Learn to dance with admissions: I heard that "showing interest" will help me get in. How do I do that?
By Rachel Hartigan Shea and Ulrich Boser
Challenging course load? Check. Decent test scores? Check. Eloquent essay? Check. Strategy for dealing with the admissions office? Uh-oh. You thought you'd done everything within your power to get into your dream school. But in fact, there's still one more subject you need to master–the etiquette of dealing with the folks in the admissions office. We asked admissions officers and guidance counselors for advice on handling such unusual–and awkward–social situations as reporting your own bad behavior or answering questions about where else you plan to apply. Among the things we found out: Confessing to a silly sophomore suspension won't derail your application, but listing all of your other college choices might. Read on for more surprising tips:
I heard that "showing interest" will help me get in. How do I do that?
Rory Gavin used her car. After she was wait-listed at Wake Forest University, the 17-year-old drove 12 hours from her home in Massapequa, N.Y., to Winston-Salem, N.C., to pay the school a second visit–and to demonstrate to the admissions office that she was still eager to attend. She was one of the first to be admitted off the wait list last May.
Colleges want to know how much high schoolers want them. It gives them a better handle on which applicants will enroll if accepted, preventing the expensive error of too many, or too few, students come fall. As a result, many schools will record your every contact with the campus. If you order a video tour of Atlanta's Emory University, an admissions officer will note the request in your application folder. E-mails to Miami University in Oxford, Ohio, will be logged into a database. Most institutions naturally construe a campus visit as a sign of serious interest, so you should be sure to travel to the schools that top your list–and let the admissions office know you've stopped by.
But don't, as Stevie Wonder sings, just call to say I love you. With every contact you should be either updating admissions officers on recent achievements or seeking information about the school that you cannot find in the brochures. Ask how many students stick around campus over the weekend, for instance. Or ask about the closest mosque or Methodist church. Don't go overboard, however. "So many kids make the mistake of being overly aggressive," says Tom Parker, dean of admissions at Amherst College in Massachusetts. "It does more harm than good."
Will admissions officers think I'm a pest if I check on my application?
Depends on what you mean by "check." Trying to find out whether you've been accepted before decisions are released will most definitely irritate admissions officers. But checking that your application is complete could stave off disaster. Katherine Nuckols, a sophomore at Elon University in North Carolina, didn't realize until March of her senior year that the College Board hadn't sent her SAT scores to the colleges. She had to postpone higher education for a year and go through the whole process again. The second time around, she says, "I was that annoying person who called every single day." She ended up getting into all of the 12 schools to which she applied.
