Category: College Admissions

The first of these newsletters, in a sense, took two and a half years to create. A savvy friend had suggested that my clients would enjoy and benefit from my stories of 34 years of teaching and working with special needs kids. “Just write up one story,” he intoned. “Your

When Churchill said, “Never give in–never, never, never, never, in nothing great or small, large or petty, never give in except to convictions of honour and good sense. Never yield to force; never yield to the apparently overwhelming might of the enemy” the alternative was that there was–well–actually there was

This week, I wrote a check for term life insurance. If I die, my widow and four children will be sad. But they will not be poor. I was happy to write this check as I have been for years. When signing the check, I did not raise my fist

I’m going to go out on a limb here and suggest that Tom Brady is a significantly better quarterback than Tim Tebow. In ten seasons, Brady has appeared in five Super Bowls, winning three of them; his career post season record of 16-5 is unparalleled; Brady has won two Super

Harry Bauld’s On Writing the College Application Essay may have turned 25 this year, but it remains the freshest, best book on the subject of the most dreaded 500 words a high school senior ever pens. Bauld’s scathing criticism of the essay he derides as “Pet Death”–“As I watched Buttons’s

An erudite reader responded to my column last week about bad parenting: “One question: Do people respond to requests for stories? It seems your call to action should be a bit higher up in the post and set apart rather than at the end and as part of another paragraph.

In order to best serve my admissions counseling clients, I have been visiting college campuses for the past 30 years. Although I have long since lost count of the number of universities I’ve toured, I imagine I’m coming up on 200. To help you avoid the inconveniences of travel, the

On a blustery winter morning in the early years of the war, the American engineer, Abraham Wald is shown hundreds of crippled planes that have limped back to an airfield in Southern England. The planes have been painted red in the area in which they have been struck by flak

The Princess Esmerelda was as gracious as she was erudite. Well read, articulate and thoughtful, when she wore her flowing silk robes to affairs of state, her constituents smiled. On her 21st birthday, Esmerelda’s father brought her news of her impending marriage. He had made an alliance, he explained, with

1) In post war Rome, a man comes across a stranger weeping in an alley. “Don’t cry, Friend” he says. “It’s true, our beloved country has been brutally defeated, that the best young men of their generation have been slaughtered, and that we now have no infrastructure to speak of.