Essays In Bloom

06/27/2026

Graduation speech wisdom from one of my favorite social psychologists. “Pay” attention. Invest in it. Where your attention goes, energy flows.

05/11/2026

I'm looking forward to attending IECA's annual conference next week and sharing the insights I gain with my students, including AI strategies and planning, as well as takeaways from key workshops such as "Strategic Storytelling," "Planning for an International Experience," "Global Outlook: Trends in Int'l Admissions," "Preserving Student Authenticity in Applications," and "150 Characters That Make Colleges Love You."

04/27/2026

Deep reading is essential. This is the first generation not to intellectually surpass the previous generation. Deep reading is essential to intellectual growth. See the comments for more info on the claim that this generation is lagging.

Start assigning college students the hard readings again, Walt Hunter wrote in February—you’ll learn something along the way. https://theatln.tc/1DaQ3G53

“I’ve taught for nearly two decades, but last fall I was worried in a way I’d never been before,” Hunter writes. He was concerned by anecdotes and statistics about the decline of reading, his own raddled attention span, and the apparent inevitability of AI-generated essays. “And yet my fears that students might refuse to read helped clarify my approach … I would teach the students what I was starting to miss myself: tarrying with an author beyond his best-known works, developing a relationship with a novelist across wildly different novels.”

“Two things became clear in the early weeks of class. First, the students were reading. They were reading everything, or most of it,” Hunter writes. “Second, they were experiencing life in a way that was not easy outside the class and its assignments. They were expected—required—to give huge chunks of time to an activity, reading, that was not monetizing their attention in real time. They had, in effect, taken back their lives, for an hour or two each day. It turned out that American literature, which so often flirts with utopian fantasies of regaining control—hello, ‘Walden’!—could do precisely that.”

Hunter changed the way he teaches—he axed take-home essays for example, so they would have more time to read, replacing them with in-class, timed “flash essays”; he changed his assignment prompts, and more. Why did the students start reading? “Because I asked them to, and told them it was worth it,” Hunter writes. “I said that time was precious, and that we needed to take some of it back for ourselves. So we did.”

🎨: The Atlantic. Source: Getty.

02/19/2026

Amid the “higher-education hellscape,” Ian Bogost wonders, are schools like Amherst and Davidson the final bastion of the college ideal? He visited several liberal-arts colleges to investigate. https://theatln.tc/Z0XEcVcU

In his conversations with leaders of higher education across the country, Bogost found that well-resourced and prestigious small colleges are less exposed in almost every way to the crises that other schools face.

For example, because liberal-arts colleges focus on their undergraduate education instead of graduate or doctoral programs, they are generally “free of the rat race of research productivity and expenditure,” Bogost writes—making the schools more resilient to funding threats from Washington.

A self-described moderate-conservative student at Davidson College told Bogost he chose to attend the school in part because its students are able to disagree with one another in thoughtful ways. In contrast, “according to higher education’s many critics on the right, elite universities have tried to stifle disagreement; allegedly they’re pushing students into echo chambers instead of broadening their minds,” Bogost continues.

In his conversations with students and faculty regarding the use of artificial intelligence in the classroom, he “witnessed a struggle to understand and respond to it with greater earnestness and complexity than I have encountered elsewhere in higher education.”

Liberal-arts colleges are not immune from any risk of being targeted, and some argue that the degree might not be the most practical. But “after spending several weeks on my tour of wealthy, liberal-arts colleges, I grew to think that the pitch they’re making to prospective students and their parents for the fall of 2026 was convincing,” Bogost writes.

📸: Randy Duchaine / Alamy

01/31/2026

The advice in the following quote and video is integral to self-discovery, clarity, and mapping future success.

"Your learning feed becomes part of your education. If you're following a 100 [AI] influencers, you're going to become very confused. But, if you're following 5 people who are doing exactly what you want to do, you're going to be learning faster, and with more clarity." - Aishwarya Srinivasan (YouTube linked below)

Students don't arrive at our first session with a clear understanding of their strengths or future direction, but after multiple strategic sessions that include research and adopting practices like mentor discovery and algorithm curation, they leave with clarity and a roadmap to success.

Curious: Are you following 5 people who are doing exactly what you want to do?

https://www.linkedin.com/posts/ebony-tillery-769854387_3-levels-of-nurse-practitioners-follow-activity-7401305733486497792-TKV7

https://www.youtube.com/watch?v=7Q4VM67jwYc

3 Levels of Nurse Practitioners ♥️ Follow for more real nurse insights, career tips, and inspiration to help you level up your nursing career your way!

11/28/2025

Have you been paying attention to the growing civil dialogue and bridging space on college campuses?

Have you, or your high school or college student, joined a bridging club?

Is your higher ed institution, or is your company upskilling in dialogue?

Curiosity about the “other” (human, claim, tradition, belief…) is making a comback. Colleges began upskilling in facilitating and engaging in controversial conversations after civil dialogue and free speech recently broke down at many higher thinking institutions.

The result: dialogue across difference and disagreeing better are trending on college campuses and as a college essay topic.

Did the American English classroom teach rhetoric as an attack tool for decades rather than as a nuanced thought and bridging methodology?

As a “comp 101” adjunct professor, my answer is yes. My greatest challenge was breaking students free from viewing academic papers as “argumentative” or “persuasive” essays.

The main difference: research or “academic” papers focus on synthesizing diverse scholarly sources before constructing new knowledge or making a claim.

Other critical ways academic papers differ from argumentative essays:

1. Conclusions aren’t decided before the research is conducted.

2. Facts aren’t cherry picked.

3. Curiosity about opposing claims lead the research.

4. The strongest opposing views and facts are authentically included and respectfully analyzed.

5. Logical fallacies are identified.

6. Only credible scholarly sources are included.

Please share your perspective. Id live to know your thoughts on this.

A few civil dialogue resources:
constructive dialogue institute
Dialogue Diplomats
Living Room Conversations
Bridge
The Dignity Index

https://lnkd.in/ejuKuq3G

Have you been paying attention to the growing civil dialogue and bridging space on college campuses? Have you or your college student joined a bridging club? Is your higher ed institution, or is your company upskilling in dialogue? Curiosity about the “other” (human, claim, tradition, belief…)...

11/09/2025

Please share your thoughts on this perspective.

11/02/2025

What a college essay coach's group text with a mom and a student should look like IMHO. I'm so proud of myself and the families I work with when I receive texts like this.

It's also why hiring (the right) college application writing coach is a success hack. The process is a growth accelerator—it's why I'm a "coach." When seniors are supported and given agency, they evolve from high schoolers into tuned-in college students who know where and how to apply their energy once on campus.

11/01/2025

Congratulations seniors on making it through the first early action deadline! You may have started this process with just a list of strengths and activities, but after examining your lists, you crafted a 650 word self-discovery narrative. You put in the work to "know thyself," a goal Socrates believed was the foundation of wisdom.

10/29/2025

https://www.facebook.com/share/17GA9chm1j/?mibextid=wwXIfr

“It’s important to do something, to study something that fascinates you. Pick a problem that you’re extremely interested in. That sounds kind of simplistic maybe, but it’s not, because you don’t want to just do a problem because it’s easy to solve, you want to do something that you’re obsessed with, that you just have to understand, because that’s where the joy comes from. […] I think, that is where the great discoveries come from, for people are really trying to try to figure out things that they don’t understand. And they don’t necessarily know how to do it, but they try very hard and then they succeed.”

These are the wise words of medicine laureate Linda Buck.

She was fascinated by one seemingly simple question: how does our sense of smell work? Once she started to look for the answer, she didn’t stop, following the olfactory process step by step to the very heart of what makes us human: our perceptions, preferences and memories.

Learn more about her work: https://www.nobelprize.org/stories/women-who-changed-science/linda-buck/