Application Counseling

Personal Statement and Application Review for College, Graduate School, and Professional School Applications

The college, graduate school, or professional school application essay is probably the greatest opportunity in the admissions process for a candidate to express his or her particular strengths and individuality. Many applicants, however, are daunted by the freedom that the essay allows. Recognizing the importance of a successful personal statement, Advantage Testing offers a comprehensive essay review program for applications that permit such review. This program enables students to express themselves with confidence, character, and creativity.

Individualized Focus

With all applications and perhaps especially with those for professional school, we can help students understand which skills and background experiences are most relevant for their chosen forum. Law, business, and medical school programs all have distinct emphases, priorities, and criteria. We educate students so that they can develop a focused perspective on the purpose of their essays for their selected fields and audience. In turn, students may well find that their writing flows more easily and that they can better assess its appropriateness.

Essay Development

The essence of good writing lies in careful rewriting, and we guide our students through this occasionally difficult process. Tutors carefully review their students' work and help students identify fresh ways of conveying their own message. Students thus learn to communicate their ideas using personal and original language that is true to them while sustaining the highest levels of academic honor and personal integrity. At the end of a careful and effective essay review program, a student will have written finely honed essays in his or her own voice. Along the way, students develop their general writing skills and gain an appreciation for the craft of writing.

Program Structure

The essay review program consists of several components, depending on the essay's stage of completion and the student's needs:

• A brainstorming session to arrive at an appropriate topic best suited to the student's strengths and background
• Assistance with planning and outlining the essay
• A discussion of overarching principles such as determining a theme, building sound structure, achieving clarity, and developing a narrative voice
• Critical and thorough reviews of the essay's progress through the final draft

Our Teaching Objective

As with all our programs, the purpose of our involvement is to cultivate enduring skills in the student. By working hard to develop an application that represents an accurate and positive personal voice, the student learns a broader lesson: the vigilant attention to every word that good writing requires. Application essay development involves both introspection and objectivity, writing and rewriting, editing and crafting-a process akin to that of developing a research paper or a professional document. The application essay can be a particularly effective means of instilling and applying writing lessons because, perhaps more than with any other piece of writing, the student is so deeply invested in the impact of his or her prose.