Spice Up Your Resume

Summer on the beach, tour a national park, hang out with your friends?

No, not for you. First, you have resume-building to do. Here’s five suggestions to make that high school resume pop in the eyes of any college:

  1.    Pre-college summer curricula are much more fun and rewarding than an hourlong campus tour. These well-developed programs give students the opportunity to meet instructors, take courses, and get a sense of college life. The number of possibilities is immense. For example, Midwest students might explore close to home with such offerings as:

Northwestern University has a five-week program guaranteed to improve writing skills for print, online and other media at the Medill-Northwestern Journalism Institute. And, no doubt, better writers are more efficient and precise for every college paper assigned in the next four years.

Or

iLED is a two-week international leadership curriculum taught by Notre Dame faculty in such areas as architecture, business, engineering and global affairs. It includes hands-on learning, collaborative projects, and business and community engagement. 

2.    Make summer a “working” vacation. No matter where the family goes for summer in the U.S., research potential colleges and visit campuses to get a flavor for how you might fit in. Always remember frequent contacts, college fairs and tours show “demonstrated interest,” crucial to most college admission decisions.

3.    Bolster your LinkedIn profile. Connect with executives in chosen disciplines and join LinkedIn Groups of interest. Post questions and answers to others’ Qs. LinkedIn’s value is its networking capability. Connect with like-minded participants.

4.    Internships in a chosen category are often hard to crack for high school students but aim high. There is a wide selection of jobs out there that fit your personality and work interests. One recent Valle Consulting client was a caddy at a local golf club. But beyond learning how to read a green, this teen talked to the executives in his foursomes about their jobs and used research and tips to develop a stock portfolio for a lifelong understanding of how to do well in the stock market.  And don’t forget those Rotary or Elks Club contacts you connected with on LinkedIn. They might be in a field you are considering and will often give an interested teen a “shadow” someone in your chosen profession. A week or a month “shadowing” an executive in that area will give powerful insights into what the job is like on a day-to-day basis, again picking up networking contacts.

5.    Apple CEO Tim Cook said the most important skill for every student to learn is how to code. Even if you are a social studies whiz with little interest in algorithms, coding is going to touch every future career. Get a head start on the nuts and bolts of apps and other tech underlayment and learn Python, Hadoop, Javascript or a host of other possibilities. Check out the coding waters and dip into Codeacademy, edX, Coursera, Khan Academy or MIT openCourseware. Don’t be shy; the water’s fine and you will get the hang of coding quicker than you think.

--Mike Ryan

The Case for ACT/SAT Tutors

Would you ask for help to learn how to drive stickshift?

Or help making risotto?

Or help for a difficult classical guitar solo?

Then why wouldn’t you ask for help mastering high school’s most important tests? 

There’s been a great deal of discussion about more colleges going “Test Optional” on top of the revelation about blatant cheating on the tests.

But despite the news swirling around the ACT and SAT, the reality is that the tests remain a “necessary evil” for every student preparing for college. Every teacher may want each child to learn the required material but realistically won’t have the time for serious preparation on an individual level.

Enter the professional tutor—in a scholastic universe where 75 points on the SAT and 3 points on the ACT can be an important component to make a difference between a reach school and a safe school.

Just like life skills such as driving a car, a tutor will walk your student through every section of the SAT/ACT. Indeed, many parents and students do not realize just how different the two tests are. 

A tutor understands the nuances of the ACT English versus the way the SAT Writing and Language questions work. The best way to remember math formulas is to practice using them—with an expert to guide the way and to identify student weaknesses.

Importantly, after assessing the strengths and weaknesses in all academic areas—from social studies to the sciences, a tutor can focus your student’s energy to improve areas that need more help. 

A tutor also knows how to motivate and encourage on one hand and address the natural nervousness a Big Test presents. This is especially valuable when taking a timed exam. Again, a tutor can help you establish a comfortable test pace for each exam, much like a music teacher illustrates the rhythm of a jazz piece versus a driving rock anthem. Through increasing confidence, pressure becomes an asset, not a hindrance.

So however you prepare for the SAT and ACT, a tutor is a logical and ethical step to success. And while we encourage every parent to invest in their child’s preparation, know that VEC has been down this path before—and can connect you with a tutor who is a good fit for your future collegian.

--Mike Ryan

When Less Is More

There are things a high school junior can put off in life:

--Making your bed.

--That overcooked broccoli on your dinner plate.

--The gum on your sock left on the floor by an inconsiderate sibling.

And then there are some things that require immediate attention.

The updated Common Application essay prompts for the 2017-18 application year have been released. And we can guarantee your first draft of your initial idea can only get better with more thought and polishing. The prompts are:

1. Some students have a background, identity, interest, or talent that is so meaningful they believe their application would be incomplete without it. If this sounds like you, then please share your story. 

2. The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience? 

3. Reflect on a time when you questioned or challenged a belief or idea. What prompted your thinking? What was the outcome? 

4. Describe a problem you've solved or a problem you'd like to solve. It can be an intellectual challenge, a research query, an ethical dilemma--anything that is of personal importance, no matter the scale. Explain its significance to you and what steps you took or could be taken to identify a solution.

5. Discuss an accomplishment, event, or realization that sparked a period of personal growth and a new understanding of yourself or others. 

6. Describe a topic, idea, or concept you find so engaging that it makes you lose all track of time. Why does it captivate you? What or who do you turn to when you want to learn more? 

7. Share an essay on any topic of your choice. It can be one you've already written, one that responds to a different prompt, or one of your own design. 

No need to freak out. Many high schools allow junior and/or senior students to complete a first-attempt Common App essay as an in-class English assignment. Maybe you are already planning or working on yours.

There are a lot of ways to approach this important effort to help you gain entrance to the college of your choice. Try some concepts, some with teacher guidance, some on your own.

Here's one tip, with a little background from a journalist. I call it "Last Before First." Try it before writing your first essay.

Imagine that your essay is going to be the cover story of a magazine.

In the lifecycle of a feature story, there is a PR pitch, an interesting phone call, a dinner-table conversation, a nugget of information, then research, consultation with experts, numerous back-and-forths between writer and editor and a dash of imagination to find a hook to ensure the story will be fresh. Editors may skip all the traditional journalism rigor and jump ahead to one of the LAST things--writing a headline for the story.

Can you captivate readers with four-to-six words that will be splashed across the cover in very large type? If you cannot think of a showstopper that makes others want to read the piece, then you have a problem.

So, after you have a topic, try writing a headline for it and bounce it off mom, dad or your English teacher. Does their expression say, “Wow”? Find that hook that makes your essay one in a thousand.

--Mike Ryan

Feed The Academic Soul

One important college consideration beyond academics is often completely neglected. Food. 

Your son or daughter is going to eat three nutritious, healthy, well-balanced meals every day of each semester, right?

NOT!

We know kids who go off to college and gain 10 pounds by their first visit back home... and a bunch of others who ended up living on Wheat Thins and Triscuits "because everything behind the dining-room glass looked gross."

There are healthy options to be aware of. Villanova offers a bag lunch program for kids who are just too busy to take a half hour out to sit and eat at a table. Oklahoma State meal plan money can be transferred, with some restrictions, from one semester to the next. 

Roasteries and other coffee makers have popped up at multiple high-traffic points on numerous campuses. Starbucks has tested coffee trucks chasing students on the campus of Coastal Carolina University. Stanford has a "peanut sensitive" dining hall. Participants in Oberlin's Student Cooperative Association decide the menu, prepare the food and handle cleanup. And best of all, UC-Davis has a farmers' market on site and allows students to put a small portion of their meal plan budget towards farm fresh veggies and fruit in spring and fall. Yum.

The point is this: When making that last tour of campus before The Big Decision: Make sure your child is comfortable with the food program, and there is no better way than to sample the fare before committing.

-Mike Ryan

Ways To Chart That Post-College Paycheck

Through the current state of human genome mapping, we can now take a small test tube of blood and accurately predict someone's height, weight, age, hair and eye color -- and even what her face looks like.

If biology has progressed that far, is it really possible to project what a college student might make in the job market -- before her first day of freshman orientation? Well, no, not exactly. But it is possible to hit some projected ranges.

It remains a truism that college graduates make $1million more than those who stopped education after high school. But drill down into such data as from the U.S. Census Bureau and there are huge variations both by subject and across majors. Georgetown University's Center on Education and the Workforce has a refined study on income potential.

But there are others. For instance, the Brookings Institution's Hamilton Project parses data by percentile, so that, for example, economics majors' earnings are about three times as large at the 90th percentile compared with the 10th percentile. Where you count economic beans after college matters -- and thus there is stunningly greater value in degrees from such schools as the University of Michigan than your local commuter college. Thus one can arrive at a much narrower range building off university quality.

There also is a data farm called Educate to Career, which ranks about 1,200 universities and colleges -- showing, for instance, starting salary averages by major within those schools. The median social work degree grad starts around $44k, while the median engineer begins in the $80s.

Readers can drill down to find out, for example, the average SAT score at Carlton College, and that the school produced 34 computer science grads in recent numbers.

The ETC College Ranking Index is full of interesting metrics used in its algorithms. Some of the metrics include: Major, weighted against national norms; percentage of persons employed within one year of graduation (weighted on an occupational trend basis); and the all-important net cost of in-state tuition. Using Purdue University as an example, one can learn the four-year graduation rate is 37.5%, the "net" annual price of tuition is $5,414 and the average engineering grad starts out at $47,500.

The ETC index has an interesting take on why Ivy League schools do not fare as well as other top universities. But the bottom line is that the index can help identify schools providing a quality education with proven career placement at a lower net cost than at some of the elite universities.

-- Mike Ryan

California Dreaming

Have you gotten tired of Midwest winters? Are you thinking four years of shorts and flip-flops at a California college is sounding like more your style?

Get in line.

California universities have long attracted young women and men, but we have just passed a significant milestone—a number as relevant as 61 was to baseball—before steroids helped shatter the single-season home-run record.

UCLA has received 102,177 applications for the Class of 2021, the first time an American university has received more than 100,000 freshman applications--each with a $70 application fee unless waived.

Do the math. That's a staggering amount of competition for what will be somewhere around 6,500 acceptances.

Cal State-Long Beach, home of mascot Prospector Pete, got nearly 62,000 freshman applications, and USC received almost 52,000 from prospective Trojan freshmen.

And this is in a state cutting back on education budgets.

So while you and your parents are preparing your college app packages and thinking about going West, have you assembled all the details, filled out the questionnaires, answered all the "optional" interrogatories, checked all your spelling and grammar and written a 1-in-100,000 college essay?

If not, get cracking! Those California beaches require more than a little legwork.

--Mike Ryan

Take The Team Approach To A Good College Fit

Aristotle was an early proponent of "learning by doing". Consider a hot topic in education these days called PBL, project-based learning.

Yes, the book is still part of the U.S. History curriculum, but increasingly teachers are assigning say, a World War 1 documentary to a class team. PBLs are knocking down the barrier between book-learning and post-academic real-life projects.

It's time to consider a PBL as an effective method to grow big-schooler knowledge about the college hunt.

There is so much more information about college classes, professors, application tricks, essay tips, undergraduate cultures and more than there was just 5 years ago.

It seem to me that it is time for high-schoolers to recruit a cadre of college-eager peers, say four or six like-minded students who agree to set up a calendar of obvious tasks and regularly meet for progress reports.The group's goal would be to guide each other through the rush-to-apply process. In K-12 education, PBL has evolved to address core content through rigorous, hands-on learning. The PBL skills learned seem a perfect fit on college prep, whether discovering the quirkiest essay prompts of the University of Chicago, why Boston College kids refuse to use lunchroom trays or how Oberlin students can hang a Picasso in their dorm rooms.

Bonus points to inviting members to your PBL group from other schools who will no doubt have a fresh perspective on what's important.

-- Mike Ryan