Helping Hispanic Students Achieve College

Helping Hispanic Students Achieve College One of the realities that confronts many high school seniors during the college application process is the data-centric nature of college admissions. Jessica is a former admissions professional who now shares her insider knowledge to help students and their families as they move through the college admissions process. The problem with these words is colloquiality and vagueness, inappropriate for academic language. We know what a great essay looks like, and we know all the clichéd tales to avoid. Your child has come a long way, and is about to embark on an exciting and transformative college experience. If he or she would benefit from a little extra help here in the home stretch, please don't hesitate to reach out. Our college essay coaching is a fantastic value, and can help give your child's application an edge with admissions officers. Colleges would be irresponsible to offer you a place in their program if you do not have the basic skills needed to succeed. Still not convinced that your essays are important? Let’s look deeper into the four main reasons that colleges require essays as part of the application process to see why they’re worth your time and attention. You might be used to turning in your writing assignments on a page-limit basis. While some colleges provide page limits for their college essays, most use a word limit instead. Most of the time I see that parents get into an essay and take away the student voice…they make it too polished for a high school student. Colleges get suspicious when they receive an essay that sounds like a PhD wrote it. I have seen too many essays where parents “helped” and as result, the essay lost the student’s voice. Too many words had been added that just did not reflect the student’s vocabulary or mode of writing. College admissions readers are bright and intuitive and can tell when an essay has been “helped” too much. I see no problem with parents doing a grammar/spelling check as well as offering suggestions on how an essay could be improved. At any point in time during your college education, you’ll probably have one or more papers to write for your classes. It’s okay to use them in everyday talk; but when in essays, they sound too elementary and make admission officers think of your poor vocabulary. Do your best to master paraphrasing and synonymization for writing more sophisticated words in academic papers. It’s difficult, time- and energy consuming, and challenging to complete them. A thesis, arguments, references, and conclusion are fundamental to every essay. But what makes yours stellar is words you use to convince readers. It is certainly okay for parents to help edit their child’s essay â€" with the key word in that sentence being EDIT. They can help catch spelling or punctuation mistakes or help a student better clarify an idea that isn’t fully fleshed out in the early draft. It is NOT okay for parents to WRITE their child’s essay or influence it unduly, however. He or she isn’t a full-fledged literary genius and the admission officers who read the essays are well aware of this. They are okay with thoughts and phrasing that sounds like it’s come from a teenager; they understand that not all of the ideas will be fully formed. This makes sure there's a standard length for all the essays that a college receives, regardless of formatting or font. The role of the essay varies greatly from school to school. But the main idea behind any essay is that it should reveal something of the writer’s (in this case, the student’s) character and parents can easily hinder that process if they edit too much. If possible, mom and dad should stay out of the essay writing business. However, some parents are able to understand that over-editing essays is not a good thing. Everything should be spelled correctly, with correct grammar and punctuation, but the essay should sound like a high school student wrote it. Words are your powerful weapon to prove critical thinking and knowledge of the topic. Words help you stand out in a crowd of other students writing about the same topics. Most students worry about bragging in their essay, but we say go for it! This is your time to shine, so highlight your accomplishments and strengths. Review your essay to make sure that you’re keeping the tone informative and that you’re still on topic. (Brag while answering the essay prompt; don’t just mention random, unrelated but impressive facts about yourself!)You can use this brag sheet where you can brainstorm your accomplishments.