Posts by Bentham Team
What courses should you take to get into a highly selective college?
Every year in mid-September the question arises for high school students and parents – what courses should we select for next year? How will college admissions officers view the schedule we create? Should we take that impressive course with the reputedly terrible teacher? Should we take the course where the teacher is great but the…
Read MoreThe Importance of Being Earnest – Writing an Effective College Essay
The most effective way to write a college essay is to be personal, honest, and vulnerable. There are other ways, but this is the most surefire route to creating a bond with readers in the admissions office and making them your allies. For many applicants, particularly those who are the children of immigrants, this kind…
Read MoreTransferring to an Elite School
It’s difficult for seniors in high school to know what they want in a college, what a particular school is really like, and even what they want their major to be. For this reason, 30 % of college undergraduates transfer to another school at least once. They transfer because they decide that going to college…
Read MoreGetting Started on Your College Essay Part 2: Some Exercises to Get You Started
Here are a few exercises to get started As we said in the last blog, the objective of the college essay is to make a deep connection with the essay reader, so they remember your essay and want to be in your corner. The key to this is to make your writing intimate, specific, and…
Read MoreGetting Started on Your College Essay Part 1: Some Advice Before You Begin
If applicants are smart, late spring or early summer is the time to get down to drafting the college essay. The essay will go through several revisions, and your trusted readers (teacher, counselor, cousin who went to Brown, admissions consultant, etc.) will often need a few days to get down to reading your draft carefully…
Read MoreCollege Deadlines You Can’t Miss
In a nutshell: No matter how perfect your essays, how impressive your activities list, or how brilliant your grades, if you miss the regular admission application deadline you’re out of luck. Nothing is more important than meeting the deadline, Admissions deadlines vary from school to school, and you would be best served by finding the…
Read MoreWhat to do if you’re waitlisted
When you apply to a college, you may not be accepted or rejected. Instead, you might get waitlisted. This probably means that you met the admissions criteria (those who did not were rejected), but there were not enough slots to go around. Because a college can’t know for sure how many of their pool of…
Read MoreWhich are the Best Extracurriculars?
To begin to consider which extracurricular activities will most impress selective colleges and universities, we should enumerate the qualities the admissions committees at these schools are looking for. Are they looking for intelligence, a long list of varied activities from sports to band, and letters from teachers praising a student’s ability to follow rules and…
Read MoreThe College Search: How To Choose a College
When I went on a college tour with my parents, we tried to see eight colleges in seven states in six days. We were from California, and we were driving in heavy snow most of the time. By the time we got to the school I was most interested in, my father decided (after a…
Read MoreWhat does Liberal Arts mean?
The concept of the liberal arts descends from Plato, who believed that any wise, compassionate, and trustworthy citizen would have mastered what he called the “seven arts” (logic, grammar, rhetoric, arithmetic, astronomy, geometry, and music). Although a great many more subjects are now covered in the liberal arts, the assumption is the same – a…
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