I look forward to reading your blog every week! Regarding the “constructive criticism” part… I think that the college admissions process is so hard because you rarely get feedback from colleges about WHY you didn’t get in. It’s easier in many respects to get a bad grade, because it’s often obvious (maybe after the fact) why you got the grade you did. Even if someone breaks up with you, you’ll often get a reason why (maybe not always a truthful one, but an answer nonetheless). But, to my knowledge, colleges don’t send back a letter saying *why* you were deferred or not accepted.

Also — and this is admittedly a big generalization — my experience is that girls tend to personalize criticism more than boys (getting a bad grade means I’m a bad PERSON, not just a struggling math student, and my teacher now HATES me).

Anyway, I just wanted to write a comment — look forward to reading next week!

Suzie

Aim high. Aim even higher than you think is reasonable. Really, what have you got to lose? If you’d be satisfied with UIC [the University of Illinois at Chicago], apply to the University of California at Berkeley or the University of Texas. If you can see yourself at one of those state schools, take a crack at the University of Chicago. If you think you could handle the University of Chicago, why not Cornell? If you think Cornell is within your reach, go for broke — Harvard, baby! And if you’re so confident that you know you can get into Harvard with a snap of your fingers . . . dare I suggest Oxford?

Think “1-2-4-2-1″: If you apply to 10 colleges, then make one of them your dream school — the one you’d choose to attend if you were twice as smart, twice as rich and twice as good-looking. Next choose two schools that you think represent the absolute limits of your academic reach, like the Frisbee that you can catch, just barely, if you leap for it. The next four should be schools that you’re fairly confident that you can get into and fairly certain that you can succeed at, without selling yourself short. Two should be schools that are a little less competitive — you know you can get in — but offer something special that would make them worth the tradeoff. And the last one is your safety school, if Murphy’s Law kicks in and everything that can go wrong does.

To give you an example of this strategy, if I woke up tomorrow and were in high school again, here are the 10 colleges I’d apply to: [1] Harvard, [2] University of Chicago, Columbia University, [4] University of California at Berkeley, University of Washington, NYU, Amherst College, [2] St. John’s University, Carleton College, [1] University of Wisconsin at Madison.

If you flat-out can’t afford to apply to 10 colleges, at least apply to six: one dream school, two limit-pushers, two good bets and one safety with something special. Do not let anyone talk you out of applying to the dream school.