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.
Jonathan’s profile is over flowing with modest grades in English, poor verbal test scores. He has never read a book that was not assigned and has overlooked many books that were. His most articulate replies in the classroom are mono-syllabic grunts, yet Jonathan’s college admissions essays are replete with “plethoras,”
Sometimes the hucksters are so mind-numbingly feckless that they contradict themselves in the same paragraph of their hard sell, sales piece. Imagine if someone communicated both of the following statements: “I’m mailing your check today” AND “I’m 200 fathoms deep in a nuclear submarine off the coast of Komsolsky.” “How’s
I could not be more proud of my student, Robbie. From 15 years of age until his 20th birthday, Robbie smoked pot daily, stole from his parents, and lied every time he opened his mouth. In college, his major was being a general pain in the ass. He refused to
No list of “The Greatest Movies of All Time” is complete without including Orson Wells’s 1940 tour de force, “Citizen Kane.” The following dialog seems to predict conversations in my office 71 years after the film was produced: KANE As far as you’re concerned, Susan, I’ve never wanted anything –
Copyright © David Altshuler 1980 – 2024 | Miami, FL • Charlotte, NC | (305) 978-8917 | [email protected]
