College Application Mindset Training: The List
The first section of our “essentials” guide to college admissions is the mindset section of our college application training. Think of our college application training as a sort of rewiring of the mind: we will help you develop the right mindset and thought process to tackle the college application process correctly.
As cliché as the word “mindset” is, it is vital that you first understand the importance of mindset when trying to increase the chances of getting into college. Having the right mindset not only motivates you to strive for the best of your ability, but It also keeps you level-headed; you very much need to be level-headed and well informed, especially in a high-stress situation such as college admissions.
Without further ado, please bear with our college admissions mindset rewiring as this is going to be vital information on how you should approach the college admissions process. Without the right mindset, you will stray from the most ideal path to college admissions success.
1. How Important Is The College Application Essay?
The obvious answer would be a resounding “very” from your college admissions officers, but that doesn’t answer the question entirely. Most of our clients like to think, “how much work could I get away with not doing while still getting accepted from my dream school”, which is not a bad way of thinking; it is just inefficient. You should be thinking, “I need to maximize my chances of college admission as much as possible to erase any chance of rejection, and that includes the college essay”.
Though no one really knows exactly how important the College Application Essay is in the admissions process, as there is no true algorithm that goes into it, we have deciphered an answer based on our previous projects and results from clients.
We do not know just how much more important the college application essay is compared to GPA and SAT/ACT, but we know how much of an advantage a well-written application essay gives in numerical format.
A genuinely well-written college application essay that has gone through editing by the applicant as well as multiple consultations and editing and optimization from our experts yields an advantage in the college application pool of about +.6 GPA and +400/2400 SAT score. In other words, students who had good essays has similar to identical admissions success rates as students who had a GPA that was .6 higher than theirs as well as an SAT score that was +400/2400 higher than theirs. These are averages based on our previous clients’ experiences, as they were accepted into many schools that had freshman admissions profiles that had a GPA higher than theirs by .6 and an SAT score higher by 400/2400.
2. We Know: It’s Hard
So the first things first, getting into a top-tier school is very, very tough. You will be competing against students who have above average GPA scores of over 3.7 and SAT scores of 1300-1500 as a baseline. There are plenty of smart students out there; so even if you are already one of said smart students, you still only stand out equally among the rest of the application pool. It is important to have other aspects that can make you stand out and appear special in the admission officer’s eyes.
But that’s the thing: college admissions officers understand that the admissions process is hard. They know GPA and SAT/ACT scores make you only appear as a statistic; and it is because of that difficulty that they make sometimes make exceptions for lower-scoring students.
How do these exceptions occur? Well, that’s the next part of our college application mindset list. They find exceptions through your extracurriculars and your application essay and personal statement.
3. There Are Exceptions
There is one common trait in every one of our successful clients we have had: They had beautiful college application essays and personal statements. Whether it is someone who always scored perfect marks or some students who were slightly below the average range in terms of grades and test scores, every applicant who was accepted into their top school had optimized essays and personal statements. Some of them had only a few hours of our consulting and advice to get accepted; others had to have hours upon hours of our editing and revisions, as they were STEM majors who were not as talented at writing.
So the college application essay section can make students be the exception that improves their admission chances and makes up for a lack of good grades. What else is there? Well, it turns out there is a lot more. This is why.
4. It is very Easy To Mess Up The Application Essay Section
You should be coming into the application essay section knowing just how easy it is to mess up the entire application essay. This usually happens due to a few circumstances. The most common ways of messing up the application include having a boring introduction, not answering the prompt enough, answering the prompt too much without enough backstory, having boring imagery, and not having the exact right connotation. These are very simple mistakes that can be very difficult to detect without an expert or second pair of eyes; surely there are plenty of other types of mistakes to be made but there’s something special about these mistakes.
Not only are these mistakes easy to make, they are also one of many types that end up ruining your entire paper altogether.
That’s what makes small mistakes in the college application essay so deadly: simply making one mistake or a slightly off-put sentence can put to waste a lot of hard work. Of course, some mistakes are more deadly; but here we’ll show a few examples of how this can ruin everything.
Messing up the introduction can lead to the admissions officers having a bad impression of the rest of the application essay after only the first few lines. The wrong connotation in words may make you seem inconsiderate or arrogant despite your intention against appearing so. Trying to directly answer the question and not stray away from the prompt –which is the smart thing to do in just about any writing project—may also lead to not giving enough interesting backstory to provide your application with character and substance.
It’s possible to avoid a majority of these mistakes if you are a great writer, but it is because they are so problematic and deadly to your college admissions chances that we suggest that you at least have a second pair of exert eyes take a look at your application and consult you on the best approach.
5. You Should Invest More Time In It
We genuinely cannot stress this enough in our college application training: if you are only starting your application the day before the deadline, colleges admission officers will think you do not deserve to attend their school. Now, it is true that no one can genuinely tell when an application was started and completed, as everyone is at different writing levels, but it is important to start early to invest as much time on the application essay as possible.
There really is nothing to lose when starting an application early, but the benefits that come with this are significantly powerful.
Firstly, applicants who start early get to have more time to think about what it is they want to write about without regretting their topics. They get more time to write the actual application essay itself, but the real value is the time they get to edit the application. Most of the spare time is spent correcting their mistakes and sending their rough drafts to qualified teachers, knowledgeable counselors, and especially specialists in the field of college application essays.
6. 2 Months To Finish The Essay; 4 Years to Master GPA and SAT/ACT
This is rather straightforward, but it is quite interesting how it stuns our clients. Whether they are parents or students, everyone is surprised by the fact that the college application essay, which is arguably in some cases more important than the GPA and SAT/ACT, only requires around 2 months to finish well compared to the 4 years of high school it takes to get a good GPA and SAT/ACT score. Okay, we know. 2 months is quite a long time. But in the case of constructing the perfect college application essay, we strongly suggest the whole 2 years at least. Our mindset training would not be complete without this grim reminder.
Remember: as important as your GPA and SAT/ACT scores may be, it only takes 2 months of genuine and honest work to make sure 4 years of hard work do not go into waste.
College Application Training: Conclusion
We hope that our college application training has rewired you to think of the admissions process the right way. Far too often are there misconceptions about the application process, even more common is students becoming demotivated from trying their best in the most important part of the application: the essay and personal statement.
Keeping this mindset in mind, (knowing how important the essay is, how hard it is, the exceptions, how easy it is to mess it up, how much time to invest, and how deceivingly small it is compared to the GPA and SAT/ACT) will set you up for success in the application process much more than the rest of the application pool.
