Self-paced college counseling resources

Other College & University Education
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Hello all!

As a head mentor, I’m always looking for ways to nurture even more successful students. One of the ways I’m tackling that this year is through 1:1 college counseling for my rising seniors. When I was in high school, I didn’t have access to very deep resources even though I went to a fancy private school, so I wanted to share the resources that I put together on my own and have been using to coach 7525 students.

Picking the right college

There are a bunch of reasons to pick which college to go to: major, scholarship, vibe, etc. However, plenty of students don’t consider all of the other factors that come along with moving somewhere for 4 years: does it snow there? Will you be able to reasonably get to a city to see a major concert? Is the school so small that you’ll meet everyone in your major in the first month, or so big that you’ll never meet them all? There is no universal right answer for any of these, but you should definitely think about them. Especially when given the fact that plenty of people change majors during college (and that that’s totally okay), you’ll want to be in an environment that you still like.

Writing the dreaded “common app personal statement”

It’s 650 words. It can be about whatever you want. Really. I wrote mine about driving 30 minutes to a coffee shop at 10pm. I almost wrote it about my favorite fonts. College admissions officers will be reading it pretty quickly (along with the rest of your application), so you want to give them something to remember you by that isn’t covered elsewhere on your application. Your essays shouldn’t be rehashing your resume or activities section, because those AOs will already see that. I highly recommend reading Hack the College Essay by John Dew, which goes more in-depth on how to find different topics to write about and how to avoid common pitfalls. It’s only 35 pages long, and I know you all ready the game manual so you should be fine.

The college tracker spreadsheet

Clicking this link will make you a copy of the tracker. I’ve tried to compile as many helpful sheets as possible into here for your benefit!

  • An overall checklist so you can view progress through the process,
  • A student profile, where you can fill in your GPA, APs, SAT/ACT, etc. This can be a helpful snapshot of you who are as a student for when you ask others for help picking colleges.
  • A college factors tab. I have written out about 60 different things to consider. The sheet will ask you to rank them on scales of 1-5, so you (and others) can get a rough sense of what you actually care about. As you go through, you can also add in some notes. For example, if I put “temperature” as a 4 (and therefore important to me), do I mean I want hot? Cold? Snow? Humidity?
  • A list of potential colleges to research. This page will help you organize which schools you’re exploring, so you can compare them across several different factors.
  • The application and essay tracker. This sheet will let you fill in which schools you’re applying to, when their deadlines are, and which supplemental essays you’ve completed.

What should my timeline be?

Here is a super rough recommendation. It’s what I stuck to and what I recommend to my students. Adapt it as you see fit.

  • Summer: Write your personal statement and complete a rough list of schools to apply to. This list can change, but you want to have a good basis to get started with.
  • August-October: Start filling out supplemental essays, preparing for the Early Action and Early Decision deadlines! I highly recommend submitting applications in the EA period if you can so you can balance your workload across the semester.
  • November-December: Complete your Regular Decision applications!

I hope this information is helpful. Please feel free to ask questions or provide additional helpful resources in this thread, and good luck to all of you students. You’re going to crush it!

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This is good stuff.

I’m going to add some wisdom to the personal essay component… however many people you’ve asked to review your essays… it isn’t enough… ask more. Take advantage of the resources you have and ask those people in your life who are important to you to review your essays.

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I wish I had seen this when I was applying to colleges a year and a half ago.
Didn’t follow any of it, lol

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Happy oh-god-it’s-August-1st-and-college-apps-are-open day! I wanted to bump this thread for y’all. Happy to also do my best to answer any questions you have about the college process :call_me_hand:

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Is this where we dump our unsolicited advice on college? Okay, good.



I have a lot of things to say about the college admissions process – and college in general – and schooling in general (see this TEDx talk from FIRST’s former head of DEI). That said, here’s my number one piece of advice for the process:

Where you go to college barely matters. Note: I don’t say it doesn’t matter. You should do everything in your power to go to a school where you will enjoy your days and feel fulfilled in what you are doing. That’s it, full stop.

Do not go to a school because the reputation is superior. Do not go to a school because your friend is going there. Do not go to a school because someone else is trying to live vicariously though you.

Likewise, do not go to great lengths to get into a school so far beyond your reach. Be ambitious, absolutely. Try hard. Reach for the stars. But be okay with not getting there, and be okay with going to a school that is well within your reach.

I had a poor to mediocre GPA in high school. There are a lot of factors that contributed to that, but they don’t really matter. The point is, I ended up at a state school with a relatively unknown reputation outside of the region which more often gets confused for the system’s flagship campus with a similar name (for which my alma matter started as a satellite campus). Ending up at a school where I was “under-placed,” though, led to some of the following things:

  • I was in a really small major/department at a large school, which gave me benefits like getting to know my professors and peers and accessing the classes I needed while still maintaining the amenities and diversity of a large campus.
  • I managed to achieve nearly a perfect GPA (I think I might have gotten a B+ one time) and graduate summa cum laude, making it onto the Dean’s List and President’s List each semester.
  • I graduated in just 2.5 years with a full four year degree. No, I didn’t enter with a ton of AP credits or transfer credits. No, I didn’t shirk other responsibilities. I just worked hard, and quickly.
  • I was recognized by administration a few times, something I never would have imagined would happen to me in a school of nearly 30,000.

The summer between high school and college, I was already on my college department’s email mailing list. They were sending some mass emails with internship opportunities for the fall. I applied to one that looked interesting, and turns out, political campaigns will take anyone with a pulse who is offering to work for free. But it didn’t stop there. During and since college:

  • I used that internship to make some really solid connections.
  • I had a few other really cool internships and job opportunities along the way.
  • In my last semester of college, I took all of my classes remotely and worked full time doing something that I found interesting that had nothing to do with my degree.
  • I then used the connections from that very first internship to get my first post-degree job. That job, while very entry level, was a dream and maybe the coolest year of my life.
  • And that job led me to another job, where I started integrating some of my passions all at once (politics + tech + education). I spent a year there, getting some awesome experience.
  • And now I’m like, 3.5 years out of college or something, on my third full time job, this one paying over 3x what I’m “expected” to make compared to my peers with the same degree from the same school, this many years out of college. I’m not exactly working in field of study anymore, but Political Science is way more helpful in Information Technology (and everywhere) than you might think.

All of that is a very long rant to emphasize the following:

You can be successful without going to an “elite” school. Being the top of your class at a lesser ranked school can be, in some cases, far superior to being in the middle of the pack at a better ranked school. Where you go matters, but not that much, just enough that you enjoy your day-to-day, as much as you can.

It’s like Maslow’s hierarchy of needs: once the basics are met (food, security, etc.), having more things doesn’t make us happier. Having a deep sense of fulfilment does. Realizing our own potential does. Going to the better ranked school doesn’t inherently do more for you, assuming you can enjoy your time and are learning something.

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As I’m sure many of you are beginning your common app personal statement, i thought I’d provide a guide for a self-paced exercise to help you generate ideas.

How to freewrite

  1. Grab pen and paper (not your computer. Write this by hand!)
  2. Set a target, either # of pages or # of minutes spent writing
  3. Write until you hit that target. You should write as fast as you can, limiting the amount of time you spend thinking about what you’ve written. Ideally, there is no delay between when you have a thought and when you write it down. Don’t worry about handwriting, spelling, or even complete sentences. You can get halfway through a thought and then bail, that’s totally fine. The idea is to push yourself further fhan is comfortable with brainstorming.
  4. After you’ve hit your target, use a different color/highlighter to point out the ideas you like! This might be 0, 2 per page, whatever. You’ll likely be throwing away most of your work at this stage, so it’s totally okay if the freewrite doesn’t result in much.
  5. Repeat

With your first personal statement freewrite, start super broad. Cover everything and anything that might be a good topic. Personal experiences, activities, relationships with people you care about, the time someone pushed you over in 4th grade, whatever.

After you’ve done the first freewrite, pull out the good topics. Pick your favorites, and then expand each one of them into its own freewrite. Dive into all angles. How did it make you feel? How did you change? How do you apply what you learned to new situations?

Keep repeating this process at all levels until you feel good about your topic, and THEN move it to a google doc to write your first rough draft.

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We’re just about a month away from ED, EA, and REA deadlines! I’ll re-bump this, and am happy to answer questions here or in the #academics channel on the discord :slight_smile:

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Here’s my yearly bump to this thread. Rising seniors, now is a great time to start crafting your college list and writing your personal statement!

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