College Essays

You assiduously work on your essays and application. You feel really good about your work and think it shares your authentic self. Then you have some friends read it, and they give their opinion. [...]

This weekend, I listened to an outstanding panel from Johns Hopkins called Engineering Skills that Matter and then saw Project Hail Mary. The timing was uncanny. While top STEM coursework is [...]

Written by Lisa Bleich.  Each school that participates in the Common Application or the Coalition has the ability to request supplemental essays ranging from a short answer (150 words) to a [...]

Written by Lisa Bleich We all hear about kids with perfect grades and test scores who are denied admissions at select colleges and conversely kids who were “not as strong” getting in. This [...]

Written by Abby Power I attended my first Independent Educational Consultants Association (IECA) conference in Boston earlier this month. As I listened to the various speakers and presenters talk [...]

Most writing doesn’t happen behind a laptop. It happens when your mind is free to wander and let an idea percolate and clarify itself. So as you prepare to write your personal statements and [...]

By Lisa Bleich “Julia is going to kill me!” I moaned when I discovered the broken test tube in my backpack. We had taken the sludge test home to try to finish the final project for IPS [...]

Written by Lisa Bleich.  Each school that participates in the Common Application has the ability to request supplemental essays ranging from a short answer (150 words) to a longer essay (500 [...]

Written by Lisa Bleich. Last year, with the power outage of Hurricane Sandy and the 2011 October snowstorm still fresh in my mind, I decided to be pro-active and install an electrical outlet [...]

Written by Lisa Bleich. As we meet with our clients to brainstorm for their personal statements (or college essays), it reminds us how much we enjoy delving into the depths of our clients and [...]