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Most colleges will have a question about anything you feel you need to share that is not reflected elsewhere in the application, and they usually specify “extenuating circumstances.” Two examples— From Texas A&M: If there are additional personal challenges, hardships, or opportunities (including COVID related experiences) that have shaped or impacted your abilities or academic credentials, which you have not already written about, please note them in the space below. University of Texas: Tell us your story. What unique opportunities or challenges have you experienced throughout your high school career that have shaped who you are today? Ok, so here’s the deal—this is a space for you to contextualize your transcript (a bad semester) or a life-changing experience that may or may not have had an impact on your academic experience. You can’t explain away your lone low grade with Mr. Schulenborg who you had for AP Chem who was a notoriously hard grader. But what about if you lost your mom to breast cancer in your sophomore year and your grades reflect the impact of this loss? They want to know that. Life happens. If I can look at your transcript and see a nose dive in a given semester or a couple of bad years and there is a legitimate reason for that bad trend, help me understand it. I taught a young woman once who was losing her mother. She took on a job outside of school and took over raising her younger siblings while her mother was hospitalized for a life-ending disease that took her life. This student had a low GPA but still had a burning desire to go to a college in our state. She wrote an honest answer to this question explaining her circumstances. She called one of our counselors and told her that they would have rejected her if she had not explained her life circumstances. Instead, they gave her a significant scholarship due to her grit in a time of hardship. Don’t be afraid to provide sensitive background information that will help those reviewing your file understand your transcript. They are human beings; they want to know. But they are not mind readers. Get them up to speed. Don’t write a “sob story” as my students would say. You can share extenuating circumstances in a matter of fact manner that will help them realize that a low GPA is actually quite impressive given the burden that you experienced at a particular time in your high school years.

Learn more about me and my background in helping rising seniors get into their dream schools. So, here is your bottom line: Why hire me? Three reasons: my experience—over three decades serving my seniors my passion for the process my drive to continuously update myself on the latest trends in the college application process Here is the scoop on my experience. I have been doing this for over thirty years; I have a deep well of experience in this field. I was a high school English teacher for thirty-three years, and I have taught in diverse settings—in a boarding school in England, in a large suburban high school, and in a small independent school. Right out of the gate, I got the green light from my department chair in a large suburban high school in Indiana to go all out in fleshing out a college unit. My seniors wrote resumes, worked on their common app essays, and did mock college interviews with me before and after school and during my free periods. I am proud to say my college unit became a rite of passage. I have helped kids brainstorm, assisted them in extensive revision, and have rejoiced with them as they have been accepted to their top schools. I have edited thousands of resumes and common app essays, and I don’t even want to guess how many supplemental essays and scholarship essays I have helped students write. I even made Parents Day a day when parents interviewed their children speed dating style in my classroom. Parents leaned in to grill our students. My students walked into parents day trembling but determined to impress their parents. Second, this is my passion. It has been since the early 1990’s. Advising students applying to college, graduate school, law school, pharmacy school, and med school lights me up. As my friends from high school and college approached their children’s senior year, I eagerly volunteered to help their children with their college apps. I did it for free for many years. I told my seniors that my college unit was my gift to them. I went way above what was expected of me for no extra compensation. This is my calling. It feeds my sense of purpose and is my way of serving especially after taking early retirement at the age of 55 in 2021. I stay current by talking to people in admissions, watching documentaries about the process, listening to podcasts, and reading books about the process. I am a little obsessed with it. I think it’s fascinating to track the trends. If a parent who interviewed people in corporate America volunteered to conduct a masterclass on interviewing skills, I jumped on it: Last, I pride myself on staying current on trends in the field. And over thirty years, you better believe there have been trends. And the onus is on me to stay current for your children. When I first started, colleges preferred kids with a long list of activities across multiple fields of interest. That changed. In time, they wanted kids to whittle that list down after a period of exploration to do a deep dive into an activity that sets them on fire by their senior year. I vividly remember the year a bunch of our highly-qualified kids didn’t get into their “reach” schools after applying Regular Decision. I can still see Matt Lauer and Katie Couric on The Today Show noting the shock of crushed seniors and their parents that year shortly after April 1st. I recorded the segment. I watched it over and over again as my students started texting me one after another crushed that they didn’t get into their “reach” schools. I got online and found as many articles as I could documenting the shift. And I played The Today Show segment for my glum seniors the day after their spring break to drive home to them that this was a nationwide event and not just due to their own personal failure of not being “enough” for their dream schools. From that moment on, the percentage of my kids who applied Early Decision or Early Action blew up. In the past, the handful of kids I had who applied Early Decision were legacies. Or they had a deep connection with a college spanning their entire lives. No more. Now, only a handful of my clients apply AFTER November 1st. In 2023, I met with a former student involved in reviewing applicants to his Ivy League law school. We met for three hours over two Zoom meetings, and he took great pains in educating me about what they hope to see in personal statements for their law school applications. He drove home how functional the personal statement should be. I took copious notes and grilled him. It was just in time to advise one of my former students who is getting ready to apply to law school this school year. I took early retirement and moved to Tucson for a couple of years, but I still feel that charge of anticipation as the new school year starts. It is a humbling thing for kids to entrust me with guiding them through this process. I no longer have a set of eighty Frankenstein essays to grade before I can help my new crop of seniors. This is it. In these early years of retirement, I lived my best life in Tucson and took advantage of all that was available to me: Lady Putters, pickleball, and my book club occupied my time. Being the College Application Whisperer means more to me now than it did when I was a full-time English teacher doing it as a side gig outside of my school day. I plan to continue to do this indefinitely. It feeds my sense of purpose. After my adventure in Tucson, I moved back to Indiana in November 2023 to be closer to my family, my friends, and my former students. I continue to go to Salt Lake City every June to score the AP Literature and Composition Exams, and I have been doing some substitute teaching in Indianapolis. I have squeezed in some dog sitting, too. I volunteer my time with Indiana University's School of Education and have just been asked by the dean to join her advisory board. As you will see in one of my blogs in the life unit, I speak to the Global Gateway undergraduate students who student teach overseas as I did at the start of my career. If students in the greater Indianapolis area would prefer to meet in person, I would love to do so. Final thoughts: Why hire me? Because I know my stuff, and I will set those intermediate deadlines and give you tips I have picked up from other students (boy, are they bringing on the mother of all spreadsheets this year!). I will nudge you when you need a push. I will review your essays with care and give you genuine feedback in a timely manner. And I will keep it real. If your essay doesn't sing, I will tell you that. You would rather hear it from me than be rejected. I am humbled by the thank you cards I have received from my students over more than three decades of doing this work; I have a file folder of those notes going back to the early 1990's. My former students are starting to hire me to help their sons and daughters navigate this application process. Please review testimonials from former clients who deeply appreciated my guidance.

A quick note to my Early Launchers who don’t want to wait until the first semester of your senior year: There is nothing stopping you from practicing the personal narrative essay now. You are used to writing literary analysis essays and research papers—many of you thrive when writing academic papers. You simply aren’t used to this genre of writing. Most American high schools focus on academic writing. Period. If you love to journal, and if you are highly introspective and love tearing yourself apart in the privacy of that journal, the common app essay is going to be easier for you. You have been analyzing who you are and how you have grown for years; the difference is that you were only writing for an audience of one. You. Now you are writing for others. That can be scary for a lot of my seniors. If you lock up, that is to be expected. My Top Five Tips on the College Essay: 1️⃣Nail the first sentence. 2️⃣Share stories. Stories stick. 3️⃣Demonstrate introspection and growth. 4️⃣Be you. Don’t write to impress. Write to show them what you geek out on. Be authentic. 5️⃣Answer the prompt. #1: Nail the first sentence. So many students throw this away with a quotation or a lifeless sentence that sets the context. No! What you don’t fully appreciate is that these admissions readers read hundreds of these essays every year, and the essays start blurring together. The readers get bored—and frustrated with some of the more mediocre essays. An initial strong first sentence and/or opening scene or strong image grabs their attention. We get excited when you start strong; we forget to evaluate and get excited about that gem in a pile of essays that can be forgettable. Engage me. Pique my interest. Move me. An opening sentence that simply introduces the topic or setting for your essay is boring and ineffective. Examples of weak first sentences: Football is my life. Every American should be volunteering their time to better their community. I led students in building our set for our fall production. Have you ever turned in an English paper that was good, but it just wasn’t great? My dad signed me up for a math class. Here are examples of more effective first sentences: As Harry and Ginny Potter dropped off their wizard son at platform 9 ¾, they seemed blissfully unaware of the tears landing on my pillowcase. I was occupied with a bear attack underway at Mission Control. Last year, I found out that my ancestral home is now a Subway. I am a child of the internet—the online world has raised me. Deep in the top left corner of my closest, high up on a shelf, lies a graveyard. Usually dance makes me happy-cry, not angry-cry. One of my earliest memories was when I was six years old, standing in an oversized t-shirt and barefoot, watching my mom stir-fry noodles. As I stand in the dimly lit aisle, my breath visible in the air, I put my hand on the familiar cold latch and slide the heavy wooden door open. The only question left now is where to hide the body. For several weeks, I lived above a faucet shop with a pilot, a punk, a hippie, and a traditional Galician dancer. #2: Share stories. Stories stick. I need to SEE you like I am watching a movie trailer of your life in the context of the topic you are fleshing out. Strike the right balance between telling and showing. Don’t overdo the showing, but the essays that stick are the ones that help me SEE YOU long after I have closed your folder. Check out the following paragraph written by a former student. Her entire essay can be found in the book 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays: My famille des femmes fantastiques (as I came to know them) taught me a great deal. First, I learned that family---whether it be of actual relatives or friends---is irreplaceable. Together we learned that the perfect conclusion to a low-fat dinner was chocolate mousse. They also taught me that, contrary to popular belief, routine makes life more interesting. Every Friday we ate galettes and crepes; every Saturday we would trek to the town market and buy fresh vegetables, fruit, flowers, and meat. I loved everything about the market, save for the inevitable chopping-off of chicken heads. Nicole encouraged me to create my own routine. So, I did. Every Saturday afternoon, I rode the city bus into town---and often chuckled at what I heard on the radio. It was an amusing surprise to hear middle-aged women singing along to R. Kelly or Eminem. After getting off the bus, I walked around by myself for a few hours, taking in the sights and smells of city life. After a solitary cup of coffee, I would wander into the bookstore and pick out a few books. Instead of judging books by their covers, I judged them by their titles. . .which ones sounded the best as they rolled off the tongue. HuisClos, L'Etranger, and Paroles have such pleasant-sounding titles; I wouldn't even have had to read them to enjoy them. Then on Sunday after an informal lunch with family and friends, I chose one of my new books and sat out under the heat-wave sun and read until I had finished the whole thing (67). In this body paragraph, I have highlighted the moments of showing in yellow and the moments of telling in orange. See how she goes back and forth between showing and telling? Also, she taps into one of the senses—feeling—in helping the reader imagine the heat-wave sun beating down on HIS shoulders as he reads her essay. #3: Demonstrate introspection and growth. Show me that you are self aware and that you have learned something about yourself. It’s satisfying for the reader to see resolution by the end of your essay. You don’t want me to finish reading your essay scratching my head and thinking, “So what? What was the point of that essay?” Here is the final paragraph of that published essay about the young woman who studied in France published in the book 50 Successful Harvard Application Essays: On a whim, Nolwenn and I decided to sit in during one of Nicole's flying lessons. I didn't even think twice about getting in the back. We put on headsets and I grabbed Nolwenn's hand for dear life until I saw the French countryside below me. It was at that moment that I recognized how far I had come. I had no problem going out myself. I had no shame about asking for direction or clarification. I went, alone, to a rally for the liberation of Jose Bove, the man in jail for bulldozing various McDonalds in France. I even got into a tiny airplane despite my horrible fear of flying. I had become comfortable with myself and had learned to trust my decisions, my intuition. More importantly, I had learned to trust a group of complete strangers who became like my overseas family (68). Notice that the portions highlighted in yellow clearly demonstrate introspection and growth. Indeed, here is what the Harvard admissions people had to say about this student’s essay: Another major strength of the essay is its structure: the writer lays out a clear trajectory to show how she has grown and the lessons she has learned. She begins with her arrival in St. Brieuc as an unhappy, scared student, and ends with a few anecdotes of moments when she showed her newfound confidence and independence (68-69). #4: Be you. Don’t write to impress. Write to show them what you geek out on. Be authentic. I have lost track of the hundreds of former students who turned in a first draft on a topic they thought they HAD to write about because it would impress me. Your performance at Boys State. Your position as class president. If you aren’t passionate about Boys State or leading your school, it’s a big yawn. Write about your passion—fostering stray animals, deconstructing subliminal messages in Super Bowl commercials, how Harry Potter taught you to be a man. You can’t fake passion. I think some students are so determined to impress their reader that they feel duty-bound to write about their most impressive accomplishment on paper that may or may not be something that is their passion. Students are always surprised when I enthusiastically agree that writing an essay about a house full of foster animals their family lovingly nurtures and finds homes for IS an appropriate topic–if that is your passion. A big if. I tell my students that it’s not so much the “what” as it is the “how.” If you breathe life into your topic, and the enthusiasm jumps off the page, that is your topic. When I was a speech teacher, some of the quirkiest topics were the most memorable. I had a young woman who gave a speech on the history of the American lunch. In the 90’s. And I can STILL see her dragging a massive trash bag into my classroom with those lunchboxes rubbing up against one another causing quite the jarring sound. That was in the 90’s! And I still remember it. That’s crazy. I taught speech for twenty years; I heard thousands of speeches. But that speech stuck. Why? She was SOOOOO excited to share her passion about lunch boxes with the class. ⚠️ IMPORTANT: Remember that tone matters, too. One of my top students wrote a first draft about exhausting the math curriculum of our high school by the second semester of his freshman year. It came off as arrogant and dismissive of the opportunities in his high school; I knew that this arrogant tone did not jive with his reputation in our school of being a young man of great humility. I encouraged him to either reframe it so that he might come across as less arrogant or write about a different topic altogether. I said to him, “If I didn’t know this guy, is he really someone another student would want to room with after reading this essay? He sounds like he is full of himself.” He was pretty angry at me for about a week, but in time, when he cooled off, he thanked me for understanding that his tone was not going to help him. He wrote a completely different essay and was accepted to his first-choice school. #5: Answer the prompt. Scope matters. If they ask when your passion for science occurred, don’t give me the kitchen sink answer of your life experience with science. Lock in on the moment you felt a spark or had an aha moment with science. If there are three subtopics, address all three. It’s shocking how many of my students either blow scope or blow off one of the subtopics listed. Major red flag. Look, we are all going a hundred miles an hour these days. We feel the need to be doing six things at once. We want to cross off at least ten items on our to-do list. And even on something as critical as a college essay topic, in their need to be done, kids skim. Adults do it, too. So slow down. When I taught AP Literature and Composition, I told my kids that “AP” does not stand for “advanced placement”—it stands for “address the prompt.” They got the point. Now that colleges have word limits, my students tend to restrain themselves from writing an essay that is too broad in scope. However, I still have students who fail to address the final subtopic of a prompt with three subtopics. Answer the prompt. Final thoughts: When the admissions counselors have finished reading your essay, they should have a much better sense of who you are as a human being. The majority of your focus in putting together the best possible college application starts with the common application essay. It's the first essay my clients and I work on together. When I work with students I have taught, I want that common application to be so powerful that I know them on an entirely new level than I did before we started working on that essay together. If you are anxious about the 650 word count limit, just write until you are finished. Write 1,000 words. You can trim it down to 650 later. Just write. I call it "verbal vomit" when I have kids draft an essay. Forget about paragraphing, spelling, word choice. Just get your ideas down on the page. You can clean it up later. You've got this!

A number of schools ask you to write about your intended course of study at their university and why you are interested in that university in particular. This is when I tell my students that the college application process is like dating. Students obsess about whether or not a university wants them. But guess what? The universities want to be wanted, too. One of the universities in my home state had a prestigious all-expenses paid scholarship including a year abroad for the top 20 or so incoming freshmen. They noticed a troubling pattern at the large suburban high school where I taught—our seniors were using this prestigious honor as their back up plan if they didn’t get into a more elite university. And they didn’t like it. Not one bit. They pulled aside one of our counselors and told them that they wanted her to convey the message to my students to stop doing this. They were insulted. So, that leads to the “why (fill in the name of your school)?” First, you need to know that this essay needs to be highly functional. Less showing and more telling than I tend to see in the common application essay. You need to get very specific on why THIS SCHOOL is a fit for you. A BAD answer is saying that you love Boston if it is a school in Boston or to burn too many words of your essay for a school in Manhattan writing about how much you love Manhattan. That’s fine, but why this particular school in Boston or Manhattan? 🗝️ Do your homework! One of my current seniors knows she wants to go into neonatal nursing. I encouraged her to research the courses and extracurricular clubs associated with her major. She found out they have a Maternal and Child Health Club; she noted her intention to join the club as soon as she arrives on campus in the fall in her paragraph about why she has decided to be a nursing major. 🗝️ Go to the page of your major and see if there is a prominent professor during groundbreaking research in your field who you might hope to work for as an undergraduate. ⚠️ Be careful! Don’t unintentionally dork out on some visiting professor who no one knows in the department. Spend some time on that website! Maybe you are genuinely interested in exploring giving back to the broader community of that university. Applying to Notre Dame? Look into the Big Brothers/Big Sisters in the greater South Bend area and talk about your interest in joining that organization. Interested in being a leader on campus? Explore opportunities to lead. One of my former students realized most of his peers went for student government and overlooked the student board that plans entertainment on campus. By his sophomore year, he ran for the position of inviting speakers to the university and landed Trevor Noah for the first time in the university’s history. Very smart. He identified a vacuum in leadership, and he filled it. So, if that young man found the Union Board as a prospective student and spoke to his desire to become a member of that board, that can only enhance his prospects. It’s a smart move. Let me be clear. For over thirty years, I have heard a common refrain across all campuses across the country. The admissions people are attempting to answer a burning question after they determine you can handle the rigor of their curriculum: How will you make a lasting contribution to their campus? Will you lead? Will you throw yourself into research? Be a lab rat for a prominent professor in your field? Will you lead within your major–joining a business fraternity, for example? Major tip: show me you in action on that campus making a difference. Here's an example. A former student of mine was on our cross country team, and he knew that the college that was his reach school had a tradition of running past a statue of a founder and rubbing the statue's toe as they logged in their miles. After he demonstrated that he knew that college by alluding to research he had done about the school, he talked about leading his fellow runners past that statue and rubbing that statue's toe. That's powerful. He is projecting himself onto that campus. That young man just graduated from college, so the example I am referencing is four years old. Do you know how few essays stick for someone who reads hundreds of these essays every year? The very fact that I remember his essay says it all. Very effective. Final thoughts: So, as you compose your answer to the "why us?" question, I want you to get out a post-it note and write "How will I make a lasting contribution to their campus?" Put it on your mirror in your bathroom. Display a second one prominently where you do the bulk of your homework as well as your work for the college application process. When you are brushing your teeth, running, driving to school, I want this to be your refrain: How will I make a lasting contribution to their campus? This should drive your entire response. After you have shown them that you truly know their school, tell them how you plan to make a difference on that campus.