Category: Admissions Process

The Common Application essay prompts for 2014 are here!

Lawrence University is an exclusive user of the Common Application. The newly overhauled version of the “Common App” for the 2014 academic year goes live on August 1, 2013, but the Common App board has already released the new essay prompts. If you want to start thinking about the prompts, and maybe even drafting some early versions of your essay, here is what you’ll find on August 1:

Instructions. The essay demonstrates your ability to write clearly and concisely on a selected topic and helps you distinguish yourself in your own voice. What do you want the readers of your application to know about you apart from courses, grades, and test scores? Choose the option that best helps you answer that question and write an essay of no more than 650 words, using the prompt to inspire and structure your response. Remember: 650 words is your limit, not your goal. Use the full range if you need it, but don’t feel obligated to do so. (The application won’t accept a response shorter than 250 words.)

  • Some students have a background or story that is so central to their identity that they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story.
  • Recount an incident or time when you experienced failure. How did it affect you, and what lessons did you learn?
  • Reflect on a time when you challenged a belief or idea. What prompted you to act? Would you make the same decision again?
  • Describe a place or environment where you are perfectly content. What do you do or experience there, and why is it meaningful to you?
  • Discuss an accomplishment or event, formal or informal, that marked your transition from childhood to adulthood within your culture, community, or family.

A guest blog from one of our favorite people

Marty O’Connell is a force of nature… and a college search Zenmaster. As the Executive Director of the non-profit organization, Colleges That Change Lives, she has been serving up anecdotes as antidotes to the high-stakes, high-pressure, win-at-all-costs college admission game that repeats itself year after year. We have the good fortune this week of traveling with Marty O’Connell and nearly all of our fellow Colleges That Change Lives as we make our way up the East Coast this week at a series of information nights. We will do the same in August all over the country. (For locations and dates, visit CTCL.org.)

In the meantime, we’d like to share Marty’s perspective, in her own words, about how to approach the college search. It’s a perspective she recently shared with our friends in the Southern Association for College Admission Counseling, and one that we invited her to share with you. (Thanks Marty! ihrtluhc)

We trust you will find it equal part wise, calming, and invigorating. You may even find some surprises in it.

If I made a bumper sticker for how to approach the college search process it would read: College: It’s About the Journey, Not the Destination. Too often, students will race through their secondary school years, compiling tallies of courses and AP credits completed, joining activities to lengthen their resume, taking and retaking SAT and ACT tests and always keeping one eye on the prize of the college destination. These same students arrive at college only to repeat this process with a goal of admission to graduate and professional school or the perfect first job. We live in a goal-focused society where becoming a mindful, life-long learner, instead of an educational trophy hunter is not an easily achieved state of mind. If I had the magic wand for education, my wish would be that students might approach the college search, as well as their day-to-day learning, with a greater appreciation for the long view: it is not about the race to the end, but instead what you learn from each step in the journey to get there!

Too often the college search begins with a flawed approach by using ranking lists that tout the entering class statistics, rather than focusing on what happens during the four years students are enrolled. The late author Loren Pope, of Looking Beyond the Ivy League and Colleges That Change Lives, often known as the “Ralph Nader” of college admissions, said that choosing colleges based on the entering statistics of the freshmen class is like choosing a hospital based on the health of those in the ER—it’s the treatment that really matters; in the case of college, it’s what happens between the first year and graduation. Researching colleges based on student outcomes will highlight many colleges that outperform the Ivies and Name Brands but don’t have the benefit of name recognition. The research from the Higher Education Data Sharing Consortium on the Undergraduate Origins of Ph.Ds finds lesser known colleges listed in the top ten in various categories of producers of future Ph.Ds, often ahead of the usual suspects.

If you had to choose a spouse or partner for life, would you like to use a publication ranking them by income, IQ scores, and reputation as reported by others who have never met the person? As a culture, we love consulting consumer guidebooks and lists for a shortcut method to choosing electronics and cars; the college search requires a more thoughtful, personal and time consuming approach. It can’t be reduced to rankings with numerical values when it requires starting with who the individual student is and why they are going to college, their needs and desires, and learning styles and interests. This self inventory is the start for finding colleges that “fit” for the individual, instead of starting with the assumption that only the “Top 20” on the USNWR and other rankings lists have any value. These ranking guides sell big, but their value (or lack of it) in the college search process can certainly be diminished if students, parents and counselors go after fit, rather than name recognition. Students and their anxious, hovering parents would do well to add some lesser-known colleges to their search process, where the chance for gaining admission is greater and the outcomes the same or better than those colleges admitting a fraction of applicants.

NSSE: The National Survey of Student Engagement is a wonderful resource for gathering information about college outcomes and provides a list of the right questions to ask during the college search. Most importantly, how quickly students engage in the academic and co-curricular life of the campus will make the difference, not only in their early success as an undergraduate, but in on-time degree completion and in reaching their goals beyond college.

The current weakened state of the economy and worry over the cost of attending a four-year college has made the option of attending community college and transferring to complete the bachelor degree a very appealing one. It can be a positive experience if a student chooses it because it is a good fit for them and not just because it will save them money. Community colleges have changed dramatically since their rapid growth in the 1960s, when because of their “open admissions” policies, they were too often erroneously labeled as options only for those with no other college choice. This is a much different case today when community colleges attract top high school students with honors programs that rival those at competitive four-year colleges. If students apply the same investigative process in considering a community college as they do with four-year colleges: visiting campus, sitting in on classes, eating a meal, meeting students and professors, they are less likely to feel like they “settled” instead of chose…

Perhaps the Irish poet Yeats had a better idea for that bumper sticker with this quote: “Education is not the filling of a pail, but the lighting of a fire.”…

[So, too, we will add, should be your college search.]

 Martha “Marty” O’Connell’s 35-year college admissions career includes posts at large and small colleges, beginning with Rutgers University in New Jersey and ending with McDaniel College in Westminster, MD. In July 2006 she began her role as Executive Director of the non-profit organization, Colleges That Change Lives, Inc., which has a mission to advance and support a student-centered college search process that looks beyond the college rankings industry.

(For the record, we think she is awesome.)

Ready to make your deposit online, only to be thwarted by internet-dwelling gremlins?

We hear that from time to time.

If you are ready to join the Lawrence community for the coming fall, and wish to pay your $400 tuition deposit online, you might find the following steps helpful to guide you:

  • Log into your Voyager account.
  • Select the link, Your Account, and you will be whisked off to the “Student Account Online” page. [If prompted to log in again, use the same information you used to log into your Voyager account.]
  • Once you successfully get into the Student Account Online, you will see a page that looks like this (presumably without all the same apps on the toolbar):

  • On this page, find the Items for Purchase box. It’s the third box down in the left column.
  • Select Tuition Deposit, and you’ll get to a page that looks like this:

  • Select Accept Admission $400 (we’re thinking positively here).
  • Select Add to Shopping Cart
  • The rest should be familiar to you if you’ve conducted a credit card transaction online.
  • Note: if you find the $11 service charge distasteful (we’re not too thrilled about it ourselves), you can either
    • submit through the same system the e-check/electronic funds transfer, for which there is no fee (woohoo!)
    • submit your deposit the good old-fashioned way by dropping (1) a check along with your (2) confirmation of enrollment card into the Business Reply Mail envelope we sent with your offer of admission.

Rest assured that Lawrence University is way more user-friendly than this process might otherwise suggest.

However you confirm your enrollment at Lawrence, just know that we’ll be delighted, thrilled, overjoyed, jazzed, [insert your own status here], that you have.
Welcome to Lawrence!

 

If you are waiting for access to your Voyager account…

You may have received a letter from our financial aid office encouraging you to apply for financial aid, and giving you a bunch of instructions about how to use your Voyager account to track your financial aid documents.

Many of you—dutiful future Lawrentians that you are—have followed our instructions only to find yourself unable to log in. Below is a summary statement of how we have heard this makes you feel:

Here’s the good news (sort of): It’s not you; it’s us.

We are still in the process of building user profiles for all of our applicants so they can use Voyager, a process that will be complete in the next couple of weeks.*

Once that process is complete, we will send you—via snail mail—your username and password.You can, however, still start the financial aid application process while you wait for your Voyager access to become available. Our priority deadline to apply for financial aid is March 1.

If you have questions about this, or need to know right now whether we have your financial aid documents, please connect with your Lawrence admissions counselor.

Honestly, get in touch with us. We’re happy to help.

*If you’re interested in technical stuff, we are exporting files from our admission system to our student record system. You’d think that would be a quick process, but when we’re dealing with thousands of applications and student records, you want to be more than 100% certain that all the data are right. We wouldn’t want to send the wrong information to the wrong people.

(Sad face designed by Tobias F. Wolf, from The Noun Project.)

What we mean when we say “Our Early Action notification date is January 15”

With our notification date right around the corner, we’d like to remind our applicants that Lawrence University still does things the old-fashioned way: we mail our Early Action admission decisions via First Class postal mail on January 15. Even though our decisions will be going in the mail next Tuesday, student decisions should arrive at their mailing addresses sometime later next week… unless the United States Post Office has developed a new super-fast way of getting their mail trucks around, in which case it might arrive sooner than that. (In spectacular fashion, we might add.)

Why postal mail? A staggering majority of our applicants we have surveyed say they prefer their admission decisions in their mailboxes, not their inboxes.

Rocket image designed by Cris Dobbins, from The Noun Project. Truck image designed by Michael Pangilinan + Mel Barat, from The Noun Project. (Mashup designed by an admissions dean who shall remain nameless.)