#230 Stop Trying to Impress Colleges: What Admissions Really Want with Susan Knoppow Transcript

THIS IS AN AUTOMATED TRANSCRIPT… PLEASE FORGIVE THE TYPOS & GRAMMAR! xo-Lisa.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 0:51
Colleges tell students to be authentic, and employers, well, they want the same thing, but what does that actually mean? For many young people, that advice creates more confusion than confidence, they start believing that they need to have some extraordinary story, a perfect college major plan, or some polished version of themselves to stand out. The reality is the strongest applications, well, they aren’t built on perfection, they’re built on self-awareness, reflection, and a clear understanding was actually being asked of them, I’m excited to welcome Susan Napo back to the show. Susan is a professional writer and storyteller, as well as the CEO and co-founder of WoW Writing Workshop. Her WoW method is a simple process that has helped 1000s of students navigate the college essay process with less stress and more success. In our conversation, Susan breaks down what it really means to be authentic, why so many young people misinterpret that advice, and how families can help students approach essays with confidence rather than anxiety. We also discussed the growing importance of the why this major college essay, how career clarity can strengthen applications, and practical ways to reduce pressure during the college admissions process. If you have a rising senior and want a calmer, more strategic approach to college essays, this episode will help you understand what matters most and what doesn’t. I’m Lisa Marco Robbins, and I want to welcome you to College and Career Clarity, a Flourish Coaching production. Let’s dive right in to a great conversation.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:30
Susan, welcome to the show. Thanks,

Susan Knoppow 2:32
Lisa. It’s great to be here.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:34
You’re a favorite guest in such a timely topic.

Susan Knoppow 2:39
Yeah, not a better time to talk about college essays, and now students are finishing up their junior year, they’re getting ready to apply to college for real. I always say, people ask me, when should my students start? I say, when it feels real. Now it’s starting to feel

Lisa Marker-Robbins 2:53
well, and if it’s not feeling real, then you got to start anyway, right?

Susan Knoppow 2:59
Absolutely. Well, not quite yet. They can wait a few weeks, but yes, when school ends, depending on where you are in the country, it’s time to go. Yeah, that is

Lisa Marker-Robbins 3:06
that. That is a wonky one. It’s, it’s different all over the place, right? It’s about the same for you and me, which is Memorial Day. So, we should tell everybody, we, we had a great webinar unearthing what do colleges mean when they say be authentic in the essays and applications? And it was so fun and so good and informative. We had a great group. I was amazed we had people from China and people from like half the states, so it needs to become a podcast.

Susan Knoppow 3:38
Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 3:38
here we are. So that’s what this is rooted in. I mean, we families hear all the time colleges saying be authentic,

Susan Knoppow 3:48
right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 3:48
And kids misinterpret it. How do you see them misinterpreting what do they, what do kids think it means? And then we’ll get to what colleges really mean.

Susan Knoppow 3:58
Good question. So what I find is when students hear that they think that they have to craft some sort of authentic persona that they, it’s almost like becoming like a some sort of social media star, like they have to create a version of themselves that will be appealing to colleges, which is the opposite of authentic, because what they often, what they’ll say is, I’m not that interesting, nothing special happens to me, and I say, well, actually, they expect you to be a regular person, like they, the people who are reading your applications, actually know that you have normal experiences, like

Lisa Marker-Robbins 4:36
you’re a teenager and not a 35 year old, right,

Susan Knoppow 4:39
exactly, so there’s this feeling that this word ‘authentic’ when I think colleges mean, you know, just be yourself. Students interpret it as, well, myself isn’t good enough, so what else should I be?

Speaker 1 4:53
Impossible.

Susan Knoppow 4:53
That’s hard. That’s really stressful.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 4:55
Yeah, I mean, I see that in our career clarity work that we’re doing. The kids like it. Yeah, I’m not enough, so why try? Or we encourage kids. There’s six different types of validation experiences for careers that we teach, and they will stay behind a device and research and held this up as if it’s my phone. Research and research and research the heck out of it with all the resources we give them, and our 8000 video library of careers, and all the things, and as soon as it’s time to get out from the device and get out into the real world,

Susan Knoppow 5:35
yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 5:35
which is actually what they need to do, they’re scared to death because they’re like, nobody’s gonna say yes to me, right, for an informational interview or a job shadow or all the other things that we do,

Susan Knoppow 5:46
right.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 5:47
It’s so this mindset piece is a huge part of

Susan Knoppow 5:50
it. It’s a really big part of it, and I think that, you know, one of the things that we emphasize, and I think you do as well, is starting where the student is, where they already are. I say to them, you’ve already done the hard work. You either were in the marching band or you weren’t. You either had a job after school or you did it. And it’s not that you can’t like do more things, but right, you did all you made choices, and you made choices for reasons as you went through school. You took certain classes, you didn’t take other classes. You had certain kind of summer experiences. You didn’t have other summer experiences. Wherever you are, you can start from there. There’s a place for you, and so with that in mind, I find as much as I can lower the stakes the better, because the lower the stakes, the better the student actually performs, because they’re not trying so hard, they’re not feeling like they have to overcome something, so that’s a big part of what we do, is helping students recognize that wherever you are right now, so that is actually where you’re supposed to be, and it’s where everybody else is too, they’re not somehow ahead of you.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 6:55
Yeah, I love that. Well, I think, too, that relates to what I see is the stakes that are too high in the, in the college major and career coaching that we’re doing, is these kids feeling like I’m making a forever decision, like we come up against and making a forever decision. No, you’re making the decision that’s in front of you, and like with the group that you’re talking about, it’s yeah, the college major, right. And how am I signaling that I’ve got some direction and it fits

Susan Knoppow 7:26
right? Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 7:27
but it’s just that step note. What are you going to be till you’re 65 and retire,

Susan Knoppow 7:32
right? Or I get the students who say, well, the school I want to go to, getting into the business school is too hard, but I want to be in business, and I say I’m in business. I didn’t go to business school. I have a bachelor’s degree in psychology. That there are paths to careers, I don’t have to tell you this. There are paths to careers that can go through all sorts of majors, and the major can be based on an interest or something they’re good at, or anything.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 8:00
Yeah,

Susan Knoppow 8:01
and that will get them. It’s the other experiences they have that will lead them beyond just I went to college, I took a bunch of classes, I graduated. Now, what

Lisa Marker-Robbins 8:12
I mean, there’s a handful of jobs, so like engineering, architecture, nursing, right?

Susan Knoppow 8:18
Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 8:18
teaching, that you have to have a specific degree, but by and large, most careers don’t require a specific degree, right? And that’s what we try to say, like you want to do some work, yes, to know if you’re aiming at one of those that do require a specific degree. And I’m going to be honest, like when people say, what are the most competitive majors, there’s a variety of reasons why majors are competitive, right? They, they could be hard, cognitively hard, right?

Susan Knoppow 8:46
Right,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 8:46
they could be capacity capped, like, oh my word, computer science in business, crazy, right? Like, these colleges could fill a freshman class many times over. It could be that it’s competitive because, like, with nursing and teaching, you have clinical or field experience that require oversight, right, and availability, and there’s only so much of that to go around, but yeah, once you get out of those, then you don’t have to, you and I don’t have business degrees, and we have businesses,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 9:15
absolutely,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 9:18
so one of the things, like, okay, so starting now, that’s that was a common question.

Susan Knoppow 9:24
Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 9:24
you know, by starting now, you’re like the essays start when schools get out, right?

Susan Knoppow 9:30
For the most part,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 9:31
to be to write good essays, yeah, what clarity do they have to have? Like, what should they have done going up to it? Because the work that I do is starting as early as 10th grade, and I actually find the people that has have the best ease and flow through the college-bound process, yeah, actually did start so far year or early junior year,

Susan Knoppow 9:52
so what I see as leading up to strong essays might seem like it’s not connected, but I. Say that if you have a good list, you can write strong essays. How do you get a good list? You visit colleges, you talk to people who go to those colleges, you learn about the majors at those colleges. So that should be happening in 10th and 11th grade. They should be thinking about so the students who struggle are the ones who aim at a school that they’ve just heard about by reputation, they, it’s on their list because it’s prestigious, and I say, well, you know, Brown and Harvard are both Ivy League schools, they have almost nothing in common, except you have to be really smart and accomplished to go there. Yeah, so which one are you applying to, and why? So that’s an extreme example of someone wanting to go to the most elite school, but even state schools. I’m in the state of Michigan, students will say, “I want to go to the University of Michigan, and I say, “Well, why? Well, because I love their basketball, and I say, “You know, it’s a really rigorous curriculum. I great, go to basketball games, that’s amazing. Oh, my, my dad went there, my uncle went there, my grandfather, that’s very nice. Do you know anything about? And then I start listing. I said, you want to stay in state? Here are seven other schools in state. What are you interested in? And we started to have this conversation, having it with me. I mean, I can have that conversation. Having it with me is a little bit late. They should be doing that early, so that when they come to me, let’s say they do want to go to the University of Michigan. Michigan has two supplemental questions. One is, why do you want to come here? And the fact that I’ve been, you know, I was wearing a maize and blue onesie is not the reason they’re looking for this. They know that you’re excited to go there, so are you know 10s of 1000s of other people, but I find that students who can reflect, who actually can think about who they are beyond what they’ve done. I tell this to parents, is how can I help my student? I say, help them understand what’s great about them. What are their best characteristics? Because the essays, especially the common at personal statement, so that word, personal statement, it’s about who you are, not what you’ve done. What you’ve done is all over the application, that’s easy to measure, those are quantitative, but what kind of person are you? So start reflecting, and also make sure that the colleges on your list are a good fit for you. So go to Lisa first, and then come to me.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 12:23
I mean, that’s what we begin with, right? Yeah, we start our career confidence framework.

Susan Knoppow 12:29
Yes,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 12:30
it’s three steps, and they’re really pretty simple. It begins with self awareness,

Susan Knoppow 12:35
yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 12:36
getting and by self awareness, and I think when, when kids have these things that we say embody self awareness. They will naturally, I always say that it will naturally translate into strong essays. If you know what an essay is supposed to be, so right with that, we’re saying, like, what are we measure it through the Berkman assessment. I had a mom ask me today in a session, you know, when I asked my kid about themselves, and they’re like, I don’t know, how do I, how do I get them to talk about, like, well, we give an assessment, and we use that as a conversation starter, and to dig deeper, to look beneath the hood, so we’re talking about, like, what motivates you, what do you need and expect from other people in your work environment, what are your strengths that you bring, let’s layer on, then your values and your academic aptitudes and limitations. Can we please normalize having weaknesses and not having to be smart at everything?

Susan Knoppow 13:32
Yeah, absolutely. And the sooner you can do that, the better, because they’re not – they shouldn’t be – they shouldn’t be able to do every single thing. You know, it’s interesting, because so we have a 10 step process, and our first step, which is what most people skip who don’t use our process, because I have, I have trained hundreds and hundreds and hundreds of counselors, we were going to hit 700 this year, and these are people who’ve actually gone through our training program, who’ve like paid money to be trained and write an essay with a wow coach, so there’s 1000s more who have gone to free sessions and seen my webinars and gone to conferences, but, but I say this because even they, and they’re like the experts who are getting additional professional development, say, “Oh, I just assumed that they understood the prompt. I say, “No, that’s step one in our 10, the wow method in 10 in our 10 steps. The first step is understand the prompt and purpose, so that doesn’t just mean understand the paragraph. What are these words mean? It’s why are you writing this essay? So we start with the personal statement, it’s a good teaching essay, but then they can apply that to any other essay they have to write, so if they learn how to understand the prompt and purpose, which means understanding the task, understanding your audience, understanding how an essay fits into the whole application. They don’t just jump over the wall. There’s all kinds of sample essays out there. I say, great, read 1000 of. Them, it’s not going to help you with yours, because they’re out of context. So, if you understand the prompt and purpose, and then start brainstorming ideas, we find that students can give us at least one positive characteristic, because we have explained that the purpose of this first essay is to share something beyond what you’ve done, and I say to them, in this case, that positive characteristic can be, I’m a hard worker. It doesn’t have to be anything extravagant, because once they start writing through our process, other positive characteristics will emerge. The stories they choose to tell will be more complex than they realize, even if they’re pretty mundane and simple,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 15:42
I mean, and even our kids have a very easy time with that, because they’ve spent so much time getting to know themselves and connecting it to exploring and validating careers, which is our second step. So they have an easy time with that, but it sounds like your process for somebody who hasn’t done any of that work, just the process alone, these kids probably know more about themselves. We find that too.

Susan Knoppow 16:03
Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 16:04
they actually know more about themselves than they are aware of,

Susan Knoppow 16:09
right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 16:10
But it’s when they have a process that it brings them out, because they just don’t know where to start without a frame, exactly. And career clarity is rooted in a framework. Essay writing is rooted in a framework.

Susan Knoppow 16:23
Overwhelmed kids just need a step-by-step process. They need an activity that will take them 15 minutes that they can be successful at, and that I mean, I’ve been doing this now for 17 years, and I have found, you know, people say, “Oh, kids are different today, or “this is different today, or “that’s different. I said, look, the parents are like a generation younger than when I started, so they’re not even my peers anymore, and so even the parents have changed. But if you give a student who is embarking on this challenging and very important part of their life, and you give them a task that they can complete and can help them feel confident and can help them feel capable. They will do the next step, and if in that step I can help them feel confident and help them feel capable, they’ll do the next step. And much to their surprise, they’re halfway through our 10 steps. They’ve written one draft by then, because there’s a bunch of preliminary work that happens, and they say this isn’t that hard, and we say it’s really not that hard, you just didn’t understand what it was, and even if they did understand what it was, and I said, now go write me a draft, that would still be too much, it’s too big. Well, I’m trying to get them to do this in bite-sized pieces.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 17:40
Yeah, a couple things stood out, like you said, in 15 minutes, right? So we intentionally are like 10 to 15 minute lessons,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 17:47
right,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 17:48
bite-sized chunks, like that would be a piece of advice that I have for anybody with teenagers, right? I would say, when parents or kids say things have kids have changed so much, like I will admit, attention spans are shorter,

Speaker 1 18:01
that’s true.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:02
Yeah, that bite-sized chunk piece, but the fact that, like, they’re halfway through your 10-step process before they’re really even writing,

Susan Knoppow 18:11
yeah.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:12
And, like, you know, I’m like, that would be like a kid choosing their college major. Oftentimes, they’re faced with the application,

Susan Knoppow 18:19
right,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:19
and they go to they’re like, oh, I don’t know what box, I have to check a box, and yeah, there’s again, there’s a lot of steps before you should be checking that box, right, and that kind of brings me to something that came up multiple times in our webinar this week, which was the number of people, given the fact that we work at the intersection of college major and career clarity and essays. How you express authenticity to the colleges, and a lot of people ask, do I need to write about my college major selection or what I want to be when I grow up in the personal statement,

Susan Knoppow 18:54
right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 18:55
And I’m gonna let you speak to that.

Susan Knoppow 18:58
The answer to that is, please don’t, and Well, here’s the thing. It’s if they want to know that, they will ask. That’s what supplemental essays are for. And

Lisa Marker-Robbins 19:12
a lot

Lisa Marker-Robbins 19:12
of them do,

Susan Knoppow 19:13
yeah. And a lot of many, many, many more of them than ever are asking a question along the lines of what do you want to major in? Why do you want to come here? What do we offer that is a good fit for you? The questions vary, and that’s why I take them back to step one. Understand the prompt and purpose. If it’s a school where you’re applying directly to the major, that kind of question is extremely important, because they’re asking for justification. This is not because I kind of think that you know history sounds neat, that’s not what they’re looking for. Those are majors where a lot of people want to go to, you already said this, I don’t need to tell you this, but that you are this is competitive. Now, if it’s a, if it’s a prompt that asks why is our unique. Make program the right fit for you. They want to know, do you know something about their curriculum? There are schools that have very distinct ways of teaching, and they know that you will only be successful there if you understand what you’re embarking on before you get there. So

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:16
that goes back to your good college list,

Susan Knoppow 20:18
right? Exactly, exactly.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:20
Like what came to mind was Purdue,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:23
the

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:23
computer science major, which at many, many, many, many universities is in the engineering school.

Susan Knoppow 20:30
Yes,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:30
it is

Lisa Marker-Robbins 20:31
not in the engineering school at Purdue. So it changes how that curriculum is taught, right? Right. So this is where we’re signaling fit and direction, we’ve got clarity,

Susan Knoppow 20:43
and so to go back to your original question, do they need to write about, you know, I’ve always wanted to be a doctor, and so I’m, you know, I’m very, I’m a great problem solver, and let me tell you about the medical experience I had. No, now if a student was has been an EMT and is trained and had an experience one night during, you know, they were out on a call and something happened where they demonstrated their problem-solving skills or their resiliency or their ability to be calm under pressure. That’s a story about who they are as a person. It happened in a place where they were doing, they were doing training, because I want to be in the medical field one day, and so I have done this during high school, but they’re not. But this gets to purpose. What is the purpose of that essay? It’s to show who I am, not to prove to you that I’ve had experiences that will lead me to be a physician or a nurse, or you know, whatever. So it’s not that they can’t write about what they’re interested. It’s the same reason students say, “I’ve heard that I shouldn’t write about, and then they list

Lisa Marker-Robbins 21:50
school addicts

Susan Knoppow 21:51
service, the same time, you know. I shouldn’t write about these things, and I say, “If you’re writing about lacrosse, no, they know you play lacrosse. If you’re writing about the fact that you are the team captain, the reason you’re the team captain is because this person who is supposed to be the team captain, she moved to Texas, and you live in Ohio, and all of a sudden your coach came to you and said, I think you’d make a good captain, and you’ve never been captain of anything, even though you’re the star lacrosse player. How did you approach that experience? That’s not a story about lacrosse, that’s a story about you taking on responsibility that’s different from what you’ve done before. So, helping students understand that there are no topics that are off limits or absolutely better than others. It’s if you can, if you can answer the prompt in a way that demonstrates that you understand the question. In fact, that’s I talk to admissions officers all the time, and I ask them, I’ve asked this question so many times in the last 17 years. What do you want me to tell my students? And they say, will you tell them to answer the question? Will you tell them to please just answer? I mean, a variation of it,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 23:04
and the kids think that they are answering. I guess that’s the disconnect, right? So, right, you know, be authentic, and then they say in authenticity, in a way that answers the actual question. So, the mistakes you’re seeing are like, too polished,

Susan Knoppow 23:19
yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 23:20
trying to be something or not, not answering the question,

Susan Knoppow 23:25
not answering the question, and not understanding the purpose of the question. So then my admissions people say, tell them, I just want them to be authentic, and then I push back, and I say, well, what do you mean by that, because what they say, and I say this to admissions officers all the time, I say what you say and what they hear doesn’t match. I say I get what they heard. They tell me so and so came to my school from such and such a university, and here’s what they said, and I say they did. Really, are you sure? And then I kind of go below the surface and say, oh, they said things like be authentic, or, oh, there’s another one. I tell admissions officers, so they will share their favorite essays. This was the first paragraph of my favorite essay. So, to all of you parents and students listening to this, take those with a grain of salt. They read a lot of a

Lisa Marker-Robbins 24:18
couple of schools that are known for putting these out there. Yes,

Susan Knoppow 24:21
exactly. And I say, take them with a grain of salt. Why? And I.. and also I push back at admissions officers on this. I say, I understand that you love that first paragraph, and that’s great, but tell me, if that first paragraph wasn’t so amazing, would you still have admitted that student? They say, oh yeah, and I say, you are making it sound like the student has to be a strong writer in order to go to your school, and that’s not true, and you know it, and I know it, and they say, yeah, but it’s my favorite, and I love to share it, and I say, I know, but what you say and what they hear, then they come to me and say, I need a hook, I heard that you need to have a great first sentence. Or they won’t keep reading, and I’d say no, they’ll read, they tell them they’re going to read fast, they’re all going to read really quickly, they’re second

Lisa Marker-Robbins 25:06
to nine minutes on the whole application,

Susan Knoppow 25:09
right? So the mistakes they make really go back to trying to be something they’re not, or not understanding, or moving too quickly and not taking their time, which is why I say the first draft is a fifth step. I say there’s plenty of time for revision. We got, you know, five more steps all about revision. Yeah, but slow down, take your time.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 25:34
You made a comment earlier about, like, if they want to know, you know, about your major, or your Andy Borst, he, when he was at University of Illinois Urbana-Champaign, he was on the podcast, he’s at Georgia now, and he talked, they actually there have it broken up into two essays, and it’s only 150 words, by the way, so I don’t even know if we can call that an essay,

Susan Knoppow 25:57
but sure,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 25:58
what do you want to major in, and why, and what are you going to do with that major?

Susan Knoppow 26:03
Yes,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 26:03
so but then you’ve got like Georgia Tech, Rick Clark was on the, I guess he has a different version of that, they’ve got a different version of that at Michigan, right? So you really do have to understand the nuances of the prompt,

Susan Knoppow 26:17
right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 26:18
So there’s I would say that the why this major essay tends to be the fastest growing among the supplemental essays. For years, schools asked why us, why do you want to attend

Susan Knoppow 26:31
here?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 26:31
Yeah, and the major could be part of that. Yeah, if they value, if they admit by major to some or all majors, which we have a list of the at least from the state flagships, and gives you how to find out. People can download it, Flourish Coaching co.com forward slash majors. Okay, if they’re asking that, they probably have are admitting the major to

Lisa Marker-Robbins 26:51
disagree,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 26:52
right? In your process, I know you said let’s start at the beginning of summer, writing. Should they write the personal statement before supplementals, I know supplementals aren’t in stone until August. There’s some colleges, Michigan notoriously usually does let you know early,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 27:12
right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 27:12
Yeah, changed them in a million years.

Susan Knoppow 27:15
It’s May. Well, no, they changed that. They changed one of their prompts last year, that was

Lisa Marker-Robbins 27:18
a dead

Susan Knoppow 27:19
prompt last

Lisa Marker-Robbins 27:19
year. I have not enough,

Susan Knoppow 27:20
and it says you’re not doing that. It’s a mash up of like leadership in your future plans. I find it, we so what we do for our students, and we

Lisa Marker-Robbins 27:30
saw the community essay.

Susan Knoppow 27:32
They got rid of the community essay. Community essay is gone, which I loved. The community essay, I thought it was a great essay. Yeah, so this essay is a mash up of leadership, so that’s a big U of M word, and your future, like, what are you going to do in the future? But they also have the Y U S essay, which is not just about majors, also is about, you know, yeah, why engineering, and not literature, science, and the arts, or why kinesiology, or do you want to do a living learning community, whatever. So this new essay is challenging, so what we do for our students, we always have pre-work for them before we talk about what they’re going to write about, so we parse the prompts, we go in and we look at every prompt and we say here’s what it means, here’s how to read it, here’s how to think about it, because we’ve taught them how to do that, when, so to answer your question, we do the Common App personal statement first, because it is the best learning essay, is the best teaching essay, and we can use the principles, so we do two things, we’re, we are learning two things while students are working on the Common App, we are learning how they work, which will help us as coaches guide them appropriately through the supplements, because our common app process takes about four weeks.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 28:49
Yeah,

Susan Knoppow 28:49
and we get them done, and there’s sort of.. there’s flexibility, but it’s about four weeks. People say, “Oh, my.. I wrote my common app, it took me 10 weeks, I did it all summer. I’m like, “Don’t do that, it’s

Lisa Marker-Robbins 28:59
no reason for it to take that.

Susan Knoppow 29:00
No, so we do that first, and then we can apply those principles, and say, okay, step number one: understand the prompt and purpose. Here’s our interpretation of these prompts. Here’s some questions to help you start to brainstorm ideas for what, how you might answer those questions, and then we meet with them and talk about it, so there’s these elements of thinking and reflection, which we want them to do on their own, or with their family, or with, you know,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 29:27
someone

Susan Knoppow 29:27
they trust. Have a conversation, and then we come in as the experts on the prompts and the essays. It’s what throws us is when we get new prompts and we say, oh, well, it’s a lot like this one, let’s go back and look at what we did, you know, for that one, or we call the school and say you have a new prompt, let’s make sure that we understand,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 29:46
right? We want to understand as coaches, you want to understand,

Susan Knoppow 29:50
right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 29:50
Like, as coaches, I really, I need to understand these careers and what it means to do these careers for whom they might be a fit. I had a question for you, as I’m. Thinking about this, so like our kiddos have a, they, they might not know how to write well, but they have all of the background, the kids who come out of our launch career clarity course to be able to very easily express the why us or the why this major type questions. Is it a mistake if you’re starting with a personal statement, and I know you said, like, it’s okay to talk about future aspirations or sports within context of, like, what do we learn about you?

Susan Knoppow 30:31
Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 30:31
but there’s a part of me that now I’m wondering if they’re not going to know until August if they have to write the why this major, and they will probably apply to some school if behind the university is not liberal arts colleges,

Susan Knoppow 30:43
right?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 30:44
They will have to write

Lisa Marker-Robbins 30:45
what’s

Lisa Marker-Robbins 30:46
major.

Susan Knoppow 30:46
Someone’s going to ask,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 30:47
somebody’s going to ask it on their list. So, does it feel like it could be a mistake to use the career major aspirations for the personal statement? If then, like, if they do include it, and it makes sense, your EMT examples fantastic, like that would make sense, but then, oh no, what the heck are we going to do over here when we get the why this major essay in August, could that be an error?

Susan Knoppow 31:12
Oh, good question. So, no, because here’s the thing, it’s about how they handle it in the personal scene. So, in my EMT example, this is a story about my problem-solving skills, or my ability to be calm under pressure, which is important, and that’s the story. And maybe this story is the only thing in the essay, maybe it’s the whole essay, or maybe it’s an example in the essay of myself, me being calm under pressure, or maybe it’s there’s background about how I learned to be calm under pressure, and here’s where I exhibit it, or maybe like there’s so many ways handled, so that when I say to the students, when they’re done reading it, what do you want them to know about you, and if they say I want them to know that I’m a great, you know, I’m a great EMT, and I say not your purpose, your purpose is to show them what kind of person you are, so then if in the why this major they say well I’ve done you know I had this kind of training and I’ve done this many hours and I’ve learned this many skills that’s about evidence that is about what have you done

Lisa Marker-Robbins 32:14
well I think you just hit it like

Susan Knoppow 32:17
yeah

Lisa Marker-Robbins 32:17
that you know it’s really so character driven on your personal statement.

Susan Knoppow 32:23
Yes,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 32:23
and sometimes I do see people think make the mistake, in my amateur writing opinion, the supplementals need to be as much of a personal narrative as the personal statement, when it’s really a lot of them more evidence-based,

Susan Knoppow 32:44
right? And some of them can be. I mean, I’ve had YS essays that read like narratives, or like narrative, narrative, like maybe there’s different, different pieces, you know? Because that’s how the student writes, or that’s how they’re comfortable, as long as the right information is in

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:02
it. Yeah, but

Susan Knoppow 33:02
if they pick one story and treat it like a narrative that this is what’s going to show you know, university acts that I belong there, that’s not what they’re looking for. They want to know, are you a good fit?

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:14
So, I tell them it’s dating essays back to, you know, understanding the prompt. Yeah,

Susan Knoppow 33:19
absolutely. Always, always

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:21
back to understanding the prompt again,

Susan Knoppow 33:23
always.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:24
Oh my gosh, so personal statement timeline. Let’s give you a little breather as soon as school gets out, and get in there, and don’t plan on it taking more than four weeks.

Susan Knoppow 33:36
Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:37
if you have the right process, I can see how it’s going to take longer if they don’t go absolutely right way, right?

Susan Knoppow 33:43
Yeah,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:44
and then after august 1, supplementals,

Susan Knoppow 33:46
yeah, for sure.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 33:48
Okay, so set, and

Susan Knoppow 33:49
then we say three or four weeks per school, but overlapping, so we’re brainstorming on school one, they’re writing drafts for school one, then they’re brainstorming for school, too, they’re writing drafts, so they’re always writing multiple drafts. I mean, they’re working on drafts for multiple schools, and then once they’ve applied to two or three schools, almost everything is a modification. Then understanding the prompt is crucial, because the first question we ask then is, what have you already written that is possibly similar to this, and how would you change

Lisa Marker-Robbins 34:24
it? Yeah,

Susan Knoppow 34:24
and just saying, well, the one I wrote is 300 words, and this is 150 I’d cut 150 words. That is not the answer.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 34:31
Do you find that kids have an easier time writing the shorter or the longer essays?

Susan Knoppow 34:37
That’s a good question. Sometimes the shorter ones are harder, because you have to put more in the package and a smaller space. In fact, parents will ask us, we, when we work with students, we, our packages are either by the essay or by the school, and they say, well, what if the, what if the essays are short? I say, that’s just as much work for me to help your child, right? Excellent,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 34:59
more work. I mean, what comes to mind is the 10 activities in the Common App, like, whoa, you don’t get a lot of real estate to explain it there, so you gotta, you know, get a lot of bang for your buck in those

Susan Knoppow 35:14
descriptions, right? Exactly,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 35:16
when you approach the, you said, like, you’re drafting, but you’re writing, you’re there’s this stacked overlap, right? Do you, how do you engineer that? Do you start with just nearest deadline or school that’s like number one on your list?

Susan Knoppow 35:31
So that’s one of the things. It’s funny that you asked that, because I was just showing that to someone. We have a, we have programs for professionals where they use that, we train them, they use our platform and our resources, or we work with their students three different things, but for the ones who use our platform, we have a whole library of resources, and I was showing someone yesterday here are four different ways that you can do exactly answer the question, so the option number one is assuming that they don’t have a deadline that’s like in three weeks, if they have time. Option number one is pick an easy school one that you think you’re going to get into, or where the essays don’t feel that challenging, and do that after the Common App.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 36:12
That kind of goes back to the imposter syndrome thing that we were talking towards the beginning, right?

Susan Knoppow 36:16
Yeah, so that’s option number one. Option number two, pick your early action, early decision, so the one with the early deadline, where you’re really committing. I want this is where I want to go and work on that, because you’ll feel good that it’s done, and you’ll feel accomplished. Option number three is, if they’re applying to the University of California, which has personal insight questions, which are different than the Common app, they don’t take the common app, then go directly to the personal insight questions, because you have to write four of them, and you will then have templates for almost every essay you’re going to have to write for anything else, so there’s so we, we in those, those cannot be submitted until October, so you know it’s not even available, but so we, what we really do is, as we’re working with a student on the first essay, like I said, it’s a learning opportunity for us as well as the student. We’re paying a lot of attention to the student’s willingness and ability to do the work, and by that, I mean, when we say willingness, I mean every, not just are they going to do it, because they’re doing it, I mean their parents hired us to work with them, but, but I really mean, how much effort will they put in in their ability? I don’t just mean their writing skills, I mean, can they concentrate? Do they have a learning disability? Is reading hard for them? Do they have something really challenging going on in their life, and they can’t concentrate right now. Like, I need to be real about what they can do, because I want them to be successful, and I want them to finish.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 37:47
Well, that goes back to what we were saying about self-awareness, right? Let’s get real about our strength, and let’s normalize what our weakness is, and just get real about

Susan Knoppow 37:55
it, right? So, if a student says to me, ‘Reading is hard for me, I will.. my next question is, so what do you like? What do you do in school? How do you deal with it? Yeah, if they tell me I don’t know, I know we’re going to have a problem. It’s not that I won’t work with them, but it’s going to be more challenging. I mean, I’ve 1000 tricks that you know that we can use, but but that helps us create the schedule and the plan for students to decide what they’re going to do in what order once they finish that first essay, and we say our the three print there are three foundational principles, process that’s the 10 steps plan. Who are you? What does your life look like? What does your summer look like? Where are you applying? And schedule, and so by having a firm schedule for the first essay, we’re teaching the student that they can meet deadlines, and that we’re serious about deadlines, and that makes the rest of the work go much more quickly.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 38:52
Well, as you’re saying this, I’m picturing in my head your PDF download that you have, and it is literally in chunks on I can visualize it, the different parts of your 10 step process. So we will put in the show notes, and I will put in the outro, because I forget the exact tag that we have for it, where people can go and download your 10 step process, great, and really see what that looks like, and how they’re thinking about how they’re going to tackle this. Really, it’s a project to manage, for sure. It

Susan Knoppow 39:30
is. It is. Parents, you can help your student by lowering the heat before they start, but that helps us a lot. When parents are calm, we have a whole series of emails and messages we share with parents as well, because they’ll get involved in ways that are not helpful to their student and they’re not helpful to us. So we try to give, you know, give them a job, we give them things to do.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 39:53
We see the same thing, and I would just say, like, when you start sooner, that everybody remains calm. More

Susan Knoppow 40:00
absolutely

Lisa Marker-Robbins 40:01
in our process, in your process. So, well, Susan, thank you for making the time at the timely part of the year for this topic.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 40:09
Thanks,

Lisa Marker-Robbins 40:10
appreciate it. And we will absolutely do it again.

Susan Knoppow 40:13
All right, great to be with you.

Lisa Marker-Robbins 40:15
Thank you. What am I? favorite takeaways from this conversation is that students don’t need a more impressive story, they just need a better process. Whether we’re talking about choosing a college major, exploring career options, or writing those college essays, the students who move forward with competence are usually the ones who have taken the time to understand themselves first. If your student is still struggling to choose a major, identify possible career paths or confidently answer those increasingly common why this major supplemental essays. I want to invite you to watch my free video at Flourish coachingco.com forward slash video. In it, I’ll walk you through the same career confidence framework we’ve used to help 1000s of families move from uncertainty and overwhelm to clarity and direction, and if you’re looking for additional support with essays, get Susan’s free 10 step college essay writing guide at Wow Writing workshop.com forward slash flourish. Both links to the resources are available in the show notes. Remember, you don’t need to have all the answers today. You just need to know the right next step, which we’ve given you, and you probably have a friend who needs this too. So, go ahead and share this episode. We are all better together,