The College Blueprint Buzz

There are so many ways for high school students to engage in summer activities that can have a huge impact on them personally, and on a college or university admission officer. With the ongoing impact of the Covid-19 global pandemic, many traditional summer programs have moved to an online format and, for some students, that just doesn’t hold the same appeal. Typically, students have looked forward to a residential on-campus program that helps them make new friends, engage with university faculty, and learn more about what their life might look like when they attend college. However, there are still other exciting summer opportunities to consider that can also be meaningful, so let&rsq...

Summer 2020 was dramatically different for high school students, with in-person programs closed and very few virtual opportunities. However, Summer 2021 already promises great improvements since exciting options are opening up. Some of the most well-established summer programs are offering both a few on-campus courses and many online courses. One excellent example of this is at the wellknown Summer@Brown, on the campus of Brown University. Stanford University is now open for summer 2021 enrollment with special advanced online coursework, and the Phillips Academy Summer Session has a hybrid option with both boarding and online opportunities. Columbia University has a wide range of program typ...

The waiting is over. Admission decisions have been made. And some very happy students now have the enviable problem of deciding which college they want to attend.

From now until the May 1 notification deadline, the tables are turned as admission officers try to win over newly admitted students. There will be flattering letters,phone calls and invitations to fun-filled programs designed to get prospective freshmen excited about attending their school.

Remember that these programs will paint the school in the best light. Since you want to learn everything you can before making a final decision, it’s a good idea to look beyond the nice receptions and speeches. Some students skip these event...

GPA is the most important factor in the college admissions process. One way to improve your grades is to know your preferred learning style. Each learning style has specific strategies which can be helpful to assist you in learning material. Take a look below and see if you can figure out YOUR learning style. Once you have done so, we encourage you to utilize some of these strategies while studying for your classes.

Visual Learning Style

Visual Language

These students learn language skills by sight, mainly by reading and watching. They tend to be fast thinkers, to gesture freely while talking, and to communicate very clearly and concisely. They learn well from demonstration process – they...

Parents just want to help. The natural reaction when you see your child suffering is to try and make it better. Denials are inevitable in an atmosphere of increasingly selective admissions, so how can parents help ease the pain when their child is not chosen, for many reasons relating to the college’s priorities and needs? The first step is to accept that it’s complicated. It’s complicated by your child’s emotions, your emotions and both of your preconceived notions. It gets even more complicated when students feel pressure from their classmates. The worst is the judgment many students feel from their parents’ friends, as if they disappointed their parents. Pare...

Each year, an increasing number of us high school graduates opt to take a year off between the end of high school and the start of college. Members of the high School class of 2020 did so in record numbers, spurred on by the likelihood of online learning and a greatly altered college experience due to the covid 19 pandemic.With the advent of effective vaccines and with colleges beginning to announce on campus programs for the fall of 2021,should you still consider a gap year?

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Although this article is directed to students
just beginning their college search, it will
also be useful to seniors in making their
final choice of college to attend. This is
especially true this year since so many
applicants have been unable to make an
in-person campus visit.

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Your applications have been submitted (or are nearly done) and for some, it’s now time for interviews. The first thing we need to do is to shake your image of the interviewer as the stereotypical older, tweed-jacketed, bespectacled, cranky admission person. You may be pleasantly surprised to find that college admission officers today are young, multicultural and far from cranky. For a student who loved their college experience, working in admission is often a way to stay on at their alma mater and share their enthusiasm with high school students. Admission entry level jobs involve lots of not-so-glamorous travel, visiting multiple high schools each day and then returning to campus to h...

Pandemic or no pandemic, researching colleges is an imperative for high school students. Typically, it involves many modes of research, including in-person campus visits and ours by students and families, and attending college representatives’ public information sessions and their visits to high schools. Gathering up all this information guides a student towards their short list of colleges, ranked in order of preference. Now, in the age of COVID, everything about college research has changed and teens must focus their efforts on online resources, the college website being the primary focus of that research. Fortunately, colleges have been enriching their websites and can provide stude...

There have been so many challenges and disruptions to our everyday lives since the COVID pandemic started its deadly march across the world – in-home quarantine, required social distancing, no visits with friends or distant family, no travel. and even a shortage of toilet paper. This article addresses the special circumstances for students who are engaged in their high school academics and extracurricular activities, college-bound juniors and seniors in particular. For this group of young people, it’s important to remain optimistic that the crisis will, in fact, bring about a sea change in the world of college admissions, leading to changes for the better in a system that for man...