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!
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!
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”
A Hopes & Dreams exercise; & How to Think like an Admissions Officer
Continuing from the last blog post… (2 sections today)
An Exercise:
Have you ever written down (whether on paper or typed) your dreams for your student/child? Here’s your chance! We’ll get to that in just a sec….
Brand U offers parents and students a fun and rewarding collaboration that will help students maximize their college experience and enter the real world with poise and momentum.
We begin this collaboration by exploring what your hopes and intentions are for the journey ahead. Take the time to express to your hopes for your child, and listen closely to what your child envisions, observing ways you can lend support.
The Exercise: Hopes & Intentions (30 minutes)
Goal: To explore your hopes and intentions for the journey your child will take into adulthood.
Instructions: Write all your hopes and dreams for your student, for college, and after college. How do you imagine your child leading a happy and fulfilled life in the decades to come? Write whatever comes to mind.
Have you thought about sharing this with your student/child? How did they respond?
Have you asked them if they’ve written down theirs yet? Did they share them with you?
(excerpt from BRAND U) Think Like An Admissions Officer – Uniqueness
You’re an admissions officer at a major university. For three very intense months, you spend somewhere between six and twelve hours each day reading applications—hundreds of them—from nice, well-meaning kids, and you have somewhere between 10 and 20 minutes to decide their fate.
In that time, you have to figure out who the student is, what makes her special, and what unique value she can o er the university. Unfortunately, as you flip through the files, you find the same molds repeating themselves, an endless succession of honors students and varsity athletes, math club members and science team leaders, all with good track records, but with little to help you distinguish what’s special.
Your vision blurs. You yawn, stretch, and toss another file into the 50/50 pile.
You reach for another, wondering how much more you can take, when suddenly, you wake from your stupor, reading about a student with unique promise—an unusual combination of passion and talent who has constructed a rock-solid picture of who she is, what she loves, and what she wants out of life.
Her unique experience will add value to your university in ways that no other student can, and her knowledge about your school proves how vested she is in creating her future. You feel a tingling, a thrill of pride as you place her in the acceptance pile, giving her a springboard into a promising future.
It’s moments like these that make the job worthwhile.
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Thanks for tuning in!
Next time we move onto Part 2 from the BRAND U book – ”LOCATING SPARKS: Value and Uniqueness”
www.collegematchus.com
CREATING SPARKS: the need for method
The next section shared here is about the need for a clear head, and using strategy on multiple fronts when taking on the admissions process.
”CREATING SPARKS: the need for method
COLLEGE CAN BE approached in two ways:
• The adult fashion, using a step-by-step strategy to meet the tough challenges of preparation, selection, and admission head-on in an inspired way.
• The adolescent fashion, avoiding the tough challenges with hasty preparation, procrastination, and conforming to what others do.
The college experience, and the many decades of life that follow, are very much determined by the approach to college as it is by college itself. College begins long before students arrive on campus, even before they fill out applications or select schools.
College begins now, while your child is still in high school. The actions and intentions of today create the life your child will lead in the years to come. As a parent, you’ve spent years of steady dedication and sacrifice to give your child a rewarding life.
We realize that time is limited but you can still play the pivotal role of helping your student grasp the magnitude of this moment and the importance of approaching college with a method.
The need for method: college selection
Most high school students, without guidance, will take an adolescent approach to college. they’ll choose by what matters to them in the moment, the thrill of football games or amazing parties or the prestige of a magazine ranking, not realizing that there are far more profound elements that must come into play. As a result, many students select schools without thinking through what they want out of college and where college will take them—a choice which is in many ways a blind leap that lands them in the frustration and regret of dropping out, transferring, and being disappointed at school, all at the cost of lost years and tens, if not hundreds of thousands of dollars.
The Montesano Method makes sure that doesn’t happen.
Through a series of sure-footed steps, Brand U guides students through a process of self-discovery, working organically from each student’s unique talents and interests. through experience with the Brand U method, students build a fire of vision that helps students see where they want college to take them. As a result, when the time for choosing comes, students can pinpoint the undergraduate experience best suited for them.
the need for method: gaining admission
Students have a million things on their minds. Every day brings a constant flux of expectations from parents, friends, peers, coaches, and teachers, just to name a few. With so much to worry about, college preparation can often seem like just another chore.
Out of a sense of duty, students might peruse some websites and attend the required test-prep classes, but ultimately, the applications get filled out with fingers crossed. With admissions becoming more and more competitive by the year, this approach is like a roll of the dice.
Admission comes. Or it doesn’t. Either way, this is a passive, disempowered approach, and we believe a child’s future is far too valuable to leave things to chance.
Therefore, Brand U builds off of each student’s inner fire and sense of purpose to forge an identity that is conveyed to admissions boards through the Brand, a time-tested tool that can increase a student’s chance of admission by as much 92 percent over the national average.
Twice as many schools, twice as many options, all because of a little front-loaded effort.
the need for method: performance in college
An astounding number of college students don’t graduate in four years: over 40%!
Without the support system of home, college can be a time of regression from high school successes to a time of wandering and grasping at external expectations of success for many young people. Many students leave school disappointed with their experience, and approach the “real world” feeling unprepared, with deep anxiety about what they are supposed to “do with their lives.”
These unpleasant realities can be curtailed with a method that makes sure that the transformation into adulthood begins long before the weight of college graduation sets in.
Brand U offers parents and students a fun and rewarding collaboration that will help students maximize their college experience and enter the real world with poise and momentum.
We begin this collaboration by exploring what your hopes and intentions are for the journey ahead. Take the time to express to your hopes for your child, and listen closely to what your child envisions, observing ways you can lend support.”
That should give you plenty to think about. Next time, an exercise and ”Think like an admissions officer.” Thank you for tuning in!
www.CollegeMatchUS.com