A perfect Christmas gift for the son/daughter or grandson/daughter who is college-bound.
Here is the e-book on Barnes & Noble,
Here is the printed version:
Here, the Kindle and paperback on Amazon.
May your holidays be joyful and heartfelt!
Ranking the Colleges…Top colleges that feed alumni into grad school programs.
A WSJ Inside Higher Ed article:
…for getting into Yale Med, Chicago Business and all those other elite business, medical and law schools. Below, our list of the top 50 “feeder schools,”
based on our count of how many of their alumni started this fall at 15 select grad programs (see “Behind the Rankings”). The rankings are based on the
number of students a college sends to a grad school divided by the college’s class size—our Feeder Score.
One thing to keep in mind that the ranking does not mention – the number of graduates from a particular school that apply to grad school but instead choose to postpone grad school to instead undertake another endeavor – i.e. getting a job in order to get some work experience.
download the pdf here wsj_college_092503
Or see the graph online here.
BUILDING FIRE: transformative experience
What kinds of transformative experiences has your student been able to realize?
IN CHAPTER 3, we explored ways to set your child’s sparks on fire through unique paths of transformation. Now we move forward, exploring the specific types of unique experiences that help our students develop into formidable admissions candidates.
As we discussed before, high schools across the country segregate kids into types: the math kids, the science kids, the jocks, the popular ones, and the squares. The purpose of this chapter is to help you and your child realize that regardless of whatever labels peers or teachers might want to apply to your student, this is his/her time to pursue their deepest drive. This is their time to define a sense of purpose and the vision of the life they want to live.
Over the past two decades, we’ve found that the following six types of experience offer students extraordinary opportunities for growth and are excellent ways to further define passions and skills:
• University programs
• Personalized employment
• Competitions and scholarships
• Research
• Personalized international experiences
• Publishing and performance
Transformative Experience: university programs
Participation in a summer program at a university has many benefits. First, it can show experience to committed learning away from parents, offering students a chance to learn under highly-regarded professors and observe the atmosphere of collegiate life. It can also prepare them for development outside the familiar world of their hometown and school. Moreover, most universities offer higher-level programs that can both expose a student to collegiate-level instruction or shore up weak spots in one’s GPA. Most major universities offer such programs, many of them with merit-based scholarships.
Jenny from Manhattan, New York
Sparks: Writing Skills, persistence
Building Fire: University program
When we met Jenny, she was a sophomore and an aspiring poet. With this in mind, we urged her to submit her work to various summer programs, and she won entrance into the prestigious University of Iowa’s Young Writer’s Workshop, where she spent the next summer developing her work under published authors.
With their guidance, she returned home with a polished portfolio that she was able to submit to multiple competitions. The following school year, she continued her development as a writer, traveling cross-country to deliver poetry readings in Ithaca, NY and at Hugo House in Seattle. That spring, she was awarded a National Scholastic Award for creative writing. The subsequent year, with these credits, she gained admission to the highly-regarded English programs at Cornell and Sarah Lawrence as a result of her work.
Discovered Brand: Published Author
Transformative Experience: employment
Getting a good job in an area of strong interest is a great way to develop skills, confidence, and a sense of purpose. What you don’t want is for your child to settle for random jobs. Time is ticking, and the skills that she doesn’t develop today will have to wait until tomorrow. The job that puts students on a path to self-discovery and development will propel them that much further in life, expanding horizons and creating excitement about the future.
Bill from Honolulu, Hawaii
Sparks: Positivity, leadership Building
Fire: Unique employment
Bill began volunteering at a local YMCA in 9th grade, and by his junior year, he had become a student athletic director, organizing leagues and teaching kids in after-school programs the rules of basketball and indoor soccer. During this time, one of the kids, Jack, caught his attention because of the hard time he had following directions. After contacting the family, Bill learned that the boy suffered from an acute case of autism.
While working with Bill on his college development, we advised him to research autism, and Bill got in touch with learning disability experts to find out ways to help Jack. Over time, he became a coach and mentor to Jack and other children who had learning challenges. The result was that his college essays revealed a high degree of maturity and compassion, and won him admission and merit award offers into Haverford, Whitman, and Lewis and Clark.
Discovered Identity: Community Leader, Mentor
Thank you for reading our blog!
Next time – more transformative experience stories about students – stay tuned!
Fueling the Sparks – a 30 min exercise
What did your student tell you when you asked them about all the ambitions they have?
Have you not done that yet? No problem! Give this 30 minute exercise a go and then you’ll have something really tangible to work with and you’ll know more about your student/child in the process.
Next time: Part 4 – IGNITING THE FIRE: Transformative Paths
Part II: FIRE – Finding Fire & Life’s Intentions
HOW ARE YOU FUELING YOUR STUDENT’S GROWTH IN ORDER TO MAXIMIZE THEIR OPPORTUNITIES?
IN THE SPARKS section, we looked at ways to kindle your child’s unique talents and interests. Now, we take those sparks and ignite a fire of vision and purpose and create clarity and momentum for the college selection and admissions process.
There are great challenges ahead, but when young people light the fire of their unique identity, they become driven, fueled by inspiration toward amazing possibilities.
The world puts people into categories. In high school, kids get typecast as jocks, preps, hippies, cheerleaders, nerds, thespians, and band geeks. Our goal is to help students realize that they determine their own lives, that by pursuing their talents and interests through unique paths and transformative experiences, they can build strengths and passions into identities they can develop in college and throughout their lives.
FINDING FIRE: life intentions
TO MAXIMIZE YOUR student’s opportunities moving forward, we want to look at the intentions that will fuel his or her growth. We dig into the hopes and dreams to find the wells of ambition that inspire the best your child has to offer. In the table below, examples of hopes and dreams are listed at the top, and below each one, the surface ambitions versus the deeper ambitions.
Table 4.1—Example Life Goals of Students
These are natural ambitions students often have, so let’s probe the underlying intentions:
Being a professional singer is appealing in many ways, such as for the pleasure of being sought after and famous. However, the desire for fame is hardly a good motivator (or nearly everyone would be famous). Looking more closely, we find that beneath fame there are heartfelt desires—to make people happy and to express creativity through performance. ese intentions can be lived out in many positive ways and can bring great satisfaction, whether on the stage or off.
Being a successful software developer would allow one to be rich and powerful; however, that desire hardly achieves anything, or else we’d all be billionaires. On the other hand, the ambition to improve people’s lives and to pursue an invention can spark a journey to success that can take many different forms and drive unique growth opportunities.
Being a Nobel Prize winner in science sounds appealing for the honor of being remembered and celebrated, but on a deeper and more meaningful level, this desire is rooted in the twin ambitions of helping the world in some major way and pursuing scientific discovery, both of which can be developed in many different ways.
Following the examples above, collaborate with your child to uncover the deep personal and service ambitions that underlie his or her hopes and dreams. these core ambitions are the intentions that we’ll use to drive the experiences to come.
Thank you for tuning in!
Next time – an exercise called ”Fueling the Sparks”