THE BRIDGE TO COLLEGE
Deadlines Are Not Due Dates
By Robert A.G. LeVine
It is often said that “work fills the available time.” Although I admit it sometimes goes that way, we do have control over ourselves and our schedules. Unfortunately, young people have been conditioned to confuse deadlines with due dates.
In high school, everyone turns their papers in on an assigned day. Honestly, I cannot remember or even imagine someone handing a finished assignment to a teacher even one day early. It’s just not done. As a result, students get into the habit of focusing on a due date.
In college admissions, the focus should be on quality work and success, which is not the same as filing an application on the final day of an admissions deadline. There are superior – and sub-optimal – days to submit your application.
For highly selective schools, most admissions seasons run (roughly) August 1 through the beginning of January. Usually with “Early” and “Regular” filing periods, undergraduate schools don’t follow “first come, first served” admissions strategies. Filing the moment an application can be filed is not our recommendation for best results. On August 1, most colleges remain closed after summer breaks, and most college admissions offices are either closed or not exactly moving at top speed. In fact, in August and even September, many admissions representatives are focusing on marketing, touring the country (or the Internet) to collect more interest and applicants for their universities.
So, you don’t have to be first. But try not to be last!
You might guess that too many teenagers wait until the last minute to file their college applications. While we often tell our clients “Better, Not Faster,” we also have to build a series of internal deadlines into our service just to entice our clients to do their best work. After all, we invariably ask for more or different information in essays, and proper polishing of essays does not happen when there is insufficient time.
Yet while we must consider how to get the best effort out of our clients, we must also consider how to get the best results out of the people who read the applications. College admissions is sales, and in sales, the buyer is always right.
Take a moment to realize what admissions officers are tasked to do. At peak season, they may read 60 files per day. That’s not 60 essays; it’s 60 files, each with perhaps a dozen or more parts. Do the math. Even with a 10-hour day, they are skimming, not excruciating over every word, letter and comma like you might when writing.
And this happens not just for one day, but for months. Everyone gets tired. Do you want a tired reader?
For this reason, our company recommends that clients submit their applications about one month prior to the deadlines. If the deadline is November 1, shoot for October 1. If it’s January 1, shoot for December 1. Note that you may want to file a bit earlier if an interview is part of the admissions process (i.e., give them time to assign and carry out the interview, as well as write, transmit and read the interview report). If an interview is not part of the process, there is a bit more time available.
It is unfortunate, but many of our clients do not abide by these best practices. With their extrinsic requirements, school and other commitments push the kids around, causing internal deadlines to get pushed back. This is especially true for IB students during the first semester of grade 12. However, keep in mind that college is about your future, while high school will soon be your past. Focus on your future (or, at least, balance your past and future pursuits).
Please, please, please: recognize that you have been conditioned to conforming to due dates, but deadlines are not the same as due dates. Stay on a good schedule for optimal results. After all, getting good admissions results is the reason you file those applications. If you don’t prioritize your future, why should anyone else?
Robert LeVine is the founder and CEO of University Consultants of America, an independent educational consultancy assisting students around the world with applications to colleges, universities and graduate schools. For more information, call University Consultants of America, Inc. at 1-800-465-5890 or visit www.universitycoa.com
FAMILY MATTERS
Communities and Milestones
By Anu Verma Panchal
A few months ago, I had the good fortune to stand by my parents’ side as they celebrated a significant milestone, their golden anniversary. One of my favorite parts of the event was that in addition to uncles, aunts and cousins, we had with us their closest friends, the extended “framily” that had helped my parents recreate a sense of home and family when they were thousands of miles away from the place of their birth.
Circa 1980, with a toddler and 6-year-old in tow, my parents moved to a little town in Zambia called Kabwe. They knew no one and nothing about this new country beyond my dad’s offer letter and one phone call with a relative who had once lived in Africa.
But on their very first evening, there was a knock at the door. It was a young Malayalee couple with two little boys our age. Hearing that a new family from Kerala had arrived, they had stopped by to welcome us. From that one introduction, my parents were immediately absorbed into a group of friends.
The same thing happened every time we moved towns. The news of our impending arrival reached before we did, and we were pulled into existing Malayalee social circles. Our weekends were spent at each other’s houses, uncles in safari suits swilling whiskey, aunties in sarees holding deafening conversations while we ran around and played. As the years passed, my parents grew into the veterans who welcomed new families and organized the elaborate cultural events that gave the community a sense of home away from home.
And all around town – and across the South Asian diaspora – others were doing the same thing. In Tamil, in Bangla, in Hindi, they created communities that served a familial function for each other. Community building seems to be in our genes. Or, as a friend once told me, “We’re like goats ... we can only travel in packs.”
During the college years and in my early 20s, plugging into the local desi community was nowhere close to being a priority; in fact, I reveled in the freedom from it. It was irritating, even, to see the insularity that I imagined permeated those associations. Why move to another country and only hang out with the same people? Why not at least try to assimilate?
It was only when I became a parent that I found myself searching, maybe even yearning, for some small level of connection. I wanted my daughters to learn Bharatanatyam like I had, wanted them to celebrate Hindu holidays and go to the temple occasionally. Does that mean that I want my communities to be restricted by ethnicity, language or religion? Certainly not. I am blessed with close “framily” from many backgrounds, and I enjoy Gasparilla as much as I do Onam and Navaratri.
Yet I am grateful for the generations who came before we did and established everything from the Tampa India Festival to the India Cultural Center so that we now have the option to dip a toe, an ankle or our whole selves in cultural life if we so desired.
A week before my older daughter was due to leave for college, I took her on one of our habitual visits to the Hindu temple here in Tampa. By a happy coincidence, the pujari on duty that day was the same one who had presided on the day that we had taken her on her first temple visit when she was a 6-month-old baby. “You’re the one who carried her to the front of the room when she was born, and now she’s starting college,” I told him. He beamed. “Look at that!” he marveled.
Look at that indeed. That kind of continuity doesn’t just happen. It’s the result of hard work from a lot of people who came before us, many of whom we’ll never even know. The roots they put down gave us the luxury to pick and choose how much we want to hold on to, because some variation of it has been preserved here for us.