College Admissions Consultant

We recently wrote a newsletter about college admissions consultants. It focused on how more and more students and their parents are turning to college consultants in the hope of improving their chances of gaining admission to highly selective colleges like those in the Ivy League. We stressed how it’s important, though not necessary, to select a college admissions consultant who is a  member in good standing of the National Association of College Admissions Counselors (NACAC). And even with this affiliation, you should peruse the website to see just who you’re thinking about hiring. As a point of information, the Founder of Ivy Coach is a member of NACAC in good standing. We choose not to list this affiliation on our website because we find that most people don’t know what NACAC means and thus it’s a waste of valuable real estate on our homepage.

If a college admissions consultant recommends working in a soup kitchen for a day to bolster your college application, you might want to consider shopping for a different college consultant!

Anyhow, with all of this in mind, we’re not surprised to see a college consultant quoted in the “New York Times” putting forward some really ill-advised information. We’ll take out the college admissions consultant’s name in this blog so as not to embarrass. See if you can find what’s wrong with the text below quoted from the “New York Times”…

“Students do not have to spend a summer abroad for an essay-worthy experience. When Mary Lang Gill was a rising senior at the Atlanta Girls School, a private school, she hired [College Admissions Consultant X], an independent college counselor and the author of “[College Admissions Book X],” a college admissions guide. After learning that Ms. Gill loved to paint, [College Consultant X] connected her to the Florida Highwaymen, a band of renegade painters active during the 1950s and ’60s. ‘I spent a whole day with them,’ painting and observing, said Ms. Gill, who just graduated from Dickinson College. ‘It was one of the coolest things ever, and I love that and I got to put it on my application.’ [College Admissions Consultant X] said she spent a great deal of time with students helping them find the right topic for the college essay. ‘Picking the essays is as important as writing them,’ she said. After that, she said, the stories ‘write themselves.'”

Were you able to figure out what’s wrong with the above text? We’ll give you a hint by asking you what’s wrong with the following sentence: Working in a soup kitchen for that day back in October really taught Sam the importance of giving back. A day?! College admissions counselors don’t care what you did for a day! They want to see activities that weave a narrative throughout your young adulthood. This college admissions consultant found the student something to do for a day and then urged the student to write about it in her college essay? Yikes!