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College Match

Achieve your Dreams

A College Admissions Exercise – an excerpt from 4 Steps to College

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Exercise: Third-Party Recognition
(30 minutes)

Goal: To make sure your child’s hard work and achievements get the validation they deserve.

Instructions:
1. Once your child has started developing in areas of leadership, service entrepreneurship, performance, art, writing, research, scholarships, or academic competition or scholarship, discuss ways that achievements can be used to:
• Raise awareness for a worthy cause
• Build community
• Inspire or educate others

2. Explore avenues for achievements to get profiled, reviewed, or published through print, television, online media, or social media.

3. If your child gains recognition at the local level for good work, scale the recognition upwards to the state, regional, national, and even international level.

You can find this exercise on p. 59 in BRAND U: 4 Steps To The College of Your Dreams.

David Montesano – ”Embrace a GROWTH MINDSET in Order to Gain a BETTER COLLEGE MATCH.”

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It is important for students and parents of college-bound students to embrace a growth mindset in order to gain a better college match, win admission and merit awards, and get set up to thrive in college and their chosen careers.

Decisions about where to go are not always wise: 1 in 3 students transfer, only half finish in 4 years. University counselor/student ratios are 300:1 at public schools and 200:1 at private schools.

Among the roughly 1.7 million students applying to four-year universities, the top 20% apply to roughly the same 50 to 60 universities, overcrowding these admission pools.

The right university affects:

  • A student’s choices and path in life
  • The quality of their social network, career connections and graduate school placement

Along with university choice, paying for tuition and making sure students find meaningful work are also concerns that parents share.

My book, BRAND U – 4 Steps to the College of Your Dreams, helps parents and students like those at your school set up a strategy to understand their personal journey through life and how college can be a tool to help them get where they are going.

Download your free copy here >  BRAND U – 4 Steps to the College of Your Dreams.

The book presents my unique method in 4 steps that parents and students can easily follow:

  • SPARKS (9th Grade): We identify the most critical element for your university application, your spark.
  • FIRE (10th Grade): With your spark, now you build your fire, finding and developing your abilities and experiences that make you exceptional. This process isn’t just about college, but life.
  • VISION (11th Grade): What kind of undergraduate experience is right for you? We avoid superficial criteria like magazine rankings and instead guide you to the best undergrad fit for you.
  • BRAND (12th Grade): Here, by positioning how you’re different and what you bring to each university, we turn the admissions game around so that you’re in control and colleges are pursuing you.

In today’s highly competitive admissions environment, the normal admissions approach just isn’t enough. David takes a open mindset approach, putting students and their families—not the colleges!—in control of their personal growth as a part of the admissions process. By attending David’s presentation, you will learn everything you need to know about 1) selecting the right school; 2), getting admitted; and 3), paying for college the smart way.

About David Montesano
David Montesano is a leading global educational consultant and the founder of College Match U.S. The first admissions strategist in the United States, David has 20 years of experience helping students select and get in to the college of their dreams.

PBrand U - 4 steps to the college of your dreamsrior to launching College Match in 2001, David worked with noted admissions expert Loren Pope. David has recently discussed an open mindset for college admissions as a panelist with Open Mindset author and Stanford University Professor Carol Dweck.
David is the author of two books—“Brand U: 4 Steps to the College of Your Dreams” and “Stand Out to Get In!”—in which he details his Montesano Method for college admissions. The Montesano Method is also available in a six-part video course available at Unifluence.com.
For more information about David’s admissions strategies, and to work with David, please visit www.collegematchus.com.
http://www.collegematchus.com/success.shtml College Match is the leading provider of strategic advising for college and graduate school bound students.

Transformative Paths: Leadership & Entrepreneurship

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How are you differentiating your leadership and entrepreneurship from the rest of the other ”leaders” and ”entrepreneurs”?

Transformative paths: Leadership

Colleges want students who have shown a capacity to lead. While colleges appreciate seeing leadership at school, they’re most impressed by leadership experiences that don’t fit a pre-existing mold, roles that individual students develop through their own initiative, using original ideas and out-of-the box thinking.

Joseph from Phoenix, Arizona:

Sparks: Love of tennis, outgoing, selfless

Igniting Fire: Unique leadership

Joseph came to us as a sophomore in high school, a good student and competitive tennis player in Phoenix, Arizona, but with little development of other skills. Together, we sought ways that he could use his passion for tennis to develop skills of leadership and encouraged him to look for ways he could serve the needs of his community. In the spring of 10th grade, Joseph contacted his local Boys and Girls Club and learned that Phoenix had few summer programs to help inner-city youth stay out of trouble, and so Joseph created a plan for a tennis clinic for low-income children in the area.

Working with his parents, he visited local pro shops, got sponsors for his clinic and acquired used racquets and balls for the kids. Next, he worked with the local Boys and Girls club to secure tennis courts. That summer, Joseph’s camp grew in popularity, increasing from just eight kids the first week to fifty by the end of the summer. We urged Joseph to take his success and scale it upwards, so during his junior year he wrote a handbook on how to start tennis clinics in other areas. Then the following summer, Joseph expanded his inner-city tennis program to two other cities across the country.

Discovered Brand: Community Leader, Entrepreneur.

 

Transformative paths: Entrepreneurship

While the idea of starting a business or nonprofit may seem daunting, experience has shown that once a young person puts a plan on paper for a good idea, the doors of possibility fly open.

There is something undeniably inspiring about a young person taking initiative and starting something from scratch. Without fail, the students I’ve worked with have found no shortage of enthusiastic supporters to help them realize their vision. The process starts with creating a concept and learning how to draught a business proposal.

For parents, entrepreneurship offers the great satisfaction of collaborating with kids to build a business venture. Creating a unique venture demands individuality, responsibility, and maturity, but it’s also a lot of fun. The hardest part is just getting started.

Ali from Santa Clara, California

Sparks: Compassion, love of people

Igniting Fire: Entrepreneurship

We began working with Ali as a ninth grader. Unsure of her talents, she had sincere interest in her family’s Romanian background. The following summer, she volunteered at an orphanage in Bucharest. Gradually, she became aware of her sense of compassion and desire to help. She was so taken by the children’s needs that when she returned to her high school in Silicon Valley, she got her friends to help her organize a nonprofit to raise awareness about the children’s hardships and how financial support could have a meaningful, long- lasting impact on these children.

In the subsequent years she held fundraisers, which illustrated the management skills, organization, and publicity that she had gained. Meanwhile, she brought awareness to her community and raised over $20,000 to improve living conditions for the Romanian children in need.

Discovered Brand: NGO Founder

We hope you enjoyed this free snippet from David Montesano’s book ”4 Steps to the College of Your Dreams”. Next time we look at 2 short stories on transformative paths in service and creativity.

Stay tuned!