College Bound Consulting

College Bound Consulting Graduating from high school and thinking about heading off to college can be a scary time. It’s easy to convince yourself that your classmates have all the answers and you’re the only one without a plan. Even students with the most detailed life plans will change course along the way. It is NOT okay for parents to WRITE their child’s essay or influence it unduly, however. He or she isn’t a full-fledged literary genius and the admission officers who read the essays are well aware of this. They are okay with thoughts and phrasing that sounds like it’s come from a teenager; they understand that not all of the ideas will be fully formed. Most students worry about bragging in their essay, but we say go for it! This is your time to shine, so highlight your accomplishments and strengths. Review your essay to make sure that you’re keeping the tone informative and that you’re still on topic. (Brag while answering the essay prompt; don’t just mention random, unrelated but impressive facts about yourself!)You can use this brag sheet where you can brainstorm your accomplishments. While the worksheet is geared toward requesting letters of recommendation, you can still use it to write out your hobbies, interests, college list, and strengths to help you answer your scholarship essay prompt. What is considered a good SAT score depends on the colleges and universities that you are applying at. Typically, the higher your SAT score, the greater your chances are of getting into a top school, but it's just one component of an application. If possible, mom and dad should stay out of the essay writing business. However, some parents are able to understand that over-editing essays is not a good thing. Everything should be spelled correctly, with correct grammar and punctuation, but the essay should sound like a high school student wrote it. It is certainly okay for parents to help edit their child’s essay â€" with the key word in that sentence being EDIT. They can help catch spelling or punctuation mistakes or help a student better clarify an idea that isn’t fully fleshed out in the early draft. Most of the time I see that parents get into an essay and take away the student voice…they make it too polished for a high school student. Colleges get suspicious when they receive an essay that sounds like a PhD wrote it. I have seen too many essays where parents “helped” and as result, the essay lost the student’s voice. Too many words had been added that just did not reflect the student’s vocabulary or mode of writing. But the main idea behind any essay is that it should reveal something of the writer’s (in this case, the student’s) character and parents can easily hinder that process if they edit too much. Editing is a part of the writing process, like development and revision, where another person can be helpful. College admissions readers are bright and intuitive and can tell when an essay has been “helped” too much. I see no problem with parents doing a grammar/spelling check as well as offering suggestions on how an essay could be improved. Just be sure that it still reads like it was written by a 17 year old and it shares the story that is important to them and not just an important sounding topic that a parent thinks would be more impressive . There is nothing theoretically wrong with that person being a parent if they are skilled and sensitive to helping while allowing the student’s own voice to remain dominant. Many times however, when a parent tries to help, they do more harm than good. It is very easy to spot an essay that has been overly edited by a parent and that is not good for the students chances of admission. He had what he thought was a great essay topic about how he had saved someone's life. The only problem was that the incident hadn't actually happened.