June 2025

I hope your summer is off to a great start! After a quiet, even boring, May where I had minimal contact with clients while they handled AP exams, projects, and finals, it’s great to be talking with students again.

I’m not necessarily anti-technology, but I’ve always been a late adopter and a bit of a minimalist. I didn’t have my own personal email address until around 2008. I have an iPhone 14, and it’s my first iPhone. I don’t use Siri, Alexa, or any other app where I talk to my device. No TikTok, no Facebook, no Twitter, no Snapchat.

This is all to say that I’m just now getting around to thinking about AI. In the past week, I’ve had two interesting interactions. The first is actually a client’s interaction: she had ChatGPT come up with an aptitude quiz and then analyze her answers to see what insight it could give her about her college major or career. And it had an immediate effect: she began thinking about social work and education as career fields she hadn’t thought about before. That being said, it didn’t necessarily offer much wisdom—just two more job listings for someone we already knew was compassionate and engaged with the world. It had zero effect on the colleges I’m recommending for her to look at. But even though the results were so-so, the process was amazingly quick and easy. I don’t know that the results from a traditional career aptitude test, or an online one like YouScience, would give her much better results, and they would have taken more time and money. So there’s a new use for AI that may come as no surprise for you, but was pretty eye-opening for me.

Another interaction had similar mixed results. I’ve had a few clients in the past interested in joining their college marching bands, and I have a few more coming up. So it’s time I add to my basic understanding of that process. Out of curiosity, I decided to spend five minutes seeing what ChatGPT gave me. I told it I was a high school senior who is involved in my high school band and interested in joining the marching band at a big university like UT Austin or UCLA. And I asked how I go about that. It gave me pretty good answers…and it also gave me made-up web links that don’t work. So I still ended using a basic Google search to find the actual websites to double-check the answers ChatGPT gave me.

When it comes to college admission and my immediate work with high school students, I know that the intersection of AI and essay writing is on everyone’s mind. I am going to try using AI to help me with my next blog post, and I’ll report on the process and what I learn. Until then, scroll down for blog pasts from the past few weeks and past few years that are relevant right now, as well as other admission news—lots of which concerns AI.

—Benjamin

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Here’s what I covered on the website in May:

What should rising seniors do this summer? Go on college visits. Write and revise a college mission statement. Put together a plan. Talk to your family about money and the cost of college. Draft essays. Narrow down your college list. Set reasonable deadlines, as soon as August 1. And take care of yourself.

What should high school students do this summer? You should not do anything that is boring or harsh just because you think it might “look good to colleges.” Colleges prefer that you are in interesting person, and there’s nothing interesting about wasting your time and energy just because you’re insecure about someone else’s approval. Don’t jump through any metaphorical hoops (or literal ones, either, I guess) based on vague ideas of what colleges want.

Three Quick Questions:

The full Three Quick Questions archive. I ask the same three questions:

What is a course, tradition, program or event that is unique to your school?

Naturally every college wants to recruit the perfect student--high grades, high test scores, involved in their community, leadership...everything. But what kinds of imperfect students tend to flourish at your school?

When people come to visit your school, what's a place off campus that you recommend they check out while they're there?

Have a look at this:

The surprising role of public universities in forging America’s leaders. (Education Next). If you widen the definition of "leadership and influence" to something more than "roles that Ivy League graduates fill," then it turns out that being an Ivy Leauge graduate isn't as important for reaching a role of leadership and influence.

Here are some blog posts from the archive that are good for this June:

On college admission and baseball. As a kid, I had a very basic understanding of baseball. I thought the only goal of the batter was to hit a home run. I only understood the big hits that everybody cheered loudly about. It was a simplistic understanding. I’ve come across plenty of people who think about college in ways similar to my childhood view of baseball. They’re focused on the home runs: getting accepted to famous and prestigious university. They think of colleges other than top-ranked “elite” schools as a consolation, as a type of loss. Students (and parents), let’s expand our understanding.

How do you write a great application essay? There’s a common misperception that your essay needs to be some kind of “sob story” that gets tons of sympathy from the readers. That’s not true.

If I’ve said it once… I thought I’d explain the thoughts and motives behind some of the sentences I use most in my job as someone who writes about college admissions and advises students on their own admissions paths.