diaries and write a final essay, which the foundation said would be used with their college applications.

Suddenly, the idea of working as a waitress or a lifeguard seems like a quaint relic of an idyllic, pre-Tiger Mom past.

�The reality is that the whole process of getting into school is extremely competitive, and it�s not only what you do during the school year � your grades and extracurriculars,� Mr. Isackson�s mother, Marla Isackson, said. �It�s your whole package, including what you do in the summer.�

Students do not have to spend a summer abroad for an essay-worthy experience. When Mary Lang Gill was a rising senior at the Atlanta Girls School, a private school, she hired Pam Proctor, an independent college counselor and the author of �The College Hook,� a college admissions guide. After learning that Ms. Gill loved to paint, Ms. Proctor connected her to the Florida Highwaymen, a band of renegade painters active during the 1950s and �60s.

�I spent a whole day with them,� painting and observing, said Ms. Gill, who just graduated from Dickinson College. �It was one of the coolest things ever, and I love that and I got to put it on my application.� Ms. Proctor said she spent a great deal of time with students helping them find the right topic for the college essay. �Picking the essays is as important as writing them,� she said. After that, she said, the stories �write themselves.�

As colleges look for specialization, �mastery� and �passion� have become buzzwords at many New York City private schools. Along with the perception that perfectly developed essays are essential is the sense among some parents and teachers that colleges have shifted from valuing balanced students who excel in several areas, like history and ice hockey, to demanding students who perform well across all subjects and have an area of �mastery,� like squash or fencing, that showcases one�s depth.

�Colleges have moved people from thinking they should be exceptionally well rounded to using the vocabulary that �well rounded� means �no edge,� � said Bruce Poch, the former dean of admissions at Pomona College.

Mr. Poch said members of his office staff sometimes joked that they were witnessing the �complete disappearance of summer jobs,� especially among upper-income applicants who opted for �decorative� internships at places like investment banks, where they could work with friends of their parents. He said further evidence of overspecialization was the disappearance of the multisport athlete. �It�s all but vanished,� he said.

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Many gifted children can handle college coursework long before they are 18 years old, but creating a facade that appeals to college admissions officers takes more time. One decision they face is whether to enroll young at a less selective university or whether to play the selective college admissions game.

A good book on college admissions silliness I recently read is "Crazy U: One Dad's Crash Course in Getting His Kid Into College" by Andrew Ferguson.

Thanks Bostonian. A class mom met the head of admissions of Yale during the spring and the comment was: there was an overabundance of the perfect scores and grades plus music plus sport. And finding the exceptional that popped out the pile was the task for admissions now.

For those of us that have younger kids, what will be fashionable when our kids have to apply?

Ren

That article is basically describing an arms race in college admissions. It's presumably doing a lot of damage and is really a shame.

I read that NYT article too. I think it highlights how incredibly competitive it is to get into college. There are LOTS of kids with "perfect" grades and test scores. With AP classes, the student can get above a perfect 4.00 GPA, and there are lots of prep courses for the tests.
It's important for your child long-term to have hobbies/outside interests to get into a good college. Actually, that's a good idea for LIFE. I don't support this kind of pursuit for the ideal personal essay but it is good to have SOMETHING you can write your essay about.

Whatever happened to catching a bus to talk to a professor whose paper you read in the library then ending up working for him for two years while in high school?


It would not take more than 10 minutes with the "resume padding" kids to find them out.



I think its time to push calculus down into the 10th grade and add some more mature math/physics/chem classes to the 11th and 12 grades to differentiate the kids further.

As for real passions, I wonder if its hard to develop any if the kids are 100% programmed.

I hypothesize that it is very difficult. Also, admissions committee members get really bored reading essays that give no real sense of whom the applicant is as a person. Too many students trying to be somebody else they or their parents think the school wants, when the school really wants somebody real!

I don't know if it is the kids that are so programmed or the system is so programmed to optimize.

In the age when my mother was pregnant, plenty smoked and drake through pregnancy. Then gave formula -- the non DHA kind. We ate Kraft Mac&Cheese and drank soda (or pop where I come from).

Now we breastfeed, we read to our kids as soon as they pop out, we give them organic foods, they are not around relatives that smoke etc etc. They should be smarter and accomplish more just from that.

Just like the US has not spent on infrastructure. We don't have the high speed trains, bridges need to be fixed, we need to overhaul the expectations of what kids can learn and on some level I think that is the case. Growing up in Canada, I remember learning to read in K and doing math yet many say that never happened in K when they were in school here. Yet, today, K does read, does write in their journals, does math. DD is doing more research projects in 1st grade than I remember doing. Though I read something I wrote in 1st grade, that my father kept that I was surprised I was capable of writing so maybe we did more.

So besides the push down in high school, there should be an overhaul to push higher learning at K.

On the other hand, spending the summer in NJ, the red shirt state, so many parents tell me their kids are not ready for K and have to k twice because it is like 1st grade used to be. We forget, with our kids who are years ahead, some kids cannot do the grade work at their own level because of the push to learn.

What is the solution then for the general public?

Ren

I think the answer for the general public is the same as for the HG, PG, and LD populations: individualized work at their own pace and with appropriate interventions and supports as needed, in line with mastery teaching principles. (This is very like what the RTI model was supposed to create, but its implementation, at least in Florida, has been nearly the exact opposite.) This could be accomplished in school settings without excessive additional cost through district-wide block scheduling, the abolition of grade placements, at least for academic subjects, the consistent and appropriate use of pre- and post-tests to assess readiness to move on to more advanced topics, with both curriculum compacting and additional practice and explanation available to all students as needed, and the appropriate use of technology. Live humans with appropriate knowledge and training would be used as mentors and facilitators, to lead, guide, and enhance group discussions, whether those discussions were happening face-to-face or remotely, to help give additional support and extension to those struggling with mastery of a given topic or those wishing to explore it in greater depth, and to help develop and refine writing and logic skills.

Unfortunately, bureaucracies tend to perpetuate the status quo, even when everyone knows it doesn't work, so I'm not holding my breath.

You also need to remember your goal and tailor your approach accordingly.

It's strategic on a number of levels because it's just a system to be gamed.

For example, if I had a kid who wanted to go to med school or dental school, I would recommend a nice state school where they could go for free (or make a profit, depending on the scholarships) and could get a 4.0 by sandblasting their academic competition like a soup cracker.

Harvard and Yale are very important for certain career paths (certain business consulting jobs, etc.), but not as important for others (pre-med, pre-law). Plus, there the MCAT and LSAT become much more important.

A great book on how to stand out in the college admissions process without burning out in the rat race is:

How to Be a High School Superstar: A Revolutionary Plan to Get Into College by Standing Out (Without Burning Out), by Cal Newport

I have read a lot of books about the college application process (and have one kid in college, and one in the search process right now). This book is by far the most thought provoking and useful I have read. It is very much about how to avoid being 100% programmed, and using that extra time to go against the flow with some activities that you are passionate about.