Academics: Continue to take the most challenging classes you can do well in (AP, IB or honors classes if possible). Many selective colleges prefer to see a strong “B” or “B+” in an honors class as opposed to an “A” in an easier course. Your grades from all four years count for college admission, but your grades as an upperclassman may be given more consideration – you certainly don’t want your grades to get worse as you go along. Don’t let visiting schools or taking standardized tests become more important than your school work.

High School Counselor: Your guidance counselor will write letters of recommendation when you apply to college, so make sure that he or she knows you as well as possible. Stay in close contact and meet at least twice during this important year. Remember, there are many other students assigned to your counselor – it’s your responsibility to stay on the radar. Take the initiative for making appointments and scheduling meetings.

Extracurricular Activities: Continue with your sports, club and community service activities. Staying with the same activities, especially if you achieve a leadership position, has more value to colleges than participating in many different clubs or activities. Work to achieve state, regional and national recognition in the area that is your passion, and seek a leadership role for your senior year.

Scholastic Tests: Take an SAT or ACT course, or study on your own. You may also want to consider private tutoring – it’s more expensive but it’s tailored to your needs, so you’re not wasting time and money focusing on topics other students need help with. Take these tests in the spring. If you’re applying to schools ranked as “Most Selective” or higher, register to take two or three SAT II subject tests in June.

Visiting Colleges: Attend college fairs in your area, and plan to visit several schools during your winter and spring breaks. If you want to interview at a top-choice school, consider scheduling a visit for the spring – during the winter, admissions offices are focused on applications from high school seniors.

Applying to College: Keep a file of every major test and paper where you received a high grade or positive comments. Later on, when you’re asking teachers for recommendations, you can use these grades and comments to remind them of your work in their classes. In the spring you should make a preliminary list of colleges that interest you. Fill out a college application as a practice exercise.
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Junior year has a not entirely undeserved bad reputation – heavy course work, intense college application pressures and learning to drive generally converge at roughly the same time during this challenging year. It won’t be easy, but try to build time into your schedule for relaxation, exercise and friends. And try to keep your sense of humor and perspective: luckily you won’t be a high school junior forever!

Even if they are good students with rich, multi-faceted lives, college applicants often look at the blank page and have no idea what they should write. No amount of parental nagging will help these students get started – what they need is a plan!

We have broken essay writing down to five basic stages; tackling these steps one at a time will give you an easy-to-follow framework for handling your essay.

Step 1: Find the Right Topic
Brainstorm with a friend, family member or teacher to come up with the right topic. Try free association: write down people, movies and books that come to mind and see if they trigger a topic idea. Write down memorable events in your life. Consider writing about ways in which you’ve helped others or overcome adversity – but don’t try to portray yourself as overly noble.

Stage 2: Write the First Draft
Before you have a chance to obsess, just get going – write a few paragraphs and see where that leads you. Once you’ve gotten something down on paper, try to map out the path of the essay. Start with an opening sentence and paragraph that will grab the reader’s attention – a quotation or song verse can be a good starting point.

The main body of the essay should contain several paragraphs, each with a topic sentence you will go on to explain and illustrate. When you write the conclusion, make sure to refer back to the introduction in some way – this will bring the essay full circle.

Stage 3: Revise the First Draft
After finishing the first draft, wait at least a day before looking at it again – this will give you a fresh perspective. Then take a close look at what you’ve written to make sure you’ve answered the question and supported your main point with personal and concrete examples. Make sure you haven’t wandered too far from your topic. Check to see that the essay sounds personal and that your thoughts seem to flow smoothly throughout.

Stage 4: The Final Edit
This is your chance to fine tune your revised draft with some smart editing. Now is the time to take out extraneous words and phrases you might have overused. Make sure your point is clear. Remove any cliches and ty to vary the length of your sentences. Read the essay out loud and see how it sounds.

Stage 5: Proofread
Last chance: check for typos, correct use of capitalization and proper punctuation. Use spellcheck but don’t rely on it too much – it won’t catch every problem. Make sure there is subject/verb agreement and that your use of the past and present tense is consistent. It’s a good idea to have someone whose writing ability you trust proofread too.

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These five steps will put you on the right path for a successful essay. Using them as a guideline will keep you focused and organized, and prevent the essay writing process from becoming overwhelming.

Guided by the most loving of intentions, parents can be the personal essay’s worst enemy. Even more than their children, parents often get caught up in the competitve frenzy of college admissions, and the essay tends to be a common target of parental over-involvement. Despite the fact that guidance counselors, guide books and admissions officers all advise keeping the essay clear of “hard sell” descriptions of academic or other achievments, parents often insist on trying to cram this information in. The results are rarely subtle and often interfere with the theme and flow of an otherwise good essay.

Another trap parents fall into is simply over-helping with an essay – trying to change their child’s topic or rewrite the piece altogether. I can totally identify with this impulse – as an adult it’s tempting to think you can do a better job and it’s natural to want your child to make the best possible impression. But taking over the essay – besides being completely unethical – deprives your child of his or her rightful place at the helm of this process. And it robs the essay of the genuine and personal “voice” it’s supposed to have.

As I have heard from more than one admissions officer, it really isn’t hard to spot an essay that’s has been written by a forty-five year old tax attorney. So help your child with brainstorming and proofreading – then step away from the essay!

A good essay should be long enough – just long enough – to answer the question that’s been asked in a clear, personal and compelling way. Padding the essay to increase the word count will make you seem long-winded but not any smarter. Admissions officers recognize fluff when they see it; and since they have dozens (if not hundreds) of essays to plow through, they will not appreciate having to read an essay that is longer than it needs to be.

Until recently there was 500 word maximum for the Common App essay. It’s acceptable to write more than that now, but you may still want to stay in the 500-600 word ballpark.

To some extent you can be guided by the minimum word requirement of 250 words: twice the minimum – or a little more than that – is a reasonable length for an essay. Five times that amount seems like overkill.

The real guideline should be how well the essay reads. Is it repetitive? Are there unnecessary words and phrases? These are signs that you need to do more editing.

Be careful not to go off on a tangent. One student I worked with wrote an essay about his favorite book; two entire paragraphs were devoted to his lengthy (and not very interesting) search of area bookstores for the hard-to-find novel. This kind of detail is a waste of space: stay focused on the central theme of your essay.

The good news is that if you write about yourself honestly – even if you are not a saint or a scholar – you will probably come across as likeable and sincere. Which means the challenge of an essay is self-discovery – finding traits that are genuine and relatable and putting them down on paper. This is no easy task but there are ways to do it.

One technique is to create a list of adjectives that best describe you; make another list of the activities you most enjoy, Be brutally honest – if you’re cautious by nature, don’t claim to be a thrill-seeker. If your passion is karaoke, don’t pretend it’s practicing the violin. Remember, the essay is the place to reveal yourself, not sell yourself. It may help to ask friends and family to describe your character and attributes. As you write and edit your essay, check it repeatedly to make sure it is reflecting an honest picture of you.

Students often dread writing their college essays, but looking inward will definitely get results – and not just in an effective essay, but in a surprising reward of self-discovery. All in all, a nice payoff to a stressful enterprise!

Put simply, brainstorming is the process of coming up with ideas to write about. There are a number of ways to accomplish this but remember: no matter what the topic is, a good essay is always about you. So brainstorming should help you think of different ways to identify the experiences and character qualities you want to communicate in your essay.

You can accomplish this by talking to a friend or family member about the characteristics he or she sees in you, or by making a list of the qualities that most clearly define you as an individual. Think about the people who have had the strongest impact on your life and the events that have shaped your character. If you’re stuck, try free-associating and just write down the people, events and movies that come to mind – one of them may spark an essay idea.

It may be helpful to get advice from a parent or teacher but remember: when the topic is you, you’re the expert. So choose a topic that you like!

Warm-Up Writing Exercises
A. If Steven Spielberg came to you and wanted to make a movie of your life, what would be five to ten events or things that would have to be included? It may be helpful to think of your life in a timeline, from earliest to latest events.
B. Your friends want to make a video about your teenage years. What scenes should be included? Don’t limit yourself to school accomplishments or ignore those for which you have not gained formal recognition. Sometimes the most interesting essays are based on events that seem insignificant, but which have great importance in your life.

C. The New York Times has asked you to list three to five things about which you could speak or write in some depth. What are they?

D. List five people (real, fictional, dead, or alive) whom you respect and admire.

E. What movie or book most deeply affected you?

F. Who is your favorite musical artist?

G. Four of your favorite and four of your least favorite places, objects, virtues, etc.

H. List two of your most miserable failures and two of your greatest successes in life.

The essay portion of the college application is an opportunity to introduce yourself to the admissions committee. It’s your chance to let them hear your voice and get to know you better as a person. But it’s not enough for them to get to know you – it’s also important for them to like you.

When the admissions committee is considering your application, they are thinking about more than how well you’ll do in college level classes – they are also deciding if they want you to live on their campus and be part of their community. They are evaluating whether or not you will fit in with other students.

Students sometimes forget the importance of being likeable in an essay. The pressure to present themselves in a good light and highlight their achievements sometimes leads to an essay that sounds boastful and exagerated. Try to resist the temptation to write about yourself as if you are a cross between Stephen Hawking and Neil Armstrong. Instead of just trumpeting your achievements, focus on presenting yourself in an honest and human light. If you pat yourself on the back, pat gently! When you’re finished, read your final draft over with a critical eye: do you like the person who wrote that essay? If you don’t, the admissions committee certainly won’t.

But supplemental essays should be taken seriously, since they are a terrific opportunity to round out the picture of yourself you present to a school. The questions posed may ask you to explain your interest in a particular college, or to describe the extracurricular activities you’ve enjoyed in the past. Take advantage of this chance to introduce a completely different aspect of yourself to the admissions committee. For example, if your Personal Statement describes your work with Habitat for Humanity, the secondary essay should steer clear of volunteer work and focus instead on your acappella singing group or your involvement with Model U.N. Use the supplemental essay to highlight a different facet of your character or experience.

It may be helpful to check out a particular school’s supplemental essays before writing your Personal Statement (especially if the school is one of your top picks.) Since there isn’t always a choice in supplemental essays, you may want to rethink your Common App essay to avoid being redundant.

These questions are also useful to show that you are a good match with a particular school, so do your homework and make sure that your essay reflects a strong knowledge of the school, its culture and course offerings. It’s important to treat the supplemental questions as a significant part of your overall application – these essays are not secondary and they shouldn’t be second-class.