Conquer The College Essay

09/24/2015

Check out my piece in the Daily Beast today on the power of storytelling.

It is important to tell stories to the young, but it is even more important to make storytelling a lifelong habit, enriching your life and the lives around you.

06/30/2015

Here I am in the Global Times of Beijing, helping Chinese students understand the Common App essay: http://goo.gl/cbijUU

Chinese students do approach the personal statement with one significant advantage, however. They are trained to be excellent students and the narrative, which is the best route to a strong personal statement, is definitely a form that can be mastered.

06/16/2015

Getting ready for summer? http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/summer-is-prime-time/

Surf’s up, but summer is also an ideal time to get the jump on your college admissions essay. Summer offers time to think, reflect, and connect with a writing topic that you care about. Here are some good tips for making the most of the good old summertime:

06/02/2015

If you're in the Newton, Mass. area tomorrow, come on by and see me at the library, talking, of course, about the college admissions essay. 7pm at the Newton Free Library in the Druker Auditorium.

05/14/2015

Remembering great writing teachers. http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/let-us-now-praise/

…William Zinsser, who died this past Tuesday in Manhattan at the age of 92. Zinsser was the author of the classic writing tome, On Writing Well, which sold over a million copies and which certainly had an influence on me. As the New York Times obituary said, “His advice was straightforward: Write cl…

04/10/2015

Good news for my students!
http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/the-results-are-in/

Kudos to my small, ragged band of college applicants this year. They did very, very well in such a competitive season. Here’s the breakdown of where they’re going:

04/06/2015

The new Common App essay prompts are out.
http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/the-new-common-app-essay-prompts/

This week, the Common Application released its essay prompts for the 650-word personal statement. No big surprises here. Four of the five prompts are essentially identical to what they have been in the past few years. The one significant change is that they dropped the following prompt: “Describe a…

03/24/2015

Waiting to get your news? Good luck!
http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/the-letters-are-in-the-mail/

I had a bunch of happy students who applied early this year and got into places like Harvard, Penn, Cornell, Dartmouth, Pomona, and so on. Others were disappointed, having been waitlisted or outright rejected by their schools of choice. So it goes when you set your sights on the most selective colle…

02/17/2015

Planning a college visit? http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/make-your-college-visit-count/

It’s been bone-chilling here in the Northeast these days, and in such weather things give off the impression of crawling to a stop. We know, however, that time waits for no one, and before we know it, Harvard, Yale, Brown, Cornell, Williams, Bowdoin, and all the other frozen colleges and universitie…

01/06/2015

Seems like students are fighting each other to get the attention of school counselors:
http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/help-is-needed/

The New York Times recently ran a sobering piece on the lack of good counseling available to high school students in many of today’s public schools:

10/23/2014

A fascinating article in the Times:
http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/a-quick-inspiration/

I’ve been way too busy to blog these days, trying to meet the ED deadline along with so many of my students, but today’s New York Times has an extraordinary article about a young man who went from a wasteland in Rwanda to Harvard. Now he’s got something to write about! And his story of survival shou…

09/17/2014

Thinking about the power of thinking. http://www.conquerthecollegeessay.com/thinking-is-action/

One reason why my book Conquering the College Admissions Essay in 10 Steps has been so successful is because it helps people understand what a narrative is and how you, as a writer, can effectively convey your narrative (i.e. story). A lot of people are under the impression, however, that the story…