A couple weeks ago I invited Sharon Epstein, an award-winning essay writing and college interview coach, to talk about tips for awesome essays. If you didn’t get a chance to read the post, here it is. Read it. It’s really good!
This week, Sharon invited me to write about resumes for her blog, Applying to College.
Check it out and, and always, let me know what you think!
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
This is a great question because while the essay can be very important, the topic isn’t necessarily what makes it important. What matters in an essay is how you tell your story. An essay really can be about any topic, big or small, but it’s how the student connects to the essay and what they are able to reveal about themselves that matters. A student who can show some depth, who can demonstrate a level of reflection and who can get me to see that what he is writing about truly matters to him is a student who has done a great job with their essay. The best way for a student to accomplish this is to really invest some time in their essay and make peace with the fact that they will write and rewrite several times before their essay is done. In fact, what their final essay looks like may not look anything like the original concept when they started.
Q: We are just starting the college search and our son is a sophomore – where do we start?
For freshmen and sophomores, the focus should be on helping them figure out what is important to them, what their strengths, skills and abilities are and introducing the idea of what college is about. If you go to my website, you will see that I offer a package called the “Early Exploration Package for Freshmen and Sophomores.” Basically, I help students at this stage work through a self-assessment while exploring some long range goals that tie into the college process.
Q: How do we go about figuring out our financial aid & scholarship options?
Again, this is time sensitive for the most part since you cannot apply for financial aid using the FAFSA until January 1st of the student’s senior year in high school. If he or she decides they are applying to any private schools, they may be required to also fill out the CSS Profile. The Profile, however, can be filed prior to January 1st. While you can’t do anything about filing just yet, what you can do is spend some time figuring out how much all of this is going to cost. There is some detail to this, but essentially you want to know what you will be expected to pay for school so that you have some time to plan. If you go on the College Board website, you can use their EFC Calculator to do just this. EFC stands for “Expected Family Contribution” and is a term you will get to know quite well as senior year approaches. Your EFC is what a college will expect you to pay and it is how they calculate what they will offer you in the form of aid, grants and loans. The higher your EFC, the more you will be expected to contribute and the less aid you will expect to receive. As of this past October, each college and university has been mandated to publish a net price calculator on their website. So, as your student identifies schools where he or she would like to apply, you can use their net price calculator to get a feel for how things might look financially. Here is a blog that I wrote about the EFC calculators.
Q: How to choose a career/major?
This is a great question and one that troubles many students as they work through this process. To be honest, I do some assessments with students to help flesh out their values, interests, personality style and skills – or what I like to call their VIPS. Once you have a good idea of what is important to a student, what they are interested in and what they are likely to do well at, it is a lot easier to present options for majors and to point them in the direction of some useful career exploration. If it turns out that their interests are all over the place, then you want to be looking at schools that offer a wide variety of majors and where a student can start off as an undeclared major and then take some time in first semester to continue their career exploration.
I wouldn’t worry about this issue too much as of right now, especially if your son or daughter is only a sophomore or junior. Over 50% of students end up changing their majors during their freshman year anyway.
Happy Mother’s Day to all the awesome moms out there! I hope you’re having a great day!
If you have any thoughts you would like to share on “A Conversation About College,” please use the comment box below – I would love to hear from you! You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
I’m writing you from upstate New York this weekend. My wife’s grandparents live in Rochester and we decided to take a long weekend to visit them. Following my own advice, I took some time out of our vacation weekend to visit two colleges. Since we were right in Rochester, I chose to take a tour of Rochester Institute of Technology on Saturday and then, on our way back home to Connecticut, we plan on stopping off at Ithaca College. My wife is alumna of Ithaca, so it will be nice to see it through her eyes.
While touring RIT on Saturday, I was reminded of an article I saw recently that talked about how it really doesn’t matter what you choose for a major. In most cases, unless you need pre-professional training to be a nurse, accountant, speech language pathologist or an engineer, this is true. Just look around you and talk to the people you know – I will bet that most of them don’t even hold a degree that is directly tied to the work they do. And this brings me to what I want to talk about today. Sometimes, your major really does matter and a recent article in the U.S. News offers several reasons why a degree in a technical field such as computer science, software programming, or engineering really can matter.
According to the article, the Bureau of Labor Statistics projects over a million new technical positions will be created by 2020. As our world becomes increasingly more driven by technology, data and information sharing, the need for talented individuals who understand how to design, produce, manage and secure these technologies will also increase significantly. In this case, majors do matter. Programs like computer science, information technology, software engineering, computer engineering, and information security can help point you in the direction of an exciting and growing career path. Don’t get me wrong – a degree alone is not going to deliver you to the promise land where you dream job is just waiting for you – having experiences along the way that support your brand as an aspiring technology professional while also showcasing your skills and abilities is what’s going to help you attain the jobs that you want the most.
In other words, you need to get out of the classroom and into a professional environment. You need to be able to show what you can do, not just what you learned. In the world of college, this is called experiential learning and it includes options such as volunteering, research, internships and co-ops. In case you don’t already know, a co-op is a full-time, paid work experience that can offer a student the chance to develop their skills and abilities while making valuable industry contacts.
RIT is a great example of a school where experiential learning is at the core of everything they do, especially in their co-op program, where over 3500 students obtain placements each year. A lot of these students are enrolled in programs similar to the ones mentioned in the article. As early as sophomore year, they are going out into the real world and obtaining valuable work experience and industry contacts. Some of them will complete multiple co-ops and, coupled with a degree that relates to critical needs in the world, these students will find success in their professional lives.
If you have any thoughts you would like to share on experiential learning and how majors matter (or don’t matter), please use the comment box below. You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
I’ve been asked if there are real benefits to completing a gap year experience and while I can talk about the changes a student may undergo, I decided to ask someone who had done a gap year about what it had done for them. My wife’s sister, Audra, is a recent television-radio-film grad from the Newhouse School of Public Communications at Syracuse University, and her life is such a constant adventure that we often joke about where her next postcard will come from. She has spent a gap year in Australia, studied abroad for a semester in Italy and also spent two months in India working in Bollywood right after graduation. She is currently living in Brooklyn pursuing a career in television but I know her next adventure is lurking right around the corner. She is, without a doubt, one of the most interesting people I know.
Over the holidays, we had some time to catch up and I asked her about what she learned from her gap year experience that changed her as a student and a person. I loved her response so much I wanted to share it here:
I’ve learned that the best experiences have always been the ones that have initially scared me. I take more risks now because going away for a year and succeeding has made me feel like I can do anything. Therefore, taking a semester abroad in Italy felt like no big deal. Spending two months in India working in Bollywood felt like a mini-vacation. Moving to New York City to pursue a career in television right after felt like just the next step. Yes, these subsequent endeavors frightened me a little, but mostly they felt like adventures. You start saying to yourself, “If I can spend a year in Australia, I can definitely do…” If an experience scares me because it’s new, different, or far from home, I know that it will push my limits and make me a stronger and more interesting person overall.
Because of my Gap Year, I started college knowing that the world was so much bigger than Syracuse University. For four years I never let college become the only world I knew, or what some people called a “bubble.” I took more risks. I took classes that people questioned me for. I was a TV, Radio, Film student taking two languages because I wanted to travel more. I became interested in geography because it had a global skew. I took environmental classes, graphic design classes, and learned SCUBA diving, all because I knew that an array of knowledge and skills would make me more well-rounded going into a television-related career. Sometimes college students pigeonhole themselves into the requirements of one major. They don’t think about the possibilities that exist beyond college until it’s too late, and instead they go to class because they have to and they party because they think that’s what it’s all about.
Having a gap year behind me made me a more curious and risk-taking student right from the beginning. I went into college having seen how enormous the world is and how many opportunities there are. College became not something I had to do, but a collection of experiences that would make me a smarter, more versatile, and more capable person. In other words, I made myself into a person that someone would want to hire, and most importantly, I became a person that I was proud of.
We’re very proud of her too.
If you would like some assistance with your college search or financial aid process, contact me today for a free 60-minute consultation.
Here’s what other families like yours are saying about how Dobler College Consulting made a difference for them.
The other day, Lynn Field wrote an opinion piece in the Washington Post that had a really great message. She talked about the irony of December holiday celebrations while, at the same time, high school seniors are being subjected to incredible amounts of stress and anxiety due to an increasingly complex and competitive college admissions process. She closed out her article saying, “As educators, parents, psychologists and counselors, we need to encourage teenagers to do their best for themselves — and often this can mean setting their sights on a good-enough school. The fact of the matter is, no matter what school you attend, you can get the education you desire.”
It is this message that I hope a lot of you will take to heart. A great college education is so much more about what you put into it, than it is about where you got to school. If you are fortunate enough to get into a highly selective school, then good for you! I hope you will make the most of the opportunity by networking with faculty, staff and other students. I hope you will work hard in your courses and challenge yourself to be excellent at what you do. I hope you will complete an internship or a co-op, study abroad, volunteer your time or get involved in a club or organization that it is tied to your passions. At the same time, if you go to your state’s flagship public institution, a regional state university or even the local community college, I hope you will still do the same things.
You see, it’s about the collective experiences you have during your time in college. If you choose to just go through the motions and “receive” your education, your experience will leave a lot to be desired. However, if you really buy into the opportunities around you, engage with the people you meet and go and “earn” your education, you will be so much better for it.
As you continue to work through the college admissions process, do your best and forget the rest. Find the school that is the right fit for you and invest 100% of yourself into the experience.
I invite you to post any comments or questions below. You can also email me directly at eric@doblercollegeconsulting.com.
Eric Dobler is the president and founder of Dobler College Consulting. Follow him on Twitter.
