Last week, I was sitting in a movie theater watching Personal Statement, a documentary film about a group of students attending resource-challenged schools in Brooklyn—schools where each counselor was responsible for guiding over 600 students through the college admissions process. Top students in each school were called forth, not only to navigate their own college applications, but to provide guidance for other students who needed the help. Think about it: first-generation college students, students who had absolutely no familiarity with the world of admissions, were called upon to explain the process to their peers. There are students in our society who are not only pulling themselves up from their bootstraps, they’re manufacturing their own boots, too—boots for themselves and boots for their peers.

Once an international student has decided upon their set of undergraduate studies in the U.S., there’s often a lot of planning that goes into making their stateside academic journey a success. But the academic calendar isn’t the only aspect of U.S. collegiate life that needs plotting. Don’t find yourself unwittingly caught off guard by the academic breaks your American peers might more easily fulfill at a moment’s notice by virtue of their proximity to home. Some university breaks aren’t long enough for a complicated international trek to see family and might, instead, require some thoughtful alternatives. Here’s a quick primer on the breaks an international student might encounter while studying in the U.S. and a few quick ideas for taking full advantage of them.

A common question we are asked as college admissions consultants is, “How do you address a disability in your college application?”  Or, to step back a bit, “Should you address a disability at all?”  Former MIT and Caltech admissions officer, Zaragoza Guerra, tackles this complicated question in the latest installment of our video series, Ask the College Admissions Expert.

So you’ve decided you want to be a part of Nova Nation, but the only thing standing between you and your dreams of cheering on the Wildcats in Finneran Pavilion is the Common App and a supplemental essay.

The college application process can be a source of stress for any student, but is often particularly overwhelming to international students hoping to study in the United States. The U.S. is geographically and culturally diverse, and so are its colleges. With close to 5,000 U.S. colleges to choose from, how do you narrow your choices down to a manageable list of no more than ten schools to apply to?

For students applying to U.S. colleges and universities from abroad, it’s not only a challenge meeting the benchmarks defined by one’s own national curriculum—either secondary school leaving exams or applications to one’s own set of national universities—there’s the added work of deciphering how local successes translate over to USA admissions standards, a system with its own set of quirks. Will a set of classes taken abroad even fulfill the course requirements of a U.S. college? As with most answers: It depends.

The U.S. college admissions process can be perplexing to international and domestic students alike.  Why are some seemingly qualified applicants denied admission, while others with outwardly similar qualifications are accepted?  The answer lies in the fact that U.S. college admissions officers are not tasked with simply admitting individual students, but with shaping a diverse class that meets a variety of institutional needs.

I’m an international student living in India and will be applying to universities in both the UK and the US. The UCAS application requires a personal statement, which I’ve already written. Is it okay if I use that personal statement for my main Common Application essay?

—It’s Raining Essays in Mumbai

You’ve stood in awe of JPL and its incredible feats of engineering. You’ve marveled at observations made at the Keck and Ligo observatories. You’ve even dreamed of registering for a Kip Thorne class or taking a seat in the hallowed Richard Feynman Physics Lecture Hall. The only thing standing between your STEM achievements so far and your dreams of attending the fabled California Institute of Technology—that storied STEM playground—are six little essay prompts. Consider this our small contribution to your STEM future—a bit of advice in tackling Caltech’s freshman application. Now get to it:

Identity. How do you define it, describe it, put it down on paper? And for seniors applying to colleges and universities, what does a school want to see when they ask about your identity on a college application?

Take Duke’s optional essay prompt, for example. I’ve met many a student who’s hit a mental snag when trying to tackle it: