Top Five Techniques for Getting Into Your First-Choice College

Top Five Techniques for Getting Into Your First-Choice College

1. Customize your approach.
Applying to college is an exercise in self-promotion. When you send in a college application, youre sending a sales pitch to a customer with thousands of competing offers at its fingertips. Its important that every college feel like theyre at the top of your list, so send each one an application that reflects your interest in them specifically. If you take a few extra hours to craft essays and resumes that address each school directly, admissions officers will surely take notice.

2. Know what they want.
If you look at a schools admissions website or thumb through the mailings theyve sent you, youll probably be left with some impression of what their campus community is like. For many schools, this impression is partly an exaggeration-they want you to apply, so their literature highlights the best of what the school has to offer. Try to fit yourself into the idealized picture theyve painted. If you think youd enjoy participating in the clubs and activities they mention, let them know. If they do student profiles, recognize what you have in common with the featured students and be sure to highlight those qualities somewhere in your application. If a school thinks your presence will help move their image forward, theyll bring you in.

3. Control Your Letters of Recommendation.
Few students recognize the amount of influence they have over what goes into their letters of recommendation. Just because youre not writing a letter yourself doesnt mean that you have no control over its content. Your letters of recommendation should both introduce new information and reinforce the impression that youve set forth regarding your character. With this in mind, its perfectly appropriate to let the writer know what youve already told the college and what specifically you hope to see in their letter. In fact, your requests will usually give the writer a solid foundation, making it much easier for them to get started.

4. Use Every Chance You Get to Self-Promote.
Many students look at personal statements, resumes and essays as time-consuming burdens that do little more than consume their senior years. However, these are the pieces of an application that separate you from the masses. Every application has at least one section that you can take in whatever direction you want without it seeming forced. Identify that section, be it a personal statement or even your resume, and leave it for last. When everything else is done, read the whole application through and make a list of what you wish youd included but didnt get a chance to say. Then create that final piece, making sure to include all the points you felt youd missed.

5. Believe Everything You Write.
College applicants have a tendency to exaggerate their accomplishments and experiences in some way or another. If you find yourself glorifying the things youve done over the past four years, it helps to look back and ask yourself just how much of what youve put down is a reasonable representation of what youve actually done. Try to make sure that everything you advertise about yourself is strongly grounded in reality. Your modesty and integrity will show through to the many admissions offers that can detect tall tales from a mile away.

Robert J. Moore is a Junior at Princeton University and the cofounder of YesLetter.com, a website providing practical advice for students involved in the college admissions process. The YesLetter network of students, consultants and contributors spans the Ivy League and many other top-tier universities in the United States.

This article warns of the perils of naming so-called diseases for profit rather than for the benefit of science.
Lets start with a definition of Taxonomy. The science, laws, principles of classification. From the Greek words "taxis" and "nomos," which mean "division" and "law."

I am going to say it right up front. If you are going to name something you ought to be a decent, reasonably responsible person. Why is this so? Simple. The things we name can and do become fact, believed, applied and used for good or evil.

If I classify a tree as hardwood, it really ought to be hard. Sound reasonable? There are a whole bunch of trees that are called hardwoods, which in fact, are not hard.

To tell the truth, I dont really care that much about what botanists call trees. It wont make that much difference in the great scheme of things unless I bang my head into one that I mistakenly thought was soft.

But I do care what people name things that can totally affect the way those named are treated or maltreated. For example if I call someone insane and insanity has been incorrectly defined, what happens to that person thereafter can be singularly cruel and destructive.

Governments do this all the time. They say the country, named Frozzle, is an enemy. You and I have a fair idea of what constitutes an enemy. We might think, well if they are an enemy its okay to go over there and commit all manner of atrocities against its people. Its no good saying, well, I wouldnt do that.

Yes, of course there are countries, more accurately leaders of countries that are enemies. I am just saying, be very careful when you name something, the results may be more than your conscience bargained for if you have a conscience.

Its like that silly tree in the forest sophistry. You know, if a tree falls in the forest and theres no one around to hear it, does it make a sound. I may not have got this correct but I think that is the gist of the concept. By extension, the psychiatrist might say; if we dont have a name for the disease how are people going to know it exists? And more to the point, how can we 'treat' it?

Heres one for you. Attention Deficit Syndrome (ADD). You have little children acting up in classrooms. They have far too much energy for their parents and teachers. Add to this the fact that these same children are gobbling down a steady diet of junk food heavily laced with sugars and assorted chemicals. Teacher says, sit in that chair Johnny and study. Instead Johnny runs around the room having a great time. Whats wrong with Johnny? He wants to play instead of study. What madness' is this? The sugar and junk food has Johnny as wired as a speed-crazed Peterbilt jockey on a long haul from Chicago to LA.

Enter the marketing arm of the psychiatric community. These fellas know you cant treat, cant prescribe for something that doesnt have a name. Combine this with the gullibility of the weary and poorly educated faced with clever marketers and you have happy faces all over the rat-filled laboratories of universities and boardrooms of drug cartels. Your definitions of these 'diseases' must sound threatening and be stubbornly undecipherable except in the jargon of the psychiatric community. And as a marketer you must say over an over, it is a disease, it is a disease, it is a disease. They know with expert precision that they must get the name accepted and associated as a disease. Until they have done this they cannot prescribe Class II addictive drugs such as Ritalin to children. The fact that this causes children to go out and murder people and exhibit an astonishing number of symptoms unmistakable for real disease, is irrelevant to the successful taxonomist/psychiatrist/marketer.

I picked this particular profession as its potential for harm, and the actual harm it has caused by speciously naming non-existent diseases has caused irreparable harm to literally tens of thousands of children and adults.

I think I read somewhere recently that this same bunch of zanies have discovered that puppies have ADD. Having discovered this astonishing and seriously debilitating disease in small animals, they have mobilized the chemical/drug companies to immediately start a crash program to come up with some really serious drugs to alleviate this terrible disorder in your baby Schnauzer. Well done, guys. You have really saved the day.

When botanists and biologists were trying to put some order in their sciences it is unlikely they were doing so in order that they could form lucrative associations with assorted drug cartels. They were just classifying the world they lived in, not finding justifications to butcher it.

Taxonomy is not a bad thing. It is a useful tool of science in the hands of the benign. In the hands of others who have no moral sense of their world and operate under the strange belief system that if it feels good just go ahead and do it, it becomes extraordinarily harmful. And it isnt an accident, or a failed experiment. This is when Taxonomy exceeds good sense.

About the Author

Mr. Ladew has traveled and worked all over the world. He spent many years as an aerospace engineer. He works as a technical writer and trainer. Mr. Ladew is also a novelist (2 books published), writes articles, essays, short stories and Haiku. he has also written a best selling business book for mid-level supervisors.