Nervous about college?

You should be...
You’ll have plenty of competition from other students applying.

Here’s eight tips that give college-bound students an edge.

1. Get a job, either part-time during school or full-time during the summer, and stick with it. “It shows a good work ethic and reliability,” says Linda Metcalf, the author of How to Say It: Application, Essay and Interview Strategies to Get You the Big Envelope. “Colleges are looking for students who will stick with school and graduate.”

2. Take the most rigorous courses available.

3. Instead of giving your teachers a stamped, addressed envelope for recommendations, tell them you’ll pick up the recommendations on a certain day, which gives you an opportunity to proofread them, suggests Metcalf. This is because teachers are asked to write so many recommendations that the wrong school name or even the wrong student name sometimes ends up in a letter.

4. Instill a sense of service to others at an early age, parent Karen Doskocil suggests. That jibes with Metcalf’s advice to students to commit to some sort of ongoing community service that is meaningful to them, such as regular volunteer work at an animal shelter.

5. Try looking at schools that aren’t what everybody else is looking at, suggests Ellen Hoffman of Bright Futures College Consulting.

6. Visit prospective colleges the summer after the sophomore year, suggests parent Karen Giangrosso. It’s a less task-packed time that the summer between junior and senior year, when the college application process should already be under way.

7. Ask an English teacher to help you edit your college application essay, suggests Metcalf, but don’t let Mom hire a college coach to write it for you. “The universities said they want their essays to sound like they were written by an 18-year-old, not an adult,” Metcalf says.

8. You can save the application fee at some schools if you apply online, says Kaprelian.

September 15, 2008
Cathy Frisinger
McClatchy Newspapers