Tutor Talks: College Admissions Essay Help from University of Pennsylvania’s Anastasiya

School is back and session, and many high school seniors now have the impending task of beginning their college admissions essays. See how InstaEDU tutor, and University of Pennsylvania student Anastasiya K. tapped into a unique life experience to find inspiration for her writing prompt.

Anastasiya-K. shares her college admissions essay writing tips

How early did you start writing your main college admissions essay?

I started writing in early Fall (probably September or so) of my senior year.

What was your approach to starting the writing process?

Even though my main essay was a response to an already determined topic, the first thing I did was brainstorm qualities that set me apart from other students, qualities that made me unique. After that I incorporated these qualities in my essay, connecting them to the topic in the best way I could.

What was your essay about?

I had to describe myself as a person who was either movable, immovable, or moving others. I chose “movable” and based my entire answer around a real life example. When I first came to America 5 years ago, I landed in New York City. It was extremely overwhelming. While outside on the streets and among the tallest buildings I had ever seen, I had to keep moving just to make sure I wasn’t crushed. In that moment, I realized that trying to get somewhere in life was just like trying to get somewhere in NYC. In both cases, no matter what, I had to keep moving.

What do you think the main take away or theme from your essay was?

I wrote my essay with the intention of showing my determination not just in one situation, but also on a more global scale. It was my best quality at that point, so naturally I had to write about it.

What did you learn through the college essay writing process, either about your topic, the process, or about yourself?

I definitely learned a lot about myself. I applied to over 20 colleges, so besides my main essay I had to write about 20 more. All the different topics and questions made me wonder, first of all, who I was as a person. In my high school – as, probably, in most high schools – achievement was determined by how well one could follow the template, not by how well one expressed oneself. Writing college essays provided me with an opportunity to do just that – express who I was.

What’s one thing you wish you knew before you submitted your college admissions essay?

Definitely proofreading. I cannot stress this enough. When I go back and re-read my essays now, I cannot believe I put “the” instead of “a,” or forgot a comma. It always happens, even if you think you’ve proofread it enough. I advise the students to write the essay early and proofread at various time intervals until it needs to be submitted. After a certain period of time, some sentences won’t seem as perfect as they did when you first put them down.

What tips would you offer students who are starting to try and figure out their essay topics?

No matter what you do, you will NOT know exactly what the university wants to see in your essay. There is just no way to know. So instead, focus on putting the real YOU into those essays. Include personal detail. Make sure the members of the admissions committee really have an idea of who you are as a person before they make the decision. Your GPA is just a number. Your ACT score is just a number. You are not defined by these numbers, and that is exactly what you need to show them.

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If you’re looking for more college admissions essay writing help, stay tuned for more posts in the Tutor Talks series on college admissions essay writing — coming throughout this fall on the InstaEDU blog. And make sure to get in touch with Anastasiya K. and our nearly 2,000 college admissions tutors on InstaEDU for one-on-one college essay writing guidance. Be sure to follow us on Instagram @instaedu_tutoring and on Snapchat at ‘instaedu’ to unlock more Tutor Talks content.

Are you Brilliant? If so, you can earn $1,000

Have you checked out Brilliant yet? Brilliant offers weekly challenging problems in math, physics, and computer science, and has a community of over 100,000 intellectually ambitious students from around the world.

What’s even cooler is that you can earn prizes through your activity on Brilliant – Brilliant t-shirts and lanyards, books, and today — InstaEDU tutoring time.

Need extra incentive?

Brilliant has just released a programming competition to write an algorithm to fight to the death against other algorithms. Cooperate and compete with other players at different points in the game to survive and win. There are five grand prizes of $1,000 each, as well as “I survived” t-shirts for surviving algorithms.

Guest Post: Tutoring and the team approach

Image courtesy of Flickr user Ding Yuin Shan.

As a Harvard and Berkeley-educated  private college consultant for 13 years, I constantly stress to my students, especially those who are looking at highly selective colleges, that their GPA is of profound importance. In fact, in my many conversations with admissions officials, one thing is resoundingly clear: your GPA and the strength of your curriculum are the most important components of your college application. Of course, there are other parts of the college application, but let’s face it – if your GPA is on life support nothing in your application is really going to compensate for that.

I’ve already been recommending InstaEDU to my clients, because I see applying for colleges today as being unlike anything I’ve seen in my professional experience. The fact of the matter is, that having superior grades and having a true team approach to helping a student succeed in high school is not only advantageous but almost a prerequisite for admission into top colleges today. Many of the families I work with not only have a private college consultant, but also have a private ACT or SAT tutor, and now with the advent of InstaEDU there are now on-demand tutors for virtually every subject imaginable at a high school or college level.

I see this as a distinct positive. It rewards parents and students who have a holistic view of their education. These parents provide students a broad range of tools with which to give themselves the best chance possible of admission into highly selective colleges. As I tell the families I work with, the more advice you can get from various resources, the better.

For those students out there who are looking at highly selective colleges, be put on notice that your GPA is exceptionally important and the use of qualified individuals to help guide you through the process can give you a distinct advantage in an increasingly hard-fought battle. I should know: I worked for Harvard University, I interview for the school, and this past year less than 6 percent of all applicants to the University got offers of admission. Get all the help you can get and good luck to you in the process.

About Jason Lum
A graduate on full scholarship to MIT, Harvard and Berkeley, Jason serves as a private college consultant with clients across the United States and internationally through his company, ScholarEdge. Jason’s work with high school students and families has been profiled by USA Today, Bankrate.com, CNBC, and US News & World Report. Jason is a certified professional independent college consultant by UCLA. Follow Jason on Twitter and Google+.

Your timezone, your scheduled lessons

We just rolled out a small feature that should make it easier to schedule lessons with your favorite tutors — no matter where you (or they!) are located. Now, when you go to schedule your lessons, you can easily schedule in your own timezone. You’ll notice in the lesson proposal below, the timezone is CDT for central time. Your tutor will likewise be able to schedule in his or her own timezone as well, making scheduling a lesson super simple.

We’ve automatically detected your timezone, but if for some reason it isn’t right, updating your timezone takes just a couple of  seconds on your My Account page. Being able to schedule in your own timezone should make it easy to quickly set up lessons with tutors in different timezones in the US and around the world. Let us know what you think!

Rethinking the Five-Paragraph Essay: Dos and Don’ts for Excellent Essays

Many teachers have students start out writing essays using a five-paragraph structure because it’s a simple way to structure a paper—an introduction, your top three points to make, and a conclusion that ties it all together. Unfortunately, more likely than not, the five-paragraph structure will be more of a hindrance to getting your point across than a helper. Collegiate and professional writing almost always strays from the five paragraph structure that your teacher forced upon you in Freshman year English. Here’s why:

Some topics just don’t fit into three sub points

Let’s take for example, an argumentative essay on the Miranda Supreme Court case. In its decision, the court says that the Miranda warnings are required for cases of “custodial interrogation.” Therefore there must be both custody and interrogation. In order to write an essay on the Miranda decision, you only have two main points to argue, so there’s no reason why you should force a third paragraph. Similarly, you might construct an argument that needs four supporting paragraphs, like an essay on William Wordsworth’s “I wandered lonely as a cloud,” which is a four-stanza poem. These are just two examples, but you can easily see why sometimes arguments just don’t break down neatly into three subtopics.

Some sub points are bigger than others

If you look at how much smaller this sub point is than the one above, it’s pretty clear that one above deserves a full paragraph and the other does not. An unbalanced five paragraph essay looks sloppy—a little like this part of the post.

If you’re moving away from a five paragraph essay format, you’ll still want to use some of the thought processes that were drilled into you in High School. The first step is, of course, to think of your thesis; what’s the main point you want to argue? From there, you can move into flushing out your argument through expertly crafted paragraphs.

How to structure a paragraph

A paragraph, by definition, should be structured around an idea central to supporting your main thesis or argument. An easy way to structure a thesis is through a list, though there are other, more elegant ways. If you use a list then you already know what topics your body paragraphs will be in a general form.

One example of a very good outline template. Credits to NewView Options

Examples are always helpful for illustrating, so if you were writing an English essay on The Great Gatsby, your thesis could be something like: “F. Scott Fitzgerald uses symbolism, figurative language, and Gatsby’s disappointment to criticize the American Dream.” Now say, you are writing about the symbols that Fitzgerald uses in the novel to criticize the American dream, you would not want to structure your entire paragraph around three different symbols that mean different things. Rather than talking about the Green Light and the Eyes of Doctor T.J. Ecklebert in the same massive, page-long paragraph, break it up—one (or multiple) paragraphs devoted to each symbol. After all, each one is an idea and thus deserves it’s own paragraph. Then within each paragraph, use evidence along with analysis to support your thesis. You can start out with interpretive claims (e.g. “the Eyes of Doctor T.J. Eckleburt represent the eyes of God”) and then back it up with specific examples.

In general, here are the DOs and DON’Ts of structure when writing essays:

Do

• Link your evidence to the overall idea to prove the thesis (it also helps the essay flow better and make transitions seamless).

• Use specific topic sentences—it’s ok to have paragraphs with only one piece of evidence as long as what you have to say about it is important.

• Keep related topics close together. The reader doesn’t want to have to flip three pages back to remember what you wrote about earlier.

• Introduce sufficient background before your analysis.

• Outline and re-outline your topics and points until it all makes sense.

• Include analysis! Usually papers that score low do so because they spend too much time on background and don’t include enough analysis.

Don’t

• Put two ideas in the same paragraph (even if they are slightly similar).

• Have a paragraph that’s too long. If it’s longer than 3/4s to a full page, it’s probably a run-on paragraph.

• Use such advanced sentence structure that no one can understand you. Simple sentences are easy to read and understand.

• Judge an essay by its length (alone).

Summary: Developing a paragraph should be as natural as an idea. Essays are, after all, just a way of communicating human thought into an easy to read format. Let the paragraphs and structure of your essay adapt to the size and power of your ideas.

From tutee to tutor: Meet Yamini N.

There comes a time for every student where a little extra help is needed. It doesn’t matter if you’re finishing a masters degree at Harvard or are starting Freshman year algebra; certain classes and topics can be super challenging, even for the straight A student. That’s why we were thrilled to get a note from InstaEDU tutor Yamini N. She’s starting at Yale in the fall, and wrote us a quick note about her experience using InstaEDU as a student — and why’s she’s now signed up as a tutor:

I was finally in the homestretch of my high school career — senior year. But that didn’t mean it wasn’t challenging. I had loaded my schedule with many challenging courses, including AP Computer Science. Unfortunately, I am not naturally adept at coding. I was in desperate need of some extra help. Finally, by a stroke of luck, I came across InstaEDU via a Google search.

From the moment I signed up as a student, I haven’t ever felt unsatisfied. I was able to get up to speed in Computer Science and my test scores improved. I also received tremendous support on essay writing and understanding physics concepts from the amazing InstaEDU tutors. I love how InstaEDU is so convenient to use. When I am stumped on a homework problem, I simply log on and a tutor is ready to help me. I’ve finally reached the finish line of my high school career and will be attending Yale next fall!

I am so excited about being a tutor for InstaEDU. I want to give back to InstaEDU because of all the help I received from the tutors when I most needed it.  It will be a different experience being a tutor rather than the student, but I am so grateful I am part of the InstaEDU family and want to continue to encourage other students to realize their potential just like how InstaEDU helped me to achieve my dreams.

Thanks to Yamini for sharing her story! If you want to set up a lesson with her, just head to her profile and request a lesson.

Should you take the ACT or the SAT?

Listening to dedicated students argue over which is better, SAT or ACT, is almost like watching the Capulets and Montagues battle it out over which will have control of the fair city Verona. Just like Romeo and Juliet, taking the SAT and the ACT involves a huge amount of peer pressure and flirting with the “unpopular” one at your school may be difficult. So the question comes down to, which test is best for you? There are a number of factors to consider:

1. Geography of resources

Map of the popularity of SAT and ACT by state. Image from Study Point.

Some locations do have better resources for one over the other. Check out your local resources such as school guidance counselors, the library’s collection of study books, and any opportunities offered by schools and community centers (sometimes community centers even host free practice tests!). The SAT is generally more popular (and respected) on the coasts while the ACT is generally used throughout the middle of the country, as you can see in the map above.

If you don’t have a library or set of school resources nearby, another option to consider is online resources. If you go that route, it doesn’t matter what resources are available in your city or town, since everything is available online. Plus, online resources (intensive courses, tutoring, etc) are frequently less expensive than their live-in-person counterparts.

2. Colleges

No matter how much school is about learning, the SAT and ACT tests are both about getting into college–– not learning. Though most colleges accept both tests, some colleges treat the two differently. Some schools (e.g. Yale) require that you take subject tests if you take the SAT but do not require the subject tests if you take the ACT. There are some important differences to consider for this though:

• The SAT doesn’t test science. So if you aren’t as comfortable with science topics, the SAT may be a better fit.
• The ACT doesn’t require the essay. This means that if the colleges you are applying to don’t ask for the essay, you don’t have to do the essay! Here’s a list of schools that DO require the ACT with Writing.
• Both the SAT and ACT allow you to send only your best scores, but typically, only the SAT allows you to use super score. With super score, the colleges take the best score for each section and add them all together to get your composite score (as opposed to just taking the best day)

John’s superscore takes the best of each section and adds them together. Image from Cardinal Education.

3. Type of test (and which suits you best)

The SAT and ACT are fundamentally different tests with vastly different formats. Each student will likely end up liking one significantly more than the other depending on his or her learning style. The SAT is an “aptitude test” while the ACT is an “achievement test” (according to the official ACT website).  An aptitude test is supposed to measure logical reasoning skills and does not require specific content knowledge in order to do well whereas an achievement test measures the student’s knowledge in specific subjects that have been taught in school (i.e. the ACT mathematics section tests on Trig while the SAT mathematics section tests on problem solving).  The SAT and ACT are also very different in time and structure:

And remember…

No matter which test you are taking:

DON’T stress out about it too much. One test will not determine your success in life. DO get a good night’s sleep before the test. DON’T put off studying until the last minute. Lastly, but most importantly, DO the best you can and be proud of what you accomplish.

Need some extra help now that you’ve decided which test to take? Our ACT and SAT tutors are ready to work with you!

Quinn Winters is a summer intern at InstaEdu working on content creation and marketing. He will be attending Case Western in the fall.

InstaEDU test prep is back and better than ever!

Whether you’re looking for a last-minute boost before your ACT this June or planning to spend your summer preparing to take the SAT in the fall, we have great news for you: InstaEDU test prep is back!

If you’re a student taking the SAT, ACT, SAT IIs, ISEE, SSAT or PSAT, you can now easily set up lessons with your perfect test prep tutor on InstaEDU — or even work with someone on-demand.

For example, get ready to master the SAT with Xavier, a Philosophy major at UPenn with three years of SAT tutoring experience. Or prepare for the ACT with Nigel, a neurobiology major at Harvard who has spent 2 years helping others ace the test.

Test prep tutoring is now built right into InstaEDU, meaning that you can work with an experienced test prep tutor for as little as $24/hour. If you’re a new student, you can even get a 2-hour free trial.

What tests do you have coming up?

How to Ace Your AP Exams

If you’ve been in class all year, it’s hard to believe that you’re just a few short weeks away from AP exams. On the other side? Projects, low-key reading assignments, maybe even a movie or two during class. But since the only way out is through, here are our tips for prepping over the next few weeks.

1. Collaborate with Classmates

There’s so much content in each AP class. Divide and conquer when it comes to putting together study-guides to help lessen your individual workload. Just don’t divide too much. Having friends help you get through reviews materials is a good idea. Relying on them to do everything is a bad idea. Find the happy medium in between, where every group member is contributing and working together to make sure everyone understands the content and everyone has the tools needed to review solo later on.

2. Make a Plan

With just a few weeks left before exams begin, put a plan down on paper (or on your computer — whichever works for you). Determine how much content you need to review before exam day and then divide that up over the days you have left to study. For almost any AP course, there will be material you feel comfortable with and topics you feel less prepared for. Don’t spend too much time studying the stuff you know; you can review that the day or two before the exam. Instead, focus your time on diving into the most difficult topics.

3. Understand the Structure of the Exam

Being able to pass an in-class quiz is different than acing the AP exam. Make sure that you not only know how your exam is structured, but also have done lots of practice in that format. If you’re taking the AP Calculus exam, for example, know when you’ll be allowed to use a calculator and when you won’t. Prepare for both. You should also practice working for the entire length of the test. Three+ hours of test-taking is exhausting, so you’ll want to make sure you can be just as focused going into hour three as you are in hour one.

4. Don’t be Afraid to ask for Help

Meet with your teacher sooner rather than later if you find there’s a topic you’re struggling with. Need more help when you get home from school? Find a parent or tutor who can talk through some of the most difficult concepts with you. Here on InstaEDU, we have hundreds of tutors who can help with multiple AP tests, so if you want to work through a tricky AP Chemistry problem and then strategize for the AP English Literature free response section, for example, we have you covered.

Get Connected To a Tutor ASAP Through InstaEDU’s Chat List

All your favorite tutors, all in one place, all easy to connect with. That’s our goal with InstaEDU’s new chat list, now available for all signed-in students and parents. Like many of our new features, the chat list makes it easier than ever to work with an awesome tutor whenever you’d like a hand. Here’s what it looks like:

Tutors who’ve help you out before are listed at the top. For a quick reply, look for tutors with green dots next to their names— that means they’re currently online. Looking for a new tutor? We also show you recommendations for great tutors in your areas of study. You can see the number of positive reviews, school and major of each tutor without navigating away — and start a conversation instantly. If you want to learn more about a tutor you’re chatting with, just click their name on top of the chat box once you start talking, and you’ll be taken directly to his or her profile page. If you want to work with the tutor, you can easily set up a lesson from the chat window. Just click the “Propose a Lesson” button.

If the InstaEDU team is around and available to help, you’ll also see us listed under “InstaEDU Support”. We’re happy to answer any questions you might have about using InstaEDU.

Any questions? Let us know here, or chat with us through our new chat feature — we’re here to help!