Category Archives: short answer essay

Five Effective Techniques to Optimize College Visits

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Do you plan to tour a few colleges and universities? Your college essays will flow freely and authentically if you do these five things:

1. Invest thirty minutes to soak it in, then take some notes.
Pick a few vantage points to sit and simply soak in the activity at the school. Pick an outdoor location, an academic setting, and a social setting. Close your eyes for a moment and take a few deep breaths. Then soak in the scene. After about five minutes close your eyes again and take a few more breaths. Then take no more than five minutes to jot some notes: What did you see? How did it make you feel? Could you imagine yourself in this place, participating in the campus life that you observed?

2. Try to meet with some undergrads.
If you have an idea of a major you would like to undertake, try to speak with students majoring in that department.  Visit the department. Write or dictate a quick memo on what it might feel like to take the major. What would you be doing and with whom? Why does that excite you?

3. Take in the campus life.
Visit the student activity center and dining halls. Investigate some clubs and groups you can imagine joining. Make a note to check out their social media. Snap some photos of notices, pin boards and hangouts.

4. Get off campus.
If you have a particular activity that you do, such as running, visiting art galleries, browsing used book, or exploring the Indie music scene, try to do those things during your visit. Take notes and pictures.

5. At every turn, use whatever it takes to help you to solidify your memories.
Take notes (voice dictation counts), snap photos, grab brochures. Don’t just buy T-shirts and sweatshirts! Most importantly, develop a scrapbook (concrete or digital) of your imagined future at each of the schools you visit.

These techniques will help jog your memory and conjure specific feelings about each school. They will help you you craft compelling admission essays.

Happy visiting!

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Honor the supplements!

Sometimes students place great emphasis on their main essay at the expense of the short-answer essays.  Yet, these shorter essays provide colleges the opportunity to see the specific reasons for why you chose them among all of the other schools.  You can use these essays to really prove to a college that you have done your homework and you know their school.

 

I strongly suggest that you before you fill out the short-answer questions, you should do your homework about the school. Check out their website and get to really know the campus, their academic programs, their extracurricular activities, the arts, cultural and athletic scenes in and around the campus and some details about the community of which the school is a part.  Which teams are longstanding rivals to the school?  In which coffee houses do students hang out?  Which initiatives has the school promoted? What kind of relationship does the school have with its surrounding community? What are alumni up to? What’s the hardest/most interesting course in the major that you think you’ll be taking? What’s the name of the school newspaper/literary journal, etc.

If you know these details, you can incorporate them into an honest essay that shows the things that draw you into the life of the college.

 

Happy writing!

-Dr. Kirschner