At the end of my junior year I decided to run for Student Council President, rhyming my entire speech, with friends on backup vocals, to Slick Rick’s “La Di Da Di.” Although I did not win, I stand by my platform: more social unity and school spirit—cliché maybe, but valid nonetheless. No one ever came to my basketball games and most of the students didn’t even know what our school colors were. Without a football team or pep rallies, Highland High suffers from a lack of student involvement. I wanted to change that.

Since 9^th grade I have been heavily involved in Red Door, a club whose student members tour prospective parents around the school. This club encourages students to take pride in themselves and in the school, and has always meant a great deal to me. A parent I toured last year asked me what I wanted to be when I grew up. I’m sure he expected to hear “doctor” or “lawyer” but I proudly said, “Rock star!” and prepared for the questions. I explained that Highland High offers a wide variety of classes for future rock stars. Aside from regular music classes, there are music writing classes using computers, a music appreciation club that experiments with instruments, and speech class to help with press conferences after the show.

My commitment to Highland High continues through the Arts and Crafts Club I started last year—objectively the greatest club in Highland High's prestigious history. In truth, it does have the most regular members who meet once a week, and the main goal is to add a spike of childhood back into our busy city lives. We use things we don’t have in our art classes, like Play-Doh or Silly String, and make ginger bread houses, bracelets, and tye dye. Together we strive to build a creative environment that adds to the Highland High community and makes us all view our school like a second home.

When you're starting to feel like this, watch our videos.

May 13, 2012

For juniors starting to contemplate the anxieties of the college application process up ahead, we wanted to pass on these great stress buster videos, which will definitely release some of that tension. In addition, stay tuned in to our blog as we regularly post updates on how to stay on top of the process. We also hold free webinars throughout the season, allowing for individual questions to be addressed.

14. Will you be adding essay questions for transfer students?

We don't have enough demand for transfer applicants at this point in time. Most students who want to transfer typically apply to only one or two specific colleges, making College Essay Organizer less useful to them.

15. Do you value customer service?

We place great value on our customers, and provide quick and accurate responses to all inquiries. We are always available by email and phone to further discuss how we can improve your experience if you feel anything is in need of improvement.

11. Is there always a word or character count listed for every essay?

We always include the listed word or character limit for each question if it is provided on the application. Instances in which essay lengths are listed as "Short space provided" (or something similar) refer to physical limits on a paper application. When there are discrepancies between the stated lengths of questions in the online and paper applications, College Essay Organizer lists the questions for the online application.

12. How useful are College Essay Organizer's essay samples?

We post what we deem to be "very strong" essays. We have found that posting truly exceptional essays intimidates students who are poor writers or are uncomfortable writing about themselves. We'll be adding more samples this year, which should give your students a broader range of essay topics to review.

13. Is there anything that I can do to improve the format when printing the RoadMap results?

We have added functionality to remove any questions, which will reduce the length of your printed document as much as you choose. If you are copying and pasting into a Word document, you can reduce the amount of space between lines by making sure the document is single-spaced with zero paragraph spacing before and after each line (look for this setting in the Alignment and Spacing section of the formatting palette). If you have further questions about formatting your RoadMap for your students and their families, please just send us an email and we'll be happy to help you out.

You may want to consider giving your clients access to their College Essay Organizer accounts, rather than printing out reports, as many consultants have found that sharing College Essay Organizer with their clients serves two key purposes: first, it validates the need for your services, as College Essay Organizer demonstrates the sheer magnitude of the essay process; second, it delivers a clear plan that parents can follow if they wish and empowers students to work more efficiently and proactively on their own.

7. I found that I did not use the RoadMap as much as I could have. Do you have any suggestions to help me make better use of it?

The RoadMap provides a suggested plan for organizing your essay questions and shows the overlapping themes among your essays. But one of its best features is that it provides as many topic options as possible for each essay that the student needs to write. Take advantage of this flexibility! It is ultimately up to the independent consultant and the student to relate the student's life to the broad themes addressed by the essay questions. But choose your topics carefully and specifically. It will make the writing process quicker and simpler, and increase the quality of the essays.

We are always improving the RoadMap's functionality and ease of use. This season, we have greatly simplified the layout of the RoadMap, and have added note-taking and essay uploading features to make College Essay Organizer your one-stop source for guiding students through the essay writing process.

If you would like to go over these upgrades individually, or find out how to optimize your clients' experience using College Essay Organizer, please let us know and we'll arrange a private demo with Dan Stern, our president. We're confident you'll find that the new and improved College Essay Organizer will guide students more clearly and successfully.

8. Will you be adding any additional tutorials for independent consultants?

We will be including additional resources to help new users this coming season, including live webinars that explain how to best use College Essay Organizer and that cover various essay topics. We will also include materials you can share with clients that allow them to optimize their College Essay Organizer experience. Though these additions aren't required to use College Essay Organizer or understand its benefits, they can help improve the experience for all.

9. Is it possible to use only the QuickFinder for my clients?

We do not currently offer QuickFinder-only accounts through the Master Account platform.

10. Why not?

We have developed the RoadMap around the QuickFinder format, allowing the RoadMap to function as a flexible, modifiable QuickFinder. Now that we've added an essay-sharing platform to make communication between you and your students even easier, College Essay Organizer has become a one-stop shop for the college essay writing process. We see the RoadMap as the core of that experience. The overwhelmingly positive feedback regarding the RoadMap, as well as the upgrades that make the RoadMap even easier to interpret now, makes clear that this is the best approach for our users.

It's hard to go wrong when writing about a meaningful experience

Students face all kinds of situations growing up, but the best kind of story is when someone can overcome and move beyond a significant challenge in his or her life. Through his own courage and determination, high school senior Daniel Altman was able to overcome a stutter, which he had struggled with since the age of two, through his work as a Production Assistant working on an Independent Film.

This is especially inspirational, because Daniel was also able to turn his personal success into an inspirational college essay, which got him accepted into his first choice college. Find the complete essay here.

4. Students often choose not to apply to schools on their original lists. Will it be possible to make changes to the list of schools for each student?

Each account allows a maximum of 25 college selections. The Essay RoadMap allows for colleges to be selected and de-selected, and will automatically provide an updated essay writing plan based on the student's most current list.

5. How can College Essay Organizer enhance independent consultants who pride themselves on their 'high-touch' services?

College Essay Organizer is designed to increase the quality of 'high-touch' services. Researching and organizing essay questions on your own (or having your clients do it) wastes valuable time and opens up the possibility of overlooking program-specific, optional, and scholarship questions, which are usually not included on schools' regular applications or the Common App.

With College Essay Organizer, speed and accuracy are taken care of, and you can focus your energies on high-level essay responsibilities like brainstorming the best topics and editing drafts. This optimizes the real value you bring as a consultant and eliminates the tedious, time-consuming work involved in looking up essay questions and designing a personalized essay plan.

Our new note-taking and essay uploading features will make this process even easier, allowing you to use College Essay Organizer as your one-stop source for the college essay process.

6. How can I be sure that College Essay Organizer's data will be updated quickly and accurately?

We consider accuracy our top priority. Occasionally there will be a slight delay between the time an essay question is made available by a college and when it appears on our site, but we closely monitor all the universities in our database and upload their essay questions as soon as they have been released publicly and verified by our staff.

Our stellar track record for speed and accuracy speaks for itself, and this season we will continue to work hard to ensure that new essay questions are uploaded as early as possible.

Unfortunately, university admissions departments do not always post accurate information. In 2010, many colleges posted essay questions that contradicted different versions of their own applications. Ultimately, College Essay Organizer helped to resolve these issues for its users, and for the colleges who were unaware of their discrepancies. We plan to have even more researchers this year further increasing speed and accuracy.

1. Is College Essay Organizer appropriate for all students?

College Essay Organizer is a time-saving tool regardless of where a student is applying. It instantly delivers all of the questions for any student's selected schools -- and for students applying to schools with few or no essay questions, College Essay Organizer helps them confidently know that a certain college does not have any essay questions, as sometimes it takes hours of looking to determine this.

Moreover, many colleges that don't have required supplemental essay questions for traditional applicants do have required questions for students applying to specific programs or departments. Most students are not aware of this, find out too late, and end up rushing to write mediocre essays in order to make their deadlines.

Finally, an increasing number of universities, especially state schools, offer a multitude of scholarship essay questions that appeal to all demographics, even those who do not require financial aid. College Essay Organizer now features hundreds of such questions, and the list is growing.

2. Can you help me place a value on College Essay Organizer?

Based on our research, the value of College Essay Organizer far exceeds our current price point. With College Essay Organizer, consultants save several hours per student, which means much less work required for the same number of billable hours. During the busy application season, this means your efficiency in setting up new clients skyrockets.

In fact, many consultants have found that if they share a sample College Essay Organizer report with potential clients, it often convinces clients that they could not possibly manage this process on their own without enduring excessive stress and confusion.

College Essay Organizer also finds program-specific essays that aren't included in schools' applications or on the Common App -- these questions tend to get overlooked or are discovered late in the game. Rather than spending hours seeking these out or losing your credibility when clients recognize that you've failed to address them, you can have them all delivered instantly through College Essay Organizer.

College Essay Organizer also provides a multitude of scholarship essays that can mean thousands of dollars in additional money for applicants.

With our feature that allows you and your clients to upload and edit essay drafts within the College Essay Organizer platform, you won't have to email multiple drafts back and forth for multiple students.

The alternative to using College Essay Organizer is researching all the questions on your own or assigning this task to your clients, which may lead to incomplete and inaccurate results, not to mention frustrated students and parents. It also means resorting to the cumbersome process of emailing drafts back and forth dozens, even hundreds of times.

We offer various promotional discounts via our partner sites throughout the year and post new discount codes on our blog regularly, giving you many opportunities to make College Essay Organizer an even more valuable part of your business.

3. What new features have been added to College Essay Organizer?

Our recent upgrades include making the RoadMap so much easier to interpret, adding note-taking and essay uploading features, and providing a checkbox that allows you to know whether or not an essay has been completed. We have also added the ability for educational consultants to co-brand their accounts and have increased the number of college selections to 25 per student in addition to enhancing site speed overall.

We will be holding weekly webinars for members, covering various essay topics, guidance on how to make the most of College Essay Organizer accounts, and Q&A for answers to specific questions.

Finally, all independent consultants who are College Essay Organizer members will be able to guest blog on our heavily trafficked site, expanding their reach to potential new clients.

If there is ever anything that you would like to see added to College Essay Organizer, please let us know. Your feedback drives us to be better!

Every high school has its stereotypical cliques. The jocks, the nerds, the popular ones, and on and on. I have always found these labels so narrow-minded and unfair. I move comfortably from one group to another, always at ease with whom I am among. But some friends don’t understand this. Sometimes I am with a friend and am told that I can’t bring him to some get-together going on elsewhere. I either defend my friend or simply don’t meet up with the others, but I would never abandon him. Respect is the cornerstone of any true friendship, and I have always valued the differences that others embody.

Differences are what I am all about. My father is a French-Lebanese immigrant who moved to the United States in 1979, while my mother is a native Brazilian who came to the US in 1978. They both arrived in America eager to explore their new opportunities and discover different parts of their existing identities, and this hunger for adventure and possibility has been cultivated in me.

Their upbringings have created vast distinctions between my home life and that of my friends. My parents’ cultural backgrounds stress a greater emphasis on the family unit, whereas my friends tend to be pushed into more individualistic roles that prioritize the importance of doing things on their own.

Then there is also the matter of travel. I have visited many different countries and every vacation must be a family trip. We’re more travelers than tourists, looking to experience different nations and peoples from the inside perspective. I’m sure this is largely because of my experience going so often to Brazil. I travel there yearly, spending two or three months there each year. As a Brazilian citizen fluent in Portuguese, with family in Rio de Janeiro, I am able to mingle with the culture from the inside.

This diverse background, especially in the most multicultural city in the world, has given me a very unique perspective on life. When many people mention the term “diversity,” it is often just a concept or a word. It has little relevance to their actual lives. For me, diversity is my life, and this diversity of background has opened me to political movements, social ideas, and personal attitudes that more traditional Americans might not be receptive to. As a result, I am able to look beyond a limited perspective and consider issues in more global terms.