We can help you KISS a little less of your money goodbye.

One of the hidden benefits of using CEO’s Essay QuickFinder and Essay RoadMap tools is that they deliver optional and departmental essays, as well as those for special applicants. If you are applying for scholarships available to high school seniors entering their freshman year, CEO will find those for you too!

Using the Essay QuickFinder has this hidden benefit – you’ll be told about departments and scholarship opportunities you didn’t even know were there!

This is especially true with large state schools. With such large class sizes and departments, the nooks and crannies for scholarships to be tucked away in are seemingly endless. By letting CEO deliver that easy-to-use list of your essay requirements, often you’ll find out about opportunities others may have overlooked.

There are a number of schools in our database with over fifteen essay requirements, many of which are department-specific or scholarship-oriented. Use these results to your benefit and increase your opportunities to receive that no-strings-attached funding.

Maybe after you get the acceptance letter you can think twice about getting the tattoo to match.

The University of Miami got a few new ways to recruit students this week – Lebron James and a few of his friends.

The King’s decision caused us to pause and consider His Majesty’s… shall we say… not so tactful way of revealing where he was headed. Let’s compare it to the somewhat less prickly process of letting your family know which college you’ll be attending. Yes! I said it! You will get in! Somewhere! After that initial joy wears off, take your tips from the Chosen 1:

1. Don’t schedule an hour-long slot on prime-time television, no matter who asks for it. We understand you’re going somewhere. We understand it is very, very important to you. And to many other people in your life. Even to people you have not yet met. But the process of telling people should take you fifteen seconds at best. Perhaps thirty when speaking to the elderly. An hour is pushing it for anything that can be safely squeezed inside a single sentence.

2. Don’t surround yourself with children like you’re Mother Theresa. You are not bringing wider peace to the populace. You are bringing academic potential and all the hard work of preparation that comes along with it. You are not, however, raising a city from the ashes. If, for example, you’re going to college in, oh, say, southern Florida, remember that southern Florida has seen a lot and has done okay without you.

3. Don’t tell people where you’re about to “take your talents.” We also understand how talented and wise you are. Just get in there and get those straight-As like your mama made you to. Just get in there and get ‘er done. And if there is, oh, say, someone else who might have a leg (or six) up on you, pay them respect and just let everyone know about where you’re headed quietly. A phone call, an email, even a press release to the proper media outlets, and you’ll be fine.

Follow these three simple tips and it is highly unlikely that anyone will shove life-sized cutouts of you into the garbage face first. Better yet, very few people will set anything on fire with your name on it. Stay strong.

Gotta diversify... And mix it up... Like a... British Jamaican DJ.

As we’ve written about before, the cost of diversifying your set of schools is minimal when compared to the potential reward you have in store for an acceptance at a school above your safe range.

Being accepted at a school on the high end of where you’re aiming is a big deal in terms of the academic experience you’ll have, the success your peers will have after graduation, and the professional expectations you’ll have, both in salary and breadth of opportunity.

So how do you expand that list of schools without wasting your time?

Focus on the core priorities you have for your university experience. Selectivity, reputation and ranking, class size, location, setting, etc. Once you’ve made those decisions, find ways to broaden your selections, and the odds of landing a position will increase.

If you’re going to be applying to, say, Cornell, Drexel, Boston College, and UConn, stretch out the list of top schools to three or four, and your chances of winding up at a school like Cornell, even if it’s not exactly Cornell – say, Brown, Carnegie Mellon, or Yale – are going to increase.

Remember, there are many reasons you can be denied admission to a school, many of which are outside of your control, such as your demographic, geographic location, or high school’s history with the university. Broaden your selection and you’ll improve the chances.

CEO is here to compliment the other tools at your disposal and make the many applications, and the legwork that goes along with it, that much easier.

Wasn't I Supposed To... Do..... Something.......

It’s March 1st, which means most if not all of the applications are out the door for seniors by now. But if you’re a junior, now is the time to get started with CEO and have a look at the benefits it provides if you’ve still got a year in front of you.

When you think about your senior year, what do you think about? Probably not your bright and shining desire to achieve. In fact, you may think of it as a time for doing… absolutely nothing at all. Wanting to get out from under your work will surely include avoiding the avalanche of application requirements that’ll be coming at you in the fall. CEO can make that workload shrink, and with our new email notification system, you don’t even need to check to see when the applications have been released by the schools. We’ll shoot you an email each week telling you which ones have been updated, so you can get going when you need to and not a second earlier.

Here are a few of the benefits juniors get from using CEO:

• Know in advance how many essays are expected from the colleges you’re considering
• Manage all essays simultaneously, rather than one at a time
• Receive notification over the summer each time a college updates its essay requirements
• Finish some essays over the summer
• And avoid the onslaught of work when the madness of the fall begins!

More than anything, CEO is about making it easy – now – and getting it done sooner rather than later.

Check out our new demo on the front page and see for yourself.

I tutored for years before joining the tremendous team here at Knewton. And during those salad days spent lugging the Big Blue Book around Gotham, parents always asked me to prioritize the components of the college application for their students. Here was/is my unscientific answer that I nonetheless feel strongly about, ranked in order from greatest in importance to least.

Josh From Knewton, Sayin' Hey.

1) Grades. There’s no substitute on your college apps for a strong GPA. Colleges are looking for good students, and the best way to show that you’re a good student is, well… to get good grades. Obviously you should strive to have an impressive GPA throughout your high school career, but if you had a few slip-ups early on, don’t worry too much; colleges give more weight to your performance during your junior and senior years.

2) SAT score. Love ‘em or hate ‘em, the SATs still mean something. The SAT is not an intelligence test; students’ scores can jump up to 400 points if they prepare diligently and correctly. Hence the need for a good SAT course.

3) Personal statement. This is your one shot to really introduce your personality to an admissions board. It’s like you’re running for President and you’re on national TV at the convention: You get a podium and only a few minutes to make your case to the voters. The task of organizing all the admissions essays you need to write is a notoriously difficult one, but the good folks here at College Essay Organizer provide a tremendous tool that is extremely helpful.

4) Extracurricular activities. These might have ranked higher a decade ago (before Rushmore came out), but now they’re in their rightful place at #4. The marketplace is very crowded, and you can only start so many clubs. Nevertheless, colleges really want a vibrant campus, filled with students trying and doing new things. Show focus; do a couple of things and do them well. Don’t spread yourself too thin and/or try to preen for admissions officers.

5) Teacher recommendations. The challenge here is to choose your recommenders wisely. Colleges have seen great recommendations of all shapes and sizes, and a sweet letter surely works in your favor. It is more important, however, to be cautious of a bad or— more likely—a lukewarm recommendation. In short, play it safe and ask the teachers who really seem to have taken an interest in you, instead of the aloof teacher who has a reputation for writing flowery letters.

Josh Anish is the Senior Editor at Knewton. He’s getting fired up to help students with their SAT prep.

Vocab Videos Gives You A Big, Shiny, Virtual Present

The wonderful people over at Vocab Videos have dropped a number of unexpected holiday treats on us – a free list of SAT Vocab words, as well as a holiday discount for their test prep services. Feel free to head over there and check out their site if you haven’t already. We discussed them a few posts back and their great, memorable videos for those individual vocabulary bits no one can ever seem to keep straight.

So much of what we do here at CEO is about making organization and optimization easier and simpler for you that we’re always inclined to spread the word about other tools that make your life easier during this long and complicated process.

For those of you just starting this process in preparation for next year, start thinking about your Spring SATs sooner rather than later. There’s always another word to learn or another technique to get under your belt. Vocab Videos and A-List Education can help you out with that test prep quickly, easily, and at all pricing levels.

For more updates on how to handle this smelly college behemoth, stay tuned to CEO Blog, become a fan on Facebook, or follow us on Twitter @CEOrganizer. Happy new year!

Frowny, Yes, End Of The World, No.

1. Itemize Your Workload

There’s going to be a lot to do – probably somewhere between six and ten applications in two weeks’ or a month’s time. So before you begin, list all of your work and make sure you have a single source to work from, instead of ten different applications in a pile. Handling such a workload is all about managing your time appropriately.

2. Find other options that are comparable to your first choice

Your first choice is gone. Let it go. But the good news is that there are other options out there that are actually very similar to your top choice in many important ways. In many respects, you’ll even find that they’re better. So do your research if you haven’t already, and find out what else is out there. If you were aiming for Amherst, consider Williams and Brown. If you were aiming for Chapel Hill, think of Ann Arbor and Berkeley. Any one of these places might surprise you if you look a bit further into their many nooks and crannies.

3. Repurpose, Repurpose, Repurpose

You’ve got a lot of prompts, but remember that those essays can be handled with fewer essays than you think. After you’ve itemized your workload, consolidate it. Find an efficient way to get things under control, and you may be surprised at how quickly and accurately you can knock these essays out without over-exerting yourself or spreading your interests too thin.

Now if only there were an easy-to-use site that could help…

Some not-so cunning girls in their natural habitat try to photograph a cunning fellow

The most intimidating part of the SAT that’s got to be learned a bit too quickly for most people’s tastes is the vocabulary. Words like hegemony, perquisite, arboreal… Any of these ring a bell? Not for us really. This blog post got spell checked about thirteen times already and we’re only a paragraph and a half in. Paragraph and a half. Hey. Made a rhyme.

Vocab Videos is a site that can help get the vocab down very, very easily thanks to their humorous images of what can be tedious words. And the short (thirty second) scenes help make the words much more memorable.

Yes, we all like to complain about the SAT, but the reality is that it’s here to stay, or at the very least, is here to stay in the college admissions game for as long as you are, so it’s better to take the bull by the horns before those horns get turned on you. The SAT help at Vocab Videos is much more fun and entertaining than the rest of the test-taking process, and lucky for you it deals with the parts you like the least. So get over there and make it happen.

File this under things never to do in your life, like wearing socks with sandals.

1. Bribes. We’ve all heard the stories of the kid who stapled the twenty (or the hundred) to his application and waltzed in. Generally speaking, I’m guessing your spot is worth a whole lot more than you can afford to the other several thousand applicants sitting in the pile. Save your paper route money and think about upping the ante with your essays rather than with your ante.

2. The down-and-dirty essay. We all know how desperate you can feel. But addressing the admissions officer like he’s your bro can give you more headaches than easy ins. Try not to tell the awesome party story, try not to mention the police, try not to begin paragraphs with the single-word sentence, “Look.” I know you dress to impress, but let’s maintain some semblance of formality here. The person reading your essay is likely wearing a tie.

3. An essay about how awesome you are. My including this may seem like a trick. Even, perchance, a snarky bit of round-a-bout. All essays are implicitly about how awesome you are. Of course. But if you say things like “I don’t want to sound arrogant,” you are. You really, really are. Find a way to slip in how incredibly awesome you are by describing what you do rather than how you are.

The college essay can be a bit of a minefield so keep plugging along, and remember, this ought to be the first piece of writing you do ten drafts on. Then, after you’ve wrapped out draft no. 10, you have finally figured out what the essay is about. Now you can begin.

The reality of the situation is that no matter what school you’re applying to, from Harvard to Queens County Community Incorporated, there are schools out there that are different but worth comparing to your top school, be it by location, academics, extra-curricular programs, or even study-abroad opportunities.

The moral of the story is that you’ve got to diversify that application.

If Harvard is your top choice, consider other top academic programs like Yale, Princeton, and Stanford. If Bennington is more your bag, have you considered Hampshire, Mount Holyoke, or Bowdoin?

Clearly these schools aren’t the same – no two are – but they offer many interesting overlaps that may appeal to you, and when applied to as a backup, may make it possible for you to have a host of schools you’re happy to go to, rather than the typical reach-match-safety trifecta that so people seem to stuff themselves into.

The really good news about all this is that adding schools to your list can often require little to no additional work, thanks to the wonders of the Common App, the College Board, and organizational sites like ours here. You may not even have to write an additional essay to apply to several more schools, given the requirements of your other applications. Give it a look and you might be surprised.