The College Admissions Process Does NOT Need to Be Stressful
You know the safety lane on the far left side of the freeway next to the fast lane?
Yeah, I was driving down it at 85 mph trying to get to Pomona College by 430pm.
Should I have started writing my supplemental essay for Pomona (on a typewriter, mind you) at 3 pm the day it was due?
No, no I should not have.
But that was me at 17…the greatest procrastinator in three states (or at least in Fontana High School).
After freaking out when I hit traffic and deciding to break every conceivable law imaginable, I arrived on campus at 4:28 pm. It was then I noticed that all the available spaces required parallel parking…
…I had not yet mastered this skill.
So, I left my car in the middle of the road with the flashers on and sprinted to the admissions office. By the time I got to the door, it was 4:32 pm and the janitor was in the process of locking it. Knocking, smiling, and pleading, I got him to let me in, and I sprinted around the corner where thousands of envelopes had been stacked on tables in the admissions office (yes, this was before the Internet…did I mention I’m feeling my age these days?)
Yes, I got the application in.
And yes, I got into Pomona College…and eventually Stanford from which I graduated.
This is despite the fact that the principal of my urban, public high school told me I would never get into either.
My point?
I know, firsthand, the stress that can surround the college admissions process, and it’s not only because I was an idiot in high school.
I’ve also spent the last 20 years helping thousands of families navigate this seemingly insane, please-make-it-stop process.
So yeah, I’ve seen it all:
- Screaming matches between parent and child.
- Teenagers melting down with anxiety at various points in their junior and senior years.
- And even parents walking into my office unannounced while I was in a meeting because they had an “urgent” question that couldn’t wait.
-However, I’ve also seen the absolute joy of seeing a teenager get into their first choice college.
-I’ve seen kids grow into their best selves as they go through the admissions process.
-And I have learned exactly how families can help their kids get into the best colleges in America without all the stress.
Really.
Now, just about every week, a parent tells me that my approach to things is different from most, so let’s see if I can convince you of a new way of looking at things.
And I’ll give you practical strategies that might defy conventional wisdom.
Best of all, I’m gonna do it by using a real student from last year who got accepted to
Northwestern
U Chicago
Columbia
Princeton
And also Pomona and Stanford :)
Let’s dig in.
Jennie was (is?) a smart girl who actually enjoyed learning but had a lot of doubts about what she “should” do for college, what she “should” major in, and what she “should” do for a career.
Jennie often thought a bit too much.
But this is often the norm, not the rule, especially in an age when teenagers constantly compare themselves to beautiful, successful, “perfect” people on TikTok (forgetting that it’s almost all fake, including the latest “AI influencers,” or people who don’t actually exist.)
Damn, it’s hard to be a teenager these days.
She started with authenticity.
Jennie did like to write stories, and when she took the “Career Aptitude Test” on truity.com, her answers demonstrated she was a “creative humanitarian,” or someone whose strengths were using creativity and wanting to make the world a better place.
Consequently, instead of joining the robotics team, the Model UN team, the baking club, and starting a campaign to save the whales, she leaned into doing what she enjoyed and was naturally good at…
…she wrote fun stories about aliens and contract killers and stuffed animals that came to life.
She also read books on restorative justice, knitted some awesome beanies for her friends, and taught herself the ukulele.
And, in the summers, she attended various writing programs so she could continue to develop her skills and give herself the time and space to write without interruption.
She didn’t win any awards because she didn’t apply for them. She wrote simply because she enjoyed it.
She maximized her time to focus on what was important.
She didn’t take every AP class at her school. She took most of them, but she avoided the ones considered “work factories,” so she could have enough time to act in a few school plays, hang with her friends, pursue her outside interests, and see Taylor Swift in concert (obviously).
She created a plan.
Each week, she would write out what she had to do for school and what activities she wanted to spend time on. She made a list of goals that were broken up into action items, and she estimated the time it would take to finish each one. Then she used her Google calendar to block out times where she would set appointments with herself that could not be moved (kinda like she was scheduling a doctor’s appointment).
This planning allowed her to get realistic on what she could and couldn’t accomplish each week, while also allowing her to schedule relaxation time and move blocks around if a big test suddenly got announced or something took her longer than expected.
In other words, even though the plan rarely went exactly the way she thought it would, the fact that she even had a plan made a huge difference in getting things done.
She began getting excited about colleges.
During winter break of her junior year, she started to use resources to poke around colleges.
She did Google searches and an interest-specific search on the College Board website for colleges with strong writing programs.
She began reading the two-page college profiles in the Fiske Guide to the Colleges, underlining what she liked and didn’t like, so she could easily go back and review the schools.
She watched day-in-the-life videos on YouTube and TikTok and searched Google for “drone flyovers” and “virtual tour” videos of colleges to get a sense of the campuses.
And she used student review websites like Unigo to read about what actual students had to say.
Sure, doing this work scared her about having to live in a dorm room with some stranger for a year away from her parents, dog, and stuffed animals that came to life. At the same time, it also excited her and kept her motivation high during those weeks when she had tests or when her mean chemistry teacher kept springing pop quizzes on material that she hadn’t covered.
She started visiting colleges slowly when they were in session and talked to actual students.
Jennie and her parents began seeing local colleges near their homes on Saturdays or on days she had off from school. Someone gave her the idea to break away from her parents, walk up to a group of students and ask them what they thought of the place (obviously, someone very wise gave her this advice…)
She found she learned more in ten minutes from a student than she did on a 90-minute tour and information session. On one campus, she was invited to sit in on an English class with a student; on another, she was invited to a party.
After seeing more schools farther away from home during her spring break, she realized that what she had been hearing about reputations really wasn’t true. She was finding smart, interesting students at a variety of schools, not just the top 10, and she began to understand that her choices should be based more on schools that matched her interests and personality rather than on name and reputation only.
She also started planning well in advance of the college admissions process.
Looking at the deadlines and essay requirements from previous years, Jennie put together a plan to start working on the Common Application and writing drafts of her main essay in the summer before her senior year.
By doing this, she made the stunning realization that the “terrible” college essays that everyone seemed to complain about weren’t all that bad. Most were only 250 words! (She had thought they were all like 3–4 pages long.)
She also discovered that many colleges asked modified versions of the same question. So, even if she applied to 12 colleges, she would only have to write 5–8 short answers, not 50 essays.
Now, while she wouldn’t know all the questions until August 1 when they are typically released each year, she could still write her personal statement (main college essay) and do the biggest time suck of all: “why research.”
What’s why research?
It’s a crucial component of the application process that the majority of students do not spend enough time on.
She would set aside an hour a week to do a deep dive into a college’s website and read about their overall philosophy, the academic programs, the available courses, the research opportunities, the study abroad programs, and the clubs.
She would copy anything that particularly interested her and paste it into a Google doc that she made for each school on her interest list.
Doing this research not only allowed her to discover programs she hadn’t known existed (for example, American Studies at Stanford sounded cool, the Beyond Boundaries Program at Wash U seemed interesting, and the Kelly Writers House at the University of Pennsylvania offered applicants a way to get their writing evaluated by the director who could then potentially advocate for applicants!)
The research also allowed her to compare programs among colleges.
Most importantly, it gave her a tremendous amount of material to use for some of her colleges’ supplemental essays, including “why” she wanted to attend Northwestern, Yale, Cornell, and Michigan.
She also found she would return to her why research to prepare for the few interviews she got after turning in her applications.
She reached out to admissions officers to ask questions.
She had heard from many people, including her school counselor, that many colleges no longer cared about “demonstrated interest” — the idea that students need to make regular contact with a school to show interest.
Yet that same wise, funny (and good-looking) mentor explained how admissions was still a “people” process. She understood this to mean that individuals would be evaluating her personal qualities as an applicant, which meant that admissions officers were actual human beings, not robots who used a huge rubber stamp with the word “REJECTED” printed on it.
Thus, once she had some real reasons why she liked certain colleges (i.e. after she had done her why research for a particular school), she looked up the admissions officer’s name and email address on each college’s website and sent them a genuine and heartfelt email introducing herself and stating some the specific reasons she had become interested in applying. Then she asked a couple of questions that had come up while doing her research.
Just about every admissions officer got back to her with answers, and Jennie would continue corresponding with them about when they would be coming to her school or the local area to visit, as well as ask other quick questions.
She did her best not to buy into the drama.
By fall, she was already well ahead of every one of her friends at school, most of whom hadn’t done any research other than visiting campuses. Her friends also hadn’t started the application, hadn’t looked up the essay questions, and had no plan for getting work done.
Understandably, her friends started to freak out anytime anyone would ask them about college (especially their parents), and it seemed like any time she got together with her friends, they would create a lot of drama based on their perceived amount of time the apps would take them, whether they would get into their “dream” school, and who else was applying/competing with them.
Jennie smiled and did her best not to let her friend’s stress rub off on her (although it was still challenging at times). She also tried to help some of her friends get ahead but otherwise didn’t rub it in her friends’ faces that she wasn’t stressed like they were.
She ended with authenticity.
Throughout the summer, she had learned that essay writing was really about storytelling, and since she was already pretty good at this, she would brainstorm “moment” stories (aka anecdotes) of things that she experienced that either taught her lessons or allowed her to show an interest in an activity.
She had also heard from various admissions officers that what they connected with the most, (especially when they had to reach 2000 applications in a row) was authenticity and vulnerability.
Therefore, instead of trying to show herself to be a perfect student, flex about her accomplishments, or come up with some dramatic story to get an admissions officer to feel sympathy, she went with stories that were true to who she was. In fact, here is the beginning and the end of her personal statement.
Beginning of her personal statement:
I was a ninth-grade emo.
I wore black hoodies zipped up and hid my face behind a tangled rat’s nest of hair that went down to my waist. I listened to angry, grating rock about death by people pretending to be vampires. I hid in my room shrouded in darkness half-hoping someone would walk in and see how miserable I looked.
Even though I thought I was poetically edgy and tortured, I was really an anxious, closeted lesbian with braces who couldn’t sleep without a nightlight and only had one friend. But at the time, it seemed easier to be angry than confused and scared, so I kept up with the charade, fully convinced my 5’3, fifteen-year-old freshman self was a dangerous yet intriguing paragon of darkness.
End of her personal statement:
I am now a twelfth-grade free spirit.
I religiously wear rainbow unicorn socks and rainbow-laced combat boots. I wear my hair in a short bob that bounces when I walk and shakes excitedly when I dance. I listen to upbeat music through my limited edition Mickey Mouse headphones and lip sync while I walk. I talk about whatever obscure sci-fi book I’m obsessed with at the moment to anyone who will listen and memorize male Shakespeare monologues in my free time. I am a proud, out lesbian who spouts Sappho quotes. I write hopelessly surreal poems about spaceships and moonboots and monstrous cat goddesses with opal whisker teeth and expired beer legs. I give hugs and dance ballet in my room and wear my Elsa dress to anime conventions and sleep with a nightlight that projects blue stars onto my ceiling. I am the living embodiment of the freedom and whimsy of my surrealist poetry, and I am happier than I have ever been.
Between the beginning and end of this transformation essay, she wrote about how she discovered her love of writing, specifically poetry, and how it allowed her to become the most fearless and authentic version of herself.
(She also included her poetry as part of a 10-page writing portfolio to certain colleges that would accept it.)
And most importantly, throughout all of this, she managed to get plenty of sleep and maintain a good relationship with her parents.
Does this mean there was 0 stress?
Nope.
No matter what, Jennie still had to navigate the rigors of high school, social cliques, not getting the lead in a play, getting broken up with, not passing her driver’s test the first time, dealing with relatives at Thanksgiving who all constantly asked her where she wanted to go to college, and trying to not compare herself to her friends — all of whom seemed to want to go the same colleges she did.
For her parents, they had to balance being supportive while not being overbearing. They had to encourage her, while also letting her fail and learn her own lessons. They also had to grapple with the fact that their baby — the love of their lives that they had spent 17 years raising — now didn’t need or want their help and would soon be rushing into a world they weren’t completely sure they had prepared her for.
This doesn’t even cover the waiting they had to endure once she applied, especially after she had applied early decision to Brown and was flat-out rejected (she wasn’t even deferred, even though she would then go on to get into all the schools I mentioned above).
In other words, the college admissions process still sucks.
However, one day, after she had received her first acceptance to Pomona College, she said, “You know, this process wasn’t nearly as bad as I thought it would be, and it was definitely better than what my friends went through…”
And that is why I wrote this article.
I actually plan on writing many more articles like this one, so please share this piece with other parents/ I hope that each week, I can help you sleep better at night and provide you with proven real-world strategies to help your child become the best version of themself.
And for even more specific help made especially for parents like you, check out www.dannyruderman.com/parents
