January 2010

Guess what? February is Financial Aid Awareness Month! It's true. And for all of you who are planning to start college in the fall, it is definitely the time to think about financial aid. Here are a few things that you should be aware of and do something about this week if you are staying on track with the 52 Weeks to College plan. (A previous posting also talked about Financial Aid so start with that if you haven't been following along week by week.)

1. Get your FAFSA and CSS Profile completed and submitted. You can do both of them online, but deadlines are looming for most college financial aid processes, so don't delay! By the way, if your parents are resisting filling out the FAFSA because they did it for older siblings and it was a big pain and they didn't get the financial aid they wanted, let them know that the FAFSA has gotten much easier and that older siblings in school reduces the estimated family contribution.
2. Research (if you haven't already) scholarships for which you may be eligible. The College Board has a good basic outline for how to go about doing that. Please heed their warning regarding scholarship finder scams. They are real and every year some families get taken in by them and I hate that.
3. Educate yourself about what's going on in terms of changes in the law that will benefit you and your family - for example, new legislation will increase the amount of Pell Grants in the coming years. A good summary (and quick read) has been put together by U.S. News.

Comments or Questions?

Celebrate completing your financial aid applications with a "Wahoo!" posting or get encouragement if you are having trouble getting it done with a "Need Cheerleading" posting!

Alison Cooper Chisolm writes the series 52 Weeks to College. She has worked in admissions at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and most recently Dartmouth College. She is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Alison works with college applicants and their families as they navigate the college admissions process. Read more about Alison here.

You should have your grades from your first term of senior year by now. And by the end of next week, the colleges to which you have applied should too. They get them in the form of the Midyear Report if they are a Common Application school or something similar if they use their own forms.

So whether the Midyear Report is good, bad, or ugly, here is what you need to do to keep your applications on track:

1.  If you don't have grades yet, get them! (Some of you may not have them because you ended up with incompletes - resolve that now! Some of you may not have them because your teachers haven't turned them in - pester them to do it!) Your Midyear Report is important and colleges need to get it in a timely manner.

2.  Confirm that your counselor has sent in the Midyear Report. If he/she hasn't, follow up and make sure he/she does by February 15.

3.  Deal with what it contains and how it changes your academic profile.

• If it is good news -- it raises your GPA or class standing or demonstrates a positive recovery or grade trend -- MAKE SURE THAT IS OBVIOUS. That means that your GPA is updated on your transcript, that your class standing is updated on your transcript or on the counselor's report, or that your counselor makes some note of it in the Evaluation section. YOU are responsible for making sure this good news gets shared, so meet with your counselor and let him/her know what you want highlighted. If he/she isn't receptive, then formulate a short e-mail to the admissions office and toot your own horn in two-three sentences that recount the facts clearly. E.g. "I hope that the admissions office has received and processed my Midyear Report. I am excited and proud to note that I moved into the top 10% of my class because of my performance in the fall term of my senior year. Thank you."
• If it is bad news - a decline in GPA, class standing, part of a trend of declining grades, or a particularly bad/anomalous grade in one class -- then you need to do some damage control. There are a couple of possible ways to do this. One is to meet with your counselor and discuss the situation and see if the counselor can address it in his/her evaluation in a positive way, e.g. "Johnny struggled in Chemistry for Geniuses, but it is our hardest science course and no one in the class got an A, so even though it appears that his performance has declined, it really is a demonstration of his commitment to challenging himself and a success." Another is to become your own advocate, but you must do so without slipping into an excuse-making, whiny tone. Generally speaking, you are striving to explain, without trying to excuse, and you are taking full responsibility for the grades you got. E.g. "I am writing to add some additional information regarding my Midyear Report. I am disappointed that my overall GPA slipped during this term. Despite my efforts to stay on top of my school work, I was out of school quite a bit because of my participation on the Varsity Soccer Team. It took its toll, but I expect my grades to rebound in the spring, because I won't be playing sports. You can see that a similar dip happened in the fall of my junior year and I made it up in the spring." BE SURE AND INCLUDE YOUR FULL NAME AND SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER on all correspondence, so it gets to the right file. You don't want another Leslie or David to benefit from your damage control.

4. Be sure to make your own midyear report if you have something else to share that boosts your profile. An honor bestowed or a significant achievement earned should be communicated to the admissions office and added to your file. So if you just were elected into Honor Society, share that news. Likewise, if you qualified for the Junior Olympics, let them know. The easiest way to share this news is an email. Again, it does not need to be long. Two to three sentences is plenty, but again BE SURE TO INCLUDE YOUR FULL NAME AND SOCIAL SECURITY NUMBER, so it gets to the right file. An email from Beth at bemerry@aol.com runs the risk of not making into the file of one Elizabeth Morgan, because no one knows that Elizabeth Morgan is the Beth who was crowned Homecoming Queen at Big Public School in Maryland and the admissions staff don't have time to chase down the email address.

That's all for this week. Take care of this business and then get back to enjoying your last months in high school!

Comments or Questions?

Not sure whether you are explaining or whining?  Post a draft and we'll let you know! 

Alison Cooper Chisolm writes the series 52 Weeks to College. She has worked in admissions at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and most recently Dartmouth College. She is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Alison works with college applicants and their families as they navigate the college admissions process. Read more about Alison here.

How much do things like determination and grit correlate with future success? It's a big question, and one that intrigues me as a former admissions officer. After all, the gatekeeping function of admissions is to scour all these imperfect proxies (some might say tea leaves) to try to predict the future success of all those wonderful applicants.

On that subject, a recent article by Amanda Ripley in the Atlantic Monthly caught my eye. Many of my blog readers have heard of Teach for America, the non-profit that sends talented and eager college graduates into inner-city and rural schools to teach disadvantaged students. It's a very competitive admissions process to join the "corps" (as they're called). Last year, Teach for America chose 4,100 out of 35,000 candidates, and during the 2008-09 school year, 11 percent of Ivy League seniors applied. It's a very popular career choice for college seniors.

So Teach for America has all this mad talent to choose from. Over the decades that their own researchers as well as outside researchers have been measuring their teachers' success in the classroom, some interesting findings have emerged. The factors that correlate most strongly with great teaching (which they measure very scientifically) are:

• a previous track record of perseverance and passion for long-term goals, or "grit"
• "life satisfaction" (measuring how content they are with their lives) and
• two kinds of performance in college:
  
  • GPA and
  • leadership achievement, a "record of running something and showing tangible results"

Another fascinating finding: an applicant's overall GPA wasn't as good a predictor of success as the GPA from the last two years of college. It turns out that hitting some speed bumps the first few years and being able to get your act together the last two years demonstrates something important about you. That's the kind of thing one may have already suspected intuitively, but it's great to have some data to back up the intuition.

While those findings relate to success as a classroom teacher in particular, they do strike me as having wider applicability that college and grad school applicants might find interesting. What's the take-away? You should still treat your GPA and test scores as paramount -- those are the indicators that will matter most. But if you can also demonstrate perseverance and stick-with-it-ness (whatever your particular challenges might have been), and you are the kind of student who has seized leadership opportunities outside the classroom, you have a lot of great qualities to show off besides the numbers.

So if your applications are still a ways away, think about the choices you can make between now and then that will let you show off these kinds of qualities. And if your applications are starting to sneak up on you, take inventory of your achievements. What concrete achievements can you highlight to demonstrate perseverance and leadership? How are you going to showcase them? It's not enough to say you are a leader and someone who perseveres. You'll need to back it up with a track record proving those things.

This Atlantic article has so much interesting data and examples to chew on, with implications far beyond teaching skills. Take a look, and please leave a comment with your thoughts.

You are not done yet. You haven't finished. What? I can hear the wails rising from the masses of college applicants as I type this blog. They say in unison, "Of course I'm done. I've submitted my applications. Now it is time for the colleges to go to work and time for me to have all the fun that I can squeeze into the remaining months of my senior year. I've been deprived long enough. I've worked hard for 3 ½ years, so it is time to give it a rest before I have to start all over again as a college freshman." And part of me is sympathetic to that wail. I really am. You do need to throttle back after having been in overdrive for the last several months. You should take some time and smell the roses of senior year. But, and this is a crucial but, you need and want to finish strong. Here's why.

It counts in the admissions process. Sure you get your admissions decision before you walk across the stage, but there is this little loophole. You will not be able to enroll if you do not graduate from high school. Again the wails. "D is for diploma, so I don't have to put my best effort forward, I just have to put in the minimal effort necessary to graduate."

A few problems that have presented themselves over the years for applicants who have taken this approach. First, the problem of the wait list. What if you get wait listed? You want to have a great final semester to show them, not an array of pathetic grades that show you gave up once the applications were in. Second, the problem of making sure you estimate your effort (or lack of effort) correctly. Woe be to you if you don't. F is not for diploma and it can be a pretty slippery slope from D to F. Don't risk it.

It also counts in life. You are building a record, a memory, and a habit that will follow you. The record that looks good and then falls apart will provoke questions any time you have to present that high school transcript. Also, it creates a memory for teachers, adult mentors, and others who could be important supporters of your future goals. They will remember you as that person who blew it at the end. That's not the memory you want to leave behind. Finally, you will encounter lots of times in your life when your performance doesn't seem to matter much to others, so why not slack off? In a word: integrity. You owe it to yourself to do your best because that is who you are. You do it because it matters to you, not because it matters to other people. If you launch yourself into adulthood without regard for your own integrity, you have established a habit of undermining yourself, and that is a bad habit. A big bad habit.

So pull yourself together. Relax, but don't go comatose. Finish strong.

Comments or Questions?

Want to wail to the cyberverse -- go ahead post a comment!  

Alison Cooper Chisolm writes the series 52 Weeks to College. She has worked in admissions at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and most recently Dartmouth College. She is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Alison works with college applicants and their families as they navigate the college admissions process. Read more about Alison here.

So let's assume you've followed all of my advice and have now submitted great applications to 5-10 colleges. That means come September 2010, your first tuition bill will come due. How are you going to pay it? If you (or your parents or your fairy godmother) can write a check, then no worries and you can take a break this week (and for several other weeks over the coming months). But, if you, like the majority of applicants, need or want financial aid in the form of scholarships, grants, loans, work-study jobs, etc., you will be completing the financial aid application process over the coming months. This application process is not as arduous as the admission application process, but it is equally deadline sensitive and peculiar in its own ways. So, let's get started.

1.  Educate yourself about the forms of financial aid available to you.

Here's a bit of a cheat sheet to get you started - you need to know the answers to these questions with respect to your situation:

• Who gives away the money? Short answer: the federal government, your home state government, the college itself, or an independent organization that has such a program, e.g. Local Chamber of Commerce Scholarship. So you need to research each of these sources and see what is available to you.
• Who is eligible for the money that is given away? Each source will determine its rules for eligibility. Make sure you fall within the eligibility criteria.
• What kind of money do they give away? If they give away scholarships or grants, the money does NOT have to be repaid. If they provide loans, the money MUST be repaid.
• Who actually awards the money? Some financial aid is awarded through the college (most federal money); some financial aid is awarded by the source itself.

One bit of caveat emptor here: lots, if not all, of this information is available for free (check out Zinch and FinAid.org), so be judicious about paying for "scholarship search or financial aid search" services.

2. Determine the financial aid process and deadlines for each college to which you have applied as well as for any other sources you have identified that award the money themselves.

Most colleges will require that you complete the CSS Profile (College Scholarship Service - a kind of Common App for non-federal financial aid used by many colleges) and the FAFSA (the free application for federal student assistance) and some will require an additional form specific to them. Most other sources will have a specific application.

3. Put the deadlines on your calendar and map out the tasks necessary to complete all the various financial aid forms.

FINANCIAL AID DEADLINES ARE HARD AND FAST. No lie. Don't play chicken with a financial aid office. You will lose. Guaranteed.

4. Enroll your parents in this process.

For college financial aid, your parents are a part of the picture. They need to get on board and be prepared to cooperate with the process. I've seen perfectly normal-seeming parents freak out when they found out what information about their income and assets they have to disclose. So it is best to sit your parents down and have some frank discussions about this process and make sure they are ready, willing and able to participate. If you have family dynamics that make this difficult, enlist your college counselor for help. Two situations that often require third-party intervention are divorced parents who are still "at war" with each other or parents who are undocumented workers in the U.S. You are not the first or only applicant to encounter these situations, so get the professionals that are there to help you involved.

5. Once your parents are enrolled, give them a heads-up that the first thing that requires their attention is their 2009 income tax return.

They need to complete their tax return early this year and every year you are in college and applying for aid. Let them know that so that they can gather their documentation and get those returns done. Some things can be completed with estimates and last year's return, but most things revolve around 2009.

Comments or Questions?

Not sure how to get underway with financial aid or want to rant about how endless this whole college application process is? Post a comment!

Alison Cooper Chisolm writes the series 52 Weeks to College. She has worked in admissions at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and most recently Dartmouth College. She is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Alison works with college applicants and their families as they navigate the college admissions process. Read more about Alison here.

The NYT reports today that the number of people taking the October LSAT in 2009 represented a 20% increase over October 2008, for an all-time high. Law school admissions professionals quoted in the article think it's a delayed reaction to the economy:

“There’s a bit of lag time between when people start to worry about the economy and when they get their applications going,” said Wendy Margolis, director of communications for the Law School Admission Council, which administers the L.S.A.T.

Jeffrey S. Brand, dean of the University of San Francisco School of Law, echoed that view.

“I think the crash was so severe that people were kind of catatonic,” Mr. Brand said. “They weren’t sure what to do. They’re coming out of that mode now.”

Some schools are already reporting huge spikes in applications this season:

Officials at many law schools reported substantial increases in applications over last year. Washington University in St. Louis has had a 19 percent year-to-date increase in applications to its college of law. At the University of San Francisco School of Law, applications are up 35 percent over last year, and at the University of Iowa’s College of Law, applications are up 39 percent.

Some increases are more explicable than others. Applications to the Maurer School of Law at Indiana University have risen 54 percent this year, which may be related to its rise in the U.S. News & World Report rankings to 23 in 2009, from 36 the year before.

But at Cornell University’s Law School, whose ranking has remained relatively stable, applications are up 44 percent, and no one is quite sure of the reason for such a large increase.

Richard Geiger, dean of admissions, said: “I’m a little thrown off by the fact that our increase is much bigger than expected. There’s nothing big we’re doing to explain that kind of increase.”

We're already fielding emails from people looking to apply in the 2010-11 season. Given the statistics in this article, it's not too early to start strategizing.

If you're one of many applicants who are looking at law school as a result of the terrible economy, please post a comment and share your story.

Happy New Year! All the applications with January 1 deadlines are gone. Your time of intensive activity has come to an end. So breathe and celebrate your accomplishment!  Rest. Play. Rest. Play. From now until school starts again. Then you need to be back in the swing because the last half of your senior year does matter.

Remember what I said in Week 13 about breaks like this? Of course you don't. So I'll repeat it again for good measure.

One of the things that I hope you learn during the college application process is that we all need to allow for breaks when we catch up and breathe. If you are going to manage the ambitious life you have planned, you simply have to schedule some "slack" weeks. If you don't, your head will explode off your body. Guaranteed. Or if not that, then you'll blow something big at work or have a huge fight with someone important to you. All equally grim.

Practice this important skill now. Breathe. Rest. Play. Repeat.

Comments or Questions?

Forgotten how to breath, rest, play?  Post your dilemma and we'll figure out a way!

Alison Cooper Chisolm writes the series 52 Weeks to College. She has worked in admissions at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and most recently Dartmouth College. She is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Alison works with college applicants and their families as they navigate the college admissions process. Read more about Alison here.

No need to read this post until your applications are submitted. If you are still working, go back to it. You cannot afford to waste a minute. For the rest of you, you are probably thinking, what else? I've written a million words about myself, studied for and taken the awful tests, begged for the recommendations I need and there is STILL MORE? Really? Yes, really. Because you didn't do all that alone. Your parents, teachers, counselors, friends, recommenders, interviewers, and random people helped you along the way. Sure you've worked hard, but they did too. You owe them a thank you. And not some lame one-line email or tossed off phrase on the phone, but a proper thank you. Of course, you are brain dead at this point in the admissions cycle and have only limited experience with proper thank yous, so I'm going to make it easy. By the way, you want to pay attention because this is a LIFE skill, one that you should use at every opportunity and every critical juncture in your professional (and even personal) life. If you do, good things will keep happening for you. If you don't, well I won't say bad things will happen to you, but the good things will be fewer and harder to come by.

Make a list of everyone you should thank, and I mean everyone. Overthanking is NOT a problem. So make it everyone.

Get some nice stationery, not cutesy, not icky like the overly ornate embossed "Thank You" that Walgreen's sells, not notebook paper, but legitimate nice stationery. I suggest you get the postcard size, either with or without a foldover flap. Do NOT get 8½ by 11 or half sheets - too much room for what you are going to say.

Write an individualized 3 1/2 sentence thank you - even to your parents and siblings and anyone else who has co-habited with you during this ordeal. Really, a hand-written thank you is the LEAST you should do for them. Here is the formula:

• Thank you for [fill in what they did, e.g. writing a recommendation for me to apply to college].
• I really appreciated [fill in something that is special to that person, e.g. that you took time away from your vacation to write it].
• I will be back in touch when I hear from the colleges and know where I'm going next year. Thanks again!

Address and mail them the old-fashioned snail-mail way. Trust me. Email and phone calls just aren't the way to do this. You can hand-deliver those meant for folks who live in the same house or are at your school.

Keep your list and mark on your calendar to notify them of what happened and where you are going to college as soon as you know. They care or they wouldn't have done whatever they did to earn a thank you, and nothing is more awkward than having to ask an applicant about the outcome of an application if the applicant doesn't volunteer information. For this notification, you may use email or phone calls. Urgency and timeliness trump formality.

And if you REALLY want to ensure that good things keep happening for you, keep this list and send them an update of what's going on with you on an annual basis -- a card at the holidays is the typical way of doing this. This group of people will continue to support you IF you keep them connected to you.

Comments or Questions?

Feel free to post your thank yous to me! (j/k) Of course, you can also post your comments and questions too.

Alison Cooper Chisolm writes the series 52 Weeks to College. She has worked in admissions at Southern Methodist University, the University of Chicago, and most recently Dartmouth College. She is a graduate of Yale College and the University of Virginia Law School. As part of the Ivey Consulting team, Alison works with college applicants and their families as they navigate the college admissions process. Read more about Alison here.