<p>Hello everyone! The following article if you want to call it that summarizes my current views of college preparation and college applications/essays. I am in the process of making many articles of my thoughts and ideas for fun and hopefully I can get some people to read a couple articles and tell me how I could improve my ideas. So please be very critical of the following article and make comments (try to be constructive, but if you flat out hate it that's fine too) and suggestions. It's sort of long, so don't feel obligated to read all of it to write a reply. Thank you.</p>
<p>This article is about anything related to college. I am interested in this subject because I found that many successful and influential people graduated from great colleges. Some amazingly influential people were dropouts, but they were most likely bored with school and I dont believe I will ever be bored with the education I will be receiving. Most of the ideas represented in this article come from MITs blog (mostly since its laid out very well and I hate reading things off a horribly designed website) and my thoughts.
Before I get into applying to college, Im going to go over preparation for college. I believe that your preparation for college should almost be nonexistent. Before you think, Wow. Screw this dude, let me explain. I believe you should do what you love doing. Find your passion and then follow it until the bitter end. This document is a product from the search for my passion. I love analyzing and thinking about things, and this is my analysis and thoughts of everything. But back to college, take extra classes that you will enjoy attending. Participate in clubs and activities you find interesting. Immerse yourself in your passion. This should be your primary goal in preparing for college. Standardized testing and grades however, I feel are a little bit different. For anything that the college requires (for instance the examples in the previous statement), granted this is a college you really want to go to, make sure you do your best on those requisites. In terms of grades, although you should take classes you truly like, also try to challenge yourself. Take higher level classes to challenge yourself mentally and improve your GPA (weighted GPA that is). This will be beneficial for you and the appeal of your college application. For standardized tests, study until you know the material. That means dont do one practice test and forget about it. Learn from your mistakes, so you dont miss those same types of questions again. The reason I believe you should work hard on these parts of your application even if you, like most people, dont like testing is because these parts of the application show college your work ethic. It shows how you are willing to work to accomplish your goals, which hopefully you do naturally, and so part of who you are. To sum up, do what you enjoy doing in high school and do it to the fullest extent (hopefully one of the things you like to do is learn), and do well in school and on standardized tests.
Applying to college is very important. Before I delve into my thoughts on applying to colleges, I shall try to define the purpose of this process. I believe the purpose of this process is to determine if a candidate (student) will be able to handle the workload of the school, contribute to the school, and most importantly thrive while attending the school. Pretty much will the student be a good fit for the school.
I believe your application or essay response to the school should be a brief autobiography of your achievements, interests, and most importantly you in general. The application officer should be able to grasp the reasons you do what you do. It should go into detail of why you like participating in whatever extracurricular activities you do. Try not to sound arrogant in displaying your accomplishments. Do not go into, My teacher said this was the best project by any student shed ever taught, instead go into My project was incredibly fun and educational because
You can say it won 1st place regionally, but describe the process (make sure to include your errors as well as your successes) more than the end result. As a very intrinsic person, I would include many of my thoughts and internal achievements (maybe quotes or other philosophic ideas I've had). Include anything that shows the officer who you are. If you spend hours watching YouTube every day, analyze why you do this and what determines what you watch. If you dont get in to the college you want, its fine to be disappointed, but make sure to respect the professionals decision. Maybe the college wouldn't have been a good fit or maybe the workload and courses would be too difficult and work intensive. In any case though, Id much rather not get into a college that I want to go to because they didn't like who I truly was, then getting into that college for things I did that I thought admission officers would like, or in essence getting in to that college for not being myself. In summary, make the application more personal than a list of your achievements. Make it become a brief explanation of who you are (thoughts and interests included).</p>