College reps and your high school teachers will invariably tell you that “there’s no such thing as a bad question.” But we all know the truth – there are absolutely bad questions, or at least there are better questions to ask than others. If you’ve already read Part 1 of our guide to college fairs, you’re in the right place. Today, we drill into all that face-to-face time you’ll have with college reps at your next fair. And we’re starting with the questions for you to avoid:

College fairs are a great opportunity for students and their families to browse a large number and diverse range of schools in one evening. Fairs are typically large gatherings and most often held in gyms, auditoriums, cafeterias, or even malls. The rooms can be noisy, warm, and over-crowded – but don’t give up! College fairs are an efficient and cost-effective way to “get to know” many schools in a few short hours.

College representatives will tell you that the nature of contact with students at college fairs varies widely.

Students all around the country are returning to their high schools this fall, and seniors are heading back with the special thrill and anxiety that comes with college applications. Those who have made the most of their time this summer will be pretty close to finishing their college list and will have a serviceable draft (maybe even a finished draft!) of their college essays. But even if you’ve taken care of a huge part of your college apps on your end, you’ll need to enlist the help of your high school guidance counselor to ensure everything is finished by the appropriate deadlines. A little extra thoughtfulness will go a long way towards making your application even stronger, and improving your chances of getting into your top choices. Here are some steps you should take to make the most of your high school counselor.

1. Establish a timeline that works for your high school guidance office

In my former life as an admissions officer, I was often cornered at the end of my information sessions by a student or parent who wanted to know the “secret” formula, the undisclosed algorithm, for getting into MIT or Caltech:

“How many APs should I take?”

“Should I raise that 770 math score to an 800?”

“I play violin, run track, compete on the Science Olympiad team, and volunteer several hours a week. How many other activities do I need?”

How to Ace Tough College Interview Questions

In my time spent as a senior admissions officer at Reed College, I must have interviewed hundreds of students. And I asked weird questions, too. What would be your useless superpower? Is math discovered or invented? If you had one question for God, what would it be? Sub-question: Would you rather he give you the answer to your question or tell you the question you should have asked? My goal was to keep students on their toes, then to catch them off guard, and then, when their expectations had been flipped upside-down, I would find out who they really were.

Most interviewers won’t ask questions quite as odd as the ones I used to ask, but their objective is largely the same: get a sense of the student’s personality and style of engagement.

Where to Begin with STEM Education

When NASA’s New Horizons makes its Pluto flyby this month, it’s not hard to imagine a new generation of students romanticizing the idea of a career in STEM (science, technology, engineering, mathematics).  Some might be taken by scientific discoveries. Others might be blown away with the project’s daring in engineering.  And still others will be amazed simply by the mathematics and physics involved.  The project’s incredible scale is sure to impress upon students the boundless possibilities awaiting those who pursue a career in STEM:  from opportunities to shed scientific light upon the dark unknown, to the prospect of simply thinking mathematically, to the real-world feats of engineering that can take humanity’s gaze into the far reaches of our solar system.

These are exciting times, without a doubt.

Your Guide for High School Tips and Preparing for College

When I was in high school, we used to argue about when you become a senior. Does it happen the second you walk off campus on the last day of your junior year? Or do you have to wait in summer limbo, becoming a senior only when you return for classes the fall? Now that I’m an admissions counselor, I can say definitively that your senior year starts in the summer. And why? Because you have so much you need to do to prepare yourself for the coming fall: coaxing nascent essay drafts into riveting final copies; shaving your college list down from twenty to the final seven to twelve to which you’ll apply;  organizing yourself for your final year of high school and the transition to college.

Do Asians face discrimination when applying to Ivy League schools?  Do they need to appear less “Asian” when submitting their college applications in order to be admitted?  These are questions I often receive when counseling students on competitive admissions — usually when students learn I worked as an admissions officer at MIT and Caltech.  They’re questions I’ve come across in articles such as “’The Asian Penalty,’” most recently featured in The Boston Globe.  And while the questions posed might sometimes lessen the sting one might feel at the possibility of not getting admitted to one’s dream school, the reality is much more complex.

What do college admission officers and high school counselors like to do for fun? Complete surveys, of course! In the spring of 2013, the National Association for College Admission Counseling (NACAC) asked thousands of college and high school officials to share school-specific information about everything from graduation rates and enrollment trends to admission strategies and international education. Earlier this month, NACAC released the results of those surveys in the highly anticipated “2014 State of College Admission Report.” (OK, well, it was highly anticipated by me, at least!)

While parents and students of the Class of 2016 might be more infatuated with this past year’s admission statistics (and not those from 2013), please know that the results of NACAC’s 2014 report represent the most accurate and up-to-date compilation of national statistics surrounding the college admission landscape in the U.S. And while some of the findings were rather expected (colleges’ waitlist use, for example, is still going strong), you may be surprised by some of these stats. Read on to learn what the “State of College Admission” means for you!

As a college admissions consultant with College Coach, I’m frequently asked to compare academics at two different institutions. “Which school offers the better academic experience?”  This is an impossible question to answer because of the incredible variability between institutions and their offerings, not to mention the incredible variability between students (goals, talents, abilities, learning styles, comfort zones, etc.). Nevertheless, it is a question that is asked and so I thought I’d provide an answer… at least to a part of it.

Below is my nearly verbatim response to a student who asked me to compare academics at a large public research institution (call it Big U), a medium-sized public liberal arts and science hybrid (call it Hybrid State College), and a small, niche liberal arts college (call it Lakeview College). Names have been changed to reflect the generality of the discussion: