CATES Blog

What are some good tips to writing a successful school essay?

If you find yourself struggling with school essay assignments, and everyone does, there are some helpful guidelines you can follow to craft a successful essay. The first essay tip is simply to use all the time you are allotted. Most teachers will give you a few days to a week to work on a paper and you should use all that time. Your teacher is expecting you to.  Even if that means only thinking about the assignment at the beginning, you need to begin the intellectual process of crafting an essay as soon as you are given the assignment.

Make one point in your essay.  Every successful English paper or history paper is centered on a singular thesis. This isn’t to say you can articulate many ideas about a subject along the way, but the focus of your writing must be unitary for your ideas to cohere.  Once you’ve boiled your ideas down to a singular, central thesis, you can begin to plan your essay.

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How can I get organized, and stay organized?

If you’re like most high school students, you’re probably feeling intimidated–if not overwhelmed–at the prospect of keeping up with your schoolwork, writing admissions essays, and taking the ACT or SAT exam (or maybe even both!).  With so much to do, and so much at stake, it’s incredibly important to stay organized.

1. Make sure that you have a place to work that’s free of distractions.  You’re going to find it a lot more difficult to memorize SAT vocabulary lying in bed than you will sitting on a bench in the park, or–better yet–a chair in the library.
2. Keep your phone off and, if possible, your computer offline.  Right now, school is your job, so treat your schoolwork and college admissions prep the same way you would treat your office job, if you had one.  Stay focused.
3. Keep you room and backpack clean and organized.  The organized you are in your physical spaces the more your thoughts and work will ordered. If this is something you struggle with, CATES Tutors have great strategies to keep your life from getting messy.
4. Set goals for the month, the semester, and the year.  If you fee like you are working towards something specific, like increasing an SAT or ACT Test Score, you will be greatly helped.
5. Don’t Multitask. Tt may seem like a great idea to multitask, but studies show you’ll accomplish more if you stay completely focused on one thing at a time. Making listss of what you need to do, either on your own or with a CATES Tutor and prioritize the tasks on it.
6. Don’t Procrastinate. It’s tempting to delay preparing for big projects, like term papers, or prepping for the SAT or ACT exams.  Don’t.  Break down big projects into smaller steps.  If you have to memorize eight hundred SAT vocabulary words, over six weeks, how many words do you need to learn each day?  If you need extra practice on geometry problems, how much time should you devote to geometry each week?

If you’re having trouble figuring out what to prioritize, or how to get everything done, you may want to meet with a CATES tutor, who can help you figure it out.  Getting organized and staying organized is helpful for anybody, and it’s especially important for high schoolers negotiating the college admissions process.

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How should I approach writing my personal statement for college applications?

Writing great college admissions essays can be tricky—especially on top of juggling classes, extracurricular activities and SAT or ACT prep—and of all the admissions essays you’ll have to write, the dreaded personal statement will probably be the trickiest of all.  A written account of who you are as a student, an applicant, and a person – the personal statement can seem like one of the most intimidating parts of the entire college admissions process.

How can you sum up in a short essay everything there is to know about you?  How can you write a personal statement that will impress the admissions office, and will set your college application apart from the hundreds of other applications they’ll receive?

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How can I keep track of everything I need to do to navigate the college admissions process?

Applying to college is a lot of work.  It can easily seem overwhelming.  To stay on top of it the application process, you’re going to want to make a checklist of everything you have to do, and a calendar of when each thing is going to get done. At CATES we also suggest using spreadsheets as a great tool to organize the college admissions process.

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How should I approach the common application?What are my best options?

Years ago, applying to five or six different schools often meant completing five or six different sets of essays.  In order to make this process more manageable, admissions officers from several different colleges and universities got together and created the common application, a standardized college application that’s now accepted by over four hundred different schools.

So what’s on the common application (or “common app,” as it’s sometimes called)?  You’ll be asked questions about what classes you’ve taken (including AP and honors classes), what jobs you’ve had, and what extracurricular activities you’ve participated in.  You’ll also have to fill out several questions about your family background

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