If someone ever looked at my notebooks from school, it was easy to tell that I wanted to go to college. Stickers ranging from “I love UC Berkeley” to “Future Harvard Student” were plastered on the covers, and my extensive college list was on at least one page of each of my notebooks. However, the closer I got to the end of my junior year, the smaller the list would get, until the point where I did not find anywhere I wanted to go. Sure, some of these schools looked great on paper, but I could not find a place I could call “home.” Was I being too pessimistic? Why didn’t I like the schools everyone wanted to go to? With only a summer left to finalize my college list, I pondered on millions of these questions, wondering if I would ever find “the one.” It wasn’t until I attended the National College Admissions Conference at Stanford that I discovered the place I would fit in.
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collegematch2015
Words of Inspiration from the Class of 2020
The 2016 National College Match application deadline is right around the corner! To help applicants in the final push, we asked QuestBridge Scholars who were matched in the 2015 National College Match to share their advice. Here’s what they had to say…
“Just do it! There is nothing to lose and the world to gain! It is worth the time, the effort, and the emotional stress involved.
Don’t let yourself or anyone else discourage you from applying to your dream college because you never know what life may have in store for you.” Continue reading
Decisions, Decisions
It’s admit month, and you know what that means! Acceptance letters are coming in fast and it can start to feel overwhelming. So how exactly does one make the financial college decision? Below is a list of five factors I took into account to decide what college was the right fit for me.
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Helpful Advice for Graduating High School Seniors
The foreseeable end to the college application process is just around the corner! At this point in the year, some of you have probably received offers of acceptance to institutions around the country. But many of you may be waiting on some last final schools. In either case, here are some things to keep in mind:
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Your end of the year grades still matter
Even if you have already submitted your deposit to
the college you will be attending, keep in mind that guidance counselors still need to submit your end of the year grades. Continue reading
Dear QB: I’m on a college wait list. Now what?
If you’ve been put on a college’s wait list, it may feel like you’re in the purgatory of college admissions decisions. Neither a clear “yes” nor a downright “no,” the wait list can be an unsettling place to be.
Although there isn’t a foolproof method to getting of a college’s wait list, we’re here to help you navigate this uncharted territory. Here are a few tips to help you demonstrate your continued interest to the college(s) at the top of your list: Continue reading
College Interview Tips (From an Introvert Who Dreads Them)
When college interview season rolled around a couple years ago, I naturally began to panic. I could not remember a time when I ever had to talk for an hour about myself with a college graduated adult. Surely the opportunities to do so were presented to me several times in my life, but being the introverted person I am, I mistakenly never took them. Looking back now, I realized that if someone just reassured me with a couple of tips, I would have been less stressed. And so here are some things I wish I knew before I went to my interviews:
Time for a “Rematch”
I was at Buffalo Wild Wings eating away my tears. I’d just opened my match results and, like thousands of other Finalists, I found out that I wasn’t matched. I cried. A lot. I put hours of work into not only my QuestBridge application, but also my supplements and I somewhat felt like I got rejected. However, this truly couldn’t be further from the truth.
What I’m trying to say is that this is not at all a time of grief or sorrow. We should be immensely proud of our peers who have been matched, and, likewise, they should also be very supportive for non-matched Finalists looking ahead to the Regular Decision and Early Action/Decision processes. Continue reading
My Match Day
Notifications still hadn’t been released when the bell rang, or when I sat on the bus on the way home, or even as I walked up to my front door. I refreshed the QB application portal one more time (sorry QB, I know that all of the refreshing crashed your homepage) as I stood on my front porch. I sighed as there was still no update, reminding myself of the promise that they would in fact be released by the end of the day as I dug into my jacket pocket for my house key. It wasn’t there. Puzzled, I performed a basic pat down on myself. It wasn’t in the other pocket, the pockets on my jeans, in my purse, or in my backpack. I scolded myself. How could I let this happen on such a day? And it was raining.
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When You Don’t Make the List (For Now)
I cried like a child on December 1, but I wasn’t crying because I didn’t match; I cried because I was so happy for everyone. (Masculinity may be fragile but so are my emotions.) I’ve met a million wonderful people through QuestBridge, people I wish I’d met a million years before. And seeing their success—their hard work and the way they powered through lives that weren’t picture-perfect—pay off in such a grand fashion made me feel that much more special, because I’d become a part of their story the way they’d become a part of mine.
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Becoming a Champion
Remember when we used to play with puzzles?
There was an entire shelf stacked with puzzles in my second grade classroom. The mental image of running over and grabbing a puzzle (preferably a Strawberry Shortcake puzzle), finding a seat on the bright red alphabet carpet, and spilling the dozens of cardboard pieces onto the space in front of me is vivid enough to have happened yesterday.
My teacher eventually caught onto the class hobby, and began purchasing puzzles in duplicates so that more than one person could work on the same puzzle at the same time. However, we took it in a direction that I doubt she ever anticipated: extreme puzzle races.
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