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As the school year gets underway, now is the time to address the executive functioning challenges that can impact your child’s academic and emotional success.
Uptown Psychology’s Fall Executive Functioning Intensives are designed to help children, teens, and young adults build the skills they need to stay focused, organized, and confident throughout the year. Now is the time to solidify these before returning to school. Intensives support students who struggle with:
Staying organized and managing time
Starting and completing tasks
Regulating emotions and attention
Planning ahead and following routines
Led by licensed therapists and former teachers, this structured, evidence-based program includes:
Individualized skill-building based on each student’s strengths and needs
Short-term, goal-focused sessions that fit into busy school schedules
Flexible options for in-person or telehealth participation
Convenient Upper East Side or available virtually
Whether your child is navigating new academic demands or long-standing executive functioning challenges, UP’s executive function intensives can provide the support they need to succeed.
Learn more by booking a 15-minute consultation here!
Yale podcast/blog: https://admissio
Michigan’s application instructions: http
Princeton’s helpful tips: https://admissio
Writer’s block is no joke! It happens to the best of us, so don’t get too frustrated if some days you just can’t get in the groove with your writing. When it strikes, try using these ideas to help jumpstart the process:
If you aren’t getting anything down in 20 concentrated minutes, it might be time to skip to 4 and 5.
Ultimately, the only way to get over writer’s block is… to write! You can do this!
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Your personal statement should uniquely reflect who you are, what you value, and how you think—while also engaging and even surprising the reader.
You may be thinking, “Nothing much has happened to me! How can I surprise the reader?” Well, one of the biggest myths about the personal statement is that you can’t write a good one unless you have a “big” or tragic story to tell: “I was on my way to becoming a professional skater before I shattered my ankle,” or “I overcame a life-threatening disease then founded my own nonprofit to fund research on that disease.” While an experience like this could make for an excellent (though painful) personal statement, it could also make for…a boring essay. Although it’s sad to say, admissions officers have read many of these stories and therefore aren’t surprised or even moved by them.
Just think about it: admissions officers read thousands of essays every year, year after year. To get through them all, they have to read quickly, stopping once they figure out which “pile” you belong in (yes, no, or maybe). Your goal is to force that reader to slow down, even stop—to make them want to read your essay, to make them think, “I’ve never seen this before!” Admissions officers are more likely to have seen the “big” stories before—every year, they read thousands of essays about sports injuries and divorces, about Eagle Scout projects and difficult classes. Often, the best way to surprise the reader is to think small—to write about an unusual hobby (Sample Essay 6 in The Complete College Essay Handbook) or passion (Sample Essay 5 in The Complete College Essay Handbook)—or to write about a more common experience in an unexpected way, like discussing your parent’s divorce in the context of a violent protest (Sample Essay 4 in The Complete College Essay Handbook). Surprise can also be contextual. A varsity soccer player writing about varsity soccer? Not surprising.
A note: not all surprises are created equal. There is the pleasant, gentle “surprise party” kind of surprise, and then there is shock, which can be invoked through violent images or vulgar confessions, and which produces negative emotions—fear, disgust, anger, and more.
And…not all topics are created equal: some are very common and therefore boring, while others are too complicated to tell in 650 words or highlight privilege. You might want to reconsider writing about these for the CA essay:
Occasionally, students do have exceptional stories within these topics. For instance, maybe your grandmother raised you as if you were her own child and so her death hit you particularly hard, or maybe your parents’ stories of living through the fall of the Soviet Union sparked your consuming passion for history, or maybe failing trigonometry truly changed your life. Trust yourself to know if your story falls into one of these exceptional categories, and ask a friend if you aren’t sure.
That said, there are a few topics you should never ever write, for the personal statement or the supplemental essays, about because they act as red flags to admissions readers and will likely prevent your application from being seriously considered. These include:
Note that all of these are only red flags if they are about you—your mental health issues, your consumption of drugs or alcohol, your controversial beliefs. It is fine to write an essay that engages with one of these topics from a distance (e.g., your brother was an alcoholic, a friend pressured you to engage in risky behavior, but you refused) so long as you are still writing about your experience of that situation.
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The school year is winding down, which means it’s time to start working on college admissions essays. This month, we’ll share some excerpts from our book, The Complete College Essay Handbook, starting with some personal statement tips!
First, what exactly is a personal statement like the Common Application essay?
A personal statement is a creative essay of 650 words or less that reads like a short story, memoir, or novel—not like an academic essay, textbook, or newspaper article. The best personal statements tell a story that culminates in a meaningful realization and offers the reader a glimpse of a mind in the process of thinking.
The personal statement is not the place to brag about accomplishments (student body president, team captain, founder of a schoolwide service project), or about how amazing you are (“I’m a world-changing revolutionary!”).
Although people you don’t know are going to read it, the personal statement is not a public form, like a school-wide speech. The personal statement is an intimate form, like a secret. It is the place to be honest, vulnerable, and raw, to reveal mistakes and weaknesses, to open up about an experience you’d only tell someone you were really close with, to explore what you struggle with and what scares you.
The personal statement is not “about” an event or achievement. It is about the psychological and emotional processes that occurred “behind the scenes.”
The same story, told from one angle, can be impersonal whereas, from another—told with a focus on the process rather than the outcome—can become deeply personal. Here are a few examples to help explain what I mean.
Notice how all of these negative examples focus on the superficial event: I was elected; I raised money; I tore my ACL. By contrast, the positive examples explore the story behind the event—what was going inside of the writer that either led to this event (the student body president and orphanage examples) or the internal change that resulted from it (the ACL example). They also explore intimate, potentially difficult topics.
Since the personal statement is a creative essay at its heart, there is no set formula for success—however, our process and essay samples will give you the tools and examples you need to write your own standout personal statement.
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The college process often amplifies anxiety among teens and their parents, yet stress is inevitable. The goal is to manage it healthily, according to Lisa Damour, a clinical psychologist, author of The Emotional Lives of Teenagers, and host of the Ask Lisa podcast.
Lisa joined Jeff Selingo on a special 30-minute edition of “Next Office Hour” last week. Let’s all give the episode a listen. Some top takeaways:
Accept discomfort. Parents should acknowledge emotional stress as normal. “We cannot prevent emotional pain in our teenagers. Rather, we should help them manage discomfort when it comes,” Damour said. The focus should be on helping teens cope constructively, like allowing space for healthy distractions or emotions rather than harmful habits
Encourage healthy coping. Crying, spending time with friends, physical activity, and mindful rest are all beneficial ways teens can process stress. Parents should be alert only when teens use costly coping mechanisms like substance use or self-criticism.
Reframe high school. Teens should focus on cultivating genuine interests and strengths rather than solely trying to impress admissions officers. Enjoying downtime without guilt is crucial for mental health.
Recognize parental roles. I loved Lisa’s analogy of the Pit Crew vs. the Tow Truck. Parents often feel pulled between supporting their kids (pit crew) and pushing them (tow truck). Constant towing suggests a teen may not be ready for college, highlighting the value of considering gap years or alternative pathways.
Dealing with rejection. College admissions isn’t always meritocratic. When teens face rejection, validate their feelings but emphasize they’ll thrive by focusing on what they can control.
The big picture? Parents and teens often overestimate how much college prestige matters.
If you don’t follow Jeff Selingo, you should. See past issues and subscribe to his newsletter. You can also find him on LinkedIn, Instagram, Facebook, Twitter, and Threads if social is your thing!
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I haven’t fan-girled over Adam Grant in a while, so I’m excited to share this one:
I’m seeing a growing number of students complain: “My grade doesn’t reflect the effort I put into the course.”
Public service announcement: High marks are for mastery, not for motivation.
Working hard doesn’t guarantee doing a good job, that you are a good person…. or college admission.
Read more here.
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I can’t think of a better example of nerding out to post on a blog about college admissions than Wade Fagen-Ulmschneider and Louisa Zhang’s (Illinois ’27) “Trends in High School GPAs among Incoming Freshman Classes of Big Ten Schools.“
They analyzed 286 reports to source Questions C11 and C12 in the Common Data Sets. The reports accessed in this work are published publicly by each University.
Other data nerds can join in the fun through a MicroProject they built to spread the data love. Oh, and their work also highlights the need for near-perfect grades for some of the more selective Big 10 schools!
The main CA essay prompts are the same, but there’s an updated “challenges and circumstances” question, which replaces the old COVID-19 question. The post from the CA is below:
We are happy to announce that the Common App essay prompts will remain the same for 2025–2026. 🎉
Based on positive feedback from students, counselors, teachers, and colleges, we’ve decided to keep the essay prompts unchanged. We will continue to explore trends in prompt selection across different student populations and use those insights to inform future updates.
Students will see two changes to the optional “Additional information” questions as of August 1, 2025.
We are making these changes after conducting listening sessions and consulting with our member, counselor, and student advisory committees to ensure we gather diverse perspectives and input. Students in the first-year app who have text in their “Additional information” question that exceeds the reduced word count limit after August 1 will see an error message alert letting them know they have exceeded the new max. They will not lose anything they have written prior to August 1, but they will need to go back and adjust their response. In the transfer app, student responses to the “Additional information” question prior to August 1 will not roll over.
Here is the full set of essay prompts for 2025–2026.
This is the updated “Challenges and circumstances” question language students will see beginning August 1, 2025
Sometimes a student’s application and achievements may be impacted by challenges or other circumstances. This could involve:
If you’re comfortable sharing, this information can help colleges better understand the context of your application. Colleges may use this information to provide you and your fellow students with support and resources.
Would you like to share any details about challenges or other circumstances you’ve experienced?*
( ) Yes
( ) No
Please describe the challenges or circumstances and how they have impacted you.
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