the first workshop session we talked about how fast it was going to get go and here we are days before April vacation it feels like it is the longest week of our lives this week but um the thing when we get back from this vacation it will be over in in a moment and you'll be going into the summer
months and getting ready for senior year and before you know it you'll be sitting here a year from now making these decisions of where ultimately you'll end up um which is really quite exciting and watching the class of 2025 do that now um and the exciting decisions that they're making and and really how they
were at the meeting that you're at tonight getting ready for the exciting uh journey ahead so um it's informative tonight it gives you a little bit of a blueprint of what to think about and what to consider and you're in really great hands with um introducing Steve Goldman and Amy Burn is over here as
well and um and so um have a wonderful night and and learn a lot so thank you Steve thank you thank you all for coming out tonight um I promise you for those of you who were at the first work how many people go at the first workshop this will be shorter okay the first one
is always the long one okay um so we'll probably be here for about an hour uh depending on questions and things of that sort i'll be available um after for any qu and Miss Fern I think will be you stay will be here for questions also um so it doesn't matter if you work with
the other two counselors um we can certainly uh help help answer some questions keep you folks moving in the process um so it's great to see that you guys have attended the first workshop so this is going to for the most part pick up where we left off um there's very
little repetition um in these workbooks and these presentations um that's why we give you the workbooks um so if you need to go back and reference you uh you have those um it will also be posted on our website and we will email you this workbook um it's been a busy week before
vacation so we hoping to email it out before the presentation but it will go out hopefully tomorrow to all the juniors and their parents and caregivers um so you'll have your own copy of it and as always uh make sure to uh contact us with questions as we go
through all right so let's go to So like in the other books we have just the contact information for the counselors and the breakdown of the case loads so Mrs burns has the beginning of
the alphabet A through D AU um and we just keep one at the end of the alphabet I through C um so if you need to contact us uh that is the best way to get in touch with us the next page in the workbook is just a review of what we
covered in the first workbook uh so that gives you a little bit of a snapshot of the timeline and all that so if you need to refer back to the other workbook this will help you uh find the spot to find it uh as in the last workbook we've updated the testing information for the ACTs and the SATs um you'll notice with
the SATs there's a lot of TBAs they have not posted any deadlines yet for any tests after the May 3rd test uh but they did post those dates as test dates i can tell you that the May 3rd the one
highlighted in yellow we are a test center for that one so if you want to take the SAT we strongly recommend that you take the May one and the deadline is in two days to register um try to avoid the late
registration because College board loves to tack on late fees i think it's $34 now for uh for registering late um but if you really want to take it in your uh your school and be in usually more comfortable setting um certainly you don't have to if that date conflicts and
you need to take it someplace else you certainly can do that it's not a problem we have plenty of people come here from the outside um we are also a test center for the November 8th SAT um so those are the only two dates that we uh we offer here at Middleboro High
School we are not a test center for ACT i believe the closest place for ACT testing is Bridgewwater State um but if you go to their website they will uh they will tell you where the test centers are that are available to you
the CEB code is the code that identifies Middleboro High School so that's 22145 so if you're taking an SAT or an ACT that is the code number you need to plug in if you want us to receive that information it's helpful to us in advising and through the process to be
able to see the scores um so that is the number um eventually you will need to use a five code CE code number for colleges um that is if you need to send SAT scores um they have a five-digit code okay you know tests many colleges
are still test optional for these um so as part of the process that's a good question to ask or to read through the literature where uh under requirements to see if they're optional or if they're required uh we do strongly encourage every student to take at least take the
SATs at least once uh twice is kind of better uh because you know uh if you um if you do prep work you may see some significant it increases if you sometimes you just don't have a good test day and you know
they have sec a second set of scores if you happen to do better um on the um on the reading and writing section the first time but better on the math the second time you can super score and use both tests and they will take the two highest scores to and put those together
as one so that is a brief update on testing teacher recommendations uh in most cases you're only going to need one teacher recommendation please don't flood teachers with requests read carefully and ask uh and uh and before
you ask start asking teachers um it takes a lot of time and effort they do it on their own time um if you only do one thing before you leave here for the summer make sure you've gotten a commitment from a teacher to write your letter of recommendation
um you guys know who the popular teachers are here it's usually a junior teacher that writes it because they've seen you most recently uh for the longest period of time you don't want to ask a teacher you had freshman year um
who you haven't had since uh that's a little too far removed for the colleges uh if you did have a teacher freshman year and you know for sure they are teaching you again senior year depending on the subject matter if that might be a good wreck uh and depending on your
deadline if you have an early deadline that might not work so well but if you have a later deadline the teachers had a chance to see you in the classroom as a senior they can talk about the growth they've seen you over the course of the last four years um teachers do not have to write recommendations
so they can say no if they don't feel it would be appropriate or in the event that they get inundated as I said so you guys know who the real popular teachers are here some of them will put a cap and say the first 20 students that ask me to write a rep are the ones I just don't have enough time outside of school to be
able to write a wellthoughtout letter of recommendation that would benefit this the uh the student so beat your classmates to the punch and make sure that you don't have to give them anything right now just get the commitment just say I went to college planning trying to get everything set up and organized would you be willing to
write a letter of recommendation for me next year they said "Yes great i will get you the forms um as soon when as soon as I fill them out I'll get you the form." So this blue form here I just kicked the court they told me that would happen got it told you be a short presentation
thank you all right so this blue form you will find uh this is the teacher letter of wreck info sheet you will find this in your score account so when you log into score and the instructions are right here step by step to bring you right down to the
bottom here where it says number three you click on letters of recommendation you're going to see three well you click you're going to see three forms down there the letter of recommendation for the teacher is the one that you fill out for the teacher um and in the event that
you are asking more than one teacher you have to do one for each teacher because you don't want to write about your experience in math and give it to your English teacher um also when picking a letter of recommendation make sure that you a teacher to write your recommendation make sure that you are
trying to match up best you can the discipline with the major if you know what you have to be undecided it could be pretty much any teacher i would go with an academic teacher not an elective not a uh not a gym teacher or a coach or anything like that i would try to go
with an academic recommendation um we have a lot of students that um have connections with Mr branigan and ask him to write recommendations that is not an academic letter of recommendation he's never taught you so it's important
that you have an academic that is the primary recommendation that the colleges are going to look at um and weigh in to the decision- making um so u once you fill out this form save it someplace and
email it to the teacher that has said yes I will write that for you if you want to get it done now before school ends and give the teachers a heads up over the summer maybe um then that would be very nice of you also um we do
require 15 school days prior to your college application deadline and I said school days so it's not three weeks so when we have a week's vacation or a long weekend or Thanksgiving break those days don't count um we need to give the teachers and the counselors that kind of
heads up to make sure that we can process all the forms and put the time into a well thoughtout letter of recommendation um us just whipping something together in five minutes because the deadline's in an hour isn't going to benefit anybody um so it's important that you communicate it and
you take care of that very important do not save any of the college forms in Google that is bold it is red it is underlined and many people will still do it it changes the format
significantly um so please do not save it in Google make sure that you are saving it in something else i know you guys don't as familiar with Word as the outside world is but these are Word documents
um but don't save it in Google because it's not going to be helpful to anybody so we talked about who might you ask do not interrupt teachers classes to say "Oh I just want to know if you can write a recommendation you need to see them before school after school or in the
hallway uh but do not go in and interrupt while they're teaching." This is the counselor letter info form again still you find at the bottom of your score account uh similar to the teacher one it's a little bit longer the teacher one without you typing on it is
two pages the counselor one is four pages without you typing on it um the reason it's longer is we have to write the all round recommendation not just academics but your extracurriculars and everything that kind of makes you as who you are as a person uh you basically you
get out of this what you put into it it does not need to be a novel um the colleges don't want us to write more than a one-page letter of recommendation but if you give us one-word answers or you skip questions on this you're going to get out of it what you put into it is
as teachers see you guys every day counselors we know some students better than others some students come in a lot other students don't need us for a heck of a lot so we see them a couple of times a year so we may not know beyond the academics what makes you tick you
know what are you involved with in school out of school all those types of things so the general rule of thumb when you're reading these is you read the question state what it is give two or three examples of why it was meaningful or significant enough to put on here move on to the next one so as I said
this is four pages before you type on it by the time you finish it really shouldn't be much more than four maybe touching a fifth page just uh make sure you're putting enough in there so we can give an example or two of why it was important that you uh did horseback riding for eight years outside of school
um or why uh what you got out of being a captain of a team um so it's not just stating what it is it's giving the examples it's the anecdotal information that the colleges are really looking for and again save and the samples of these forms in the back of the workbook
that's going to be emailed to you and the third form is the activity sheet we introduced you to this in the last workshop um this activity sheet goes just to your counselor you should not be sending this to your teacher your teacher should only be writing about
their experience with you in the classroom now if they happen to be a coach of yours also that's fine they can share that they can share that experience too but the one thing the colleges do not want to see is your English teacher writing about how you played this sport that sport and you were that you got an award for this and
that when they have no firsthand experience with you in that activity that's for us to write about or if you have a coach writing about writing for you okay so make sure you're uh you do not give this to your teachers even if they ask you for it tell them your counselor will not allow them you to do
that okay blame us for it this form also doubles as the second page of the scholarship application now you don't have to worry about any scholarships or financial aid stuff right now financial aid we're not even going to be talking about financial aid today because there's not a thing you can do about it
until October 1st so let's deal with this stuff first and getting the applications out and then we'll talk about scholarships uh sorry financial aid scholarships don't begin until February of your senior year um as I said this is the second page it's only a
two-page application so you will have uh your second your half of your uh scholarship applications completed so save make sure you save this now there's specific instructions here of how to save these documents um to your laptop without changing the
format and those are right over in this area right right here okay what to put on your activity sheet don't show change yourselves anything from 9th grade through 12th grade should be going on there any baseball players
here softball players any spring sports here okay when you fill these out you will not have started your sport yet right include it don't make it look like you stopped playing that sport your junior year okay it's already activities if
you're planning on doing it your senior year make sure it goes onto the activity sheet so we've broken this down by athletics uh inschool clubs honor societies and the correct titles in spelling of the honor societies student government and
then we've given you some suggestions for outside things that sometimes students forget to include so like boy scouts girl scouts actually I think they just changed the name of those groups it's just scouting America now they just changed it but any
babysitters here okay can't tell you how many times I said with a student you have a part-time job no did you babysit oh yeah i babysit that's a job with a lot of responsibility make sure that you're putting that you're putting that down there okay uh any dancers or art club people or anything like that make sure
you're including all those activities doesn't matter if you played a sport for one year and then or did a club for one year and then you decided to try something else if you have room on the form and on your applications make sure you include those things because it shows that you weren't just going to school and going home and not doing
anything the college interview there are not a lot of schools these days that do interviews they tend to be the very small schools that really want to get to know their students if a college is offering you an interview take it do not be nervous it is just as much an
interview you are just as much interviewing them as they are you because you are the one that's going to be buying this very expensive product and you want to make sure that what you're getting is what you are reading and and seeing in the pictures i can tell you right now it's not always a
sunny day in a college campus not everyone's smiling and they're not all wearing their college t-shirts and that's what you're going to see in the pictures okay um it's marketing okay it's business okay you need to get on the campuses and you need to ask questions um how many of you have
cars how many of you would like to take your car to college with you ask can freshmen have cars on campus because a lot of colleges don't have the space for that um so a lot of things like that make sure that you are asking them questions also okay if you have a
couple of a major in mind and you want more specifics okay you ask it now if you want to talk interviewing with your counselor before you go on an interview we'll be happy to go over some things with you probably the most common question you're going to get and it stumps everybody is tell us a little bit
about yourself it's not a trick question i'm a 17-year-old senior at Middleboro High School i play football um I play guitar on the side i've I I've got two siblings an older one and a younger one um I hope to major in sociology someday
i'm just They just want to get to know you that's all it's not a trick question okay get out as I said before get out on the college campuses visit april vacation is a great time to visit college campuses you won't miss any time away from here um and you will see the
colleges with students still on campus colleges close earlier than we do so usually around the first or second week of May they're going into final exams so if you wait until the summer um you'll see the campuses and that's okay but you're not going to see it with the students and it's the students that make
up the life of the campus and you want to talk to students u the admissions counselors are salespeople they'll tell you about the school but they're not going to voluntarily share a downside to the school uh like freshmen can't have cars on campus okay or something like that um the students will tell you what
it's like they are closer in age to you uh than most admissions counselors um and um they they love to talk about their school so it's important if you can to try to visit while students are on campus now the reality is if you're looking at schools that are a distance
away you may have to do visits over the summer so do those it's okay um you don't have to make a decision final decision on where you're going to college until May 1st of your senior year that is a universal deadline to put your deposit down so worst you know in
in the worst case scenario if you want to call it that is you can always do a visit later on if you've been accepted to that school that's far away you haven't get a chance to to visit it uh this uh summer or in April here are some sample questions
that you can ask and sample questions you may be asked okay the application and admissions get organized now dedicate a spot in your home if you have a a spare bedroom or an office or a dining room
table that you don't use um set up folders and organize everything to make sure that you u have things at your fingertips as you start to eliminate schools that you absolutely know that you are you want no part of then put those in a different spot to get them
away from the ones you're still considering so here's a quick overview of the process the application the essay and the fee are all completed by you or submitted by you the secondary school report is something that the school counselor will fill out and submit to the colleges the recommendations you
initiate that with the teacher um and once the counselor receives your letter of w info sheet the green one um then we that that will tell us that you are applying to college and we can get started on that piece um we also process
transcripts the school profile um and can make sure that stuff all gets sent out to the colleges test scores are the students responsibility we legally cannot access your official SAT and ACT scores we can see them if you give us
permission but we cannot access and send those on your behalf they once they touch a third party they are no longer considered official so if you are applying to a college that is requiring test scores you have to go into your account that you registered for that
test and then indicate with that fivedigit code which college you would like to have those scores sent to and they will charge you I guess 12.5 now $13 now per test if it's beyond the nine-day limit um you get four free
ones if you indicate before you uh before you take the test but um I wouldn't take that chance with a lot of test optional schools i'd rather wait see what the scores are and then if I have to pay individually for those
okay how many colleges should I apply to more is not necessarily better in this process we recommend four to six colleges and uh you know sometimes eight depending on if there's extenduating circumstances maybe family is moving to
a further location so you want to maybe have a school uh close to them um but you should if you do your homework between now and when the deadlines start rolling around the first deadline is not going to hit until the October 15th is the earliest deadline that's out there you should be
able to narrow it down to four to six colleges and you should you should categorize those schools by realistic which means that um you pretty much have what they're asking for uh when you look at their their statistics the stretch of the reach could be one
that you got most of what they're looking for a few things aren't quite there and the safety and the backup no doubt about it you got beyond what they're looking for and everybody should have a safety or a backup and it's not necessarily because you don't have the
academic levels to get into that college i've had students in the past that have had some tragic situations i had one student who was planning on going to school out west and she was an only child and her dad unexpectedly passed away and it was just it was a very close
family to three of them and the mother was devastated she was she wasn't the student wasn't in good shape um they she wanted to stay a little bit closer to home um at least for that first year luckily she had Yukon as a backup not a bad backup school um and uh I had
another student who um was all ready to go to an engine to a big time engineering program dad lost his job um couldn't afford the big time school luckily she had UMass Low which is a great engineering school it just doesn't have the name recognition of some of the
bigger schools but it was closer so she and it was uh it was more affordable for her so always have a backup plan just in case other things thank you just in case things uh things don't quite work out the way you you hope they would and the counselors will be sitting
down individually with all the seniors throughout the fall depending on when their deadlines are thank you um to review the lists also and we'll make recommendations if we feel there should be another a backup school added to that
list at least for academic purposes all right this is the basic criteria that the colleges use when deciding um on candidates uh the level of your course selection so now that we've we've unpicked our courses and we
are actually in the build miss Burn has been building the master schedule for the last three days um so uh and she's still got a lot of work ahead of her so uh she's working and trying to get everyone what they ask for um but you want to make sure that the courses that
you picked for next year are equal to or stronger than what you've had in the past colleges are not looking at seniors winding down their high school years they are looking at them gearing up for college okay so make sure that you at least have the same level of of strength
in your schedule that you have carried over the last few years um and that's something that certainly you can talk with your school counselor about as far as balancing out because a lot of you going to want internships which is perfectly okay um some of you might be applying to schools that you don't need
to have quite the rigor that you've had in the past because um it's well within your reach um but we that's why we here to talk to you about that balance to make sure that you're covering your bases we don't want you to start out in September and then find out in January that uh uh we probably should have done
something differently but you got to let us know that because we don't know specifically what's going on with you guys and what your plans are big what your long-term plans are your recommendations will carry some weight so uh they colleges will always tell you a uh and the essay moving down a little
bit for a student that's on the cusp of getting in you know we want to take you we have 10 seats left and we've got 20 really great candidates a well-written letter of recommendation a well-written essay will put you over the time so those are two things that you want to
make sure that you're taking care of um and you're not rushing through the essay is actually the hardest part of this whole process and it's the thing that people tend to push off to the very end i uh we you will notice in here later on that we have the six prompts six or seven prompts that college board college
or the common app is provided uh for you to write an essay most of you will be using the common application um so you can start framing this out over the course of the summer i know when I had uh when I have big
presentations and things sometimes I just a little old school i either have my phone or I have pad of paper by the side of my bed because when I'm laying down getting ready to fall asleep all these things are running through my head um and I just make notes say "Okay this is a good phrase this is a good," you know things like that it makes no sense
my wife will walk in and she'll look at my nightstand and say "What were you dreaming about?" You know um but to me it's just reminders okay then when I get ready I take that stuff and I start to put it into sentences and then I start to build paragraphs and then a then a
whole then a whole essay or a whole body of a speech or whatever it might be and then I have somebody proofread it for you that would be teachers okay and you keep going through that proofreading rewrite proof reading rewrite until you have a nice clean document but don't save it for the end the application
isn't hard name date address if you can those questions you're probably not ready to go to college um the most probably the trickiest question on your application is going to be what's your social security number um which you are going to need to provide if you're applying for financial aid um which
we're not talking about tonight um so um so don't save it for the end because what ends up happening is students do that they got two weeks to go and like now I'm going to do my essay and it's stress time because then you have exams coming up you know it's the end of the quarter and you have to and you got to
try to get keep your grades up and it's been a long football season and I'm tired and I'm sore and I'm achy and and the days are shorter now because we changed the clocks and you got that deadline looming so don't save it for the end you want to The essay is one of those things that you want to stop plugging away at get away from it for a
while clear your head come back do you ever read a test question over and over and over again and then you say yourself "I don't even know what the question is now." That's what the essay is like okay if you don't get away from it you're just reading it over again you're skipping over mistakes and and just not noticing things anymore so it's always
good to kind of clear your head and get away from it it's also nice to print it out and read it on paper can't tell you when I'm writing recommendations the essay looks the letter looks wonderful on the computer screen then I print it out and I read it and I'm like "Okay there's a typo there's a typo there's a
typo." And you are going to be judged on those okay it is not a giant text message you need to use proper punctuation capitalization of sentences proper nouns um you need Yes yes no slang um you need to treat this like it
is a major English exam okay um and make sure that you are presenting yourself in the best light in some cases a lot of cases that's the only opportunity you're going to have to express yourself beyond the information you put in your
application okay so you want to make sure that you're you're doing the best you can to present yourself um your interest that would be your club's activities sports things of that sort your GPA and rank uh will be looked at also uh if they do interviews that can certainly help if they really like the
candidate and you communicate well with them and any awards recognitions extracurriculars all that stuff so anything and the awards and recognitions don't have to be academic they can be outside of school they can be athletic and so on and so forth so picture a puzzle with your face on
it the college doesn't have the whole picture until every single piece is in place okay so that's another piece when you're looking at say "I got this i got this i got this." Oh they want this i don't have that you plug in your piece let them make that decision okay if it's
a school that you really are interested in that you you make sure that you uh you're telling them that you're uh you talk to them because every time you email them every time you call them they make a note in your file um so um they they do check interest level every time
you scan their website their computer system notes it that you were on their website again so it's uh so they got there's a real science now to apply students that uh receive academic
support whether it's through an IEP or a 504 there are colleges out there with specialized programs um that are very supportive of students um and uh in their adjustment to college and um and and also in their academics try to
develop continue to develop the skills they were working on with the supports here at the high school two colleges in particular that have excellent excellent programs are Curry College it's called the PAL program they actually have I believe a special application for that
when you apply um and I've had uh several students over the last 27 years who have applied there and they had a support period their first year with it with similar to what we do here at the high school for students and IEPs um where they they go and it's not you know
it's just part of their regular routine freshman year and they work on their continue working their skills get help if they're struggling with a subject but the goal is to get you off of all that stuff by the time you graduate and I've had I've had a lot of a lot of students that have seen great success with that um the other school is Westfield State
they have a separate application also for their program and they have a dedicated counselor for students with learning disabilities so when you apply to that program at Westfield State you have a counselor who specializes in that area who reviews just the special uh students with disabilities applications
and then makes decisions based on that and then puts the proper supports in place for them west State also a very successful program um and all colleges have academic support centers uh I know when I did a visit to Boston College several years ago they told me
that 66% of the students there use their academic support u center on the regular they say they just go there because the library is too much too much activity going on in the library and it's nice to
have people there if you're studying um inorganic chemistry and you don't understand something which would be the case for me um there's somebody there that can help you with inorganic chemistry so so this there's a lot of supports on the college campuses and
they should be because you're paying a lot of money to go there the different types of application deadlines so there's five different types there's early action there's early decision there's priority regular decision and then rolling admissions so let's start with early action early action is a
non-binding process you can apply to as many colleges as you want early action the colleges will pick a date it's not November 1st through December 15th it every college will pick a date so it would be either November 1st November 15th December 1st or December 15th and
they will say that is our early action deadline okay so if you want if you have the time and don't rush if you've got a lot you didn't do college boot camp in the summer and if you're playing a fall sport and you had to start your essay I wouldn't recommend starting rushing to do an early application because you're
probably going to miss some steps and not present yourself in the best light um so um so you like I said you can apply to as many of these colleges you want early decision if they offer it some colleges offer only early action some offer early decision boston
University only offers early decision the difference between early action and early decision you can only apply to one college early decision it is a binding legal contract that the student the parent or guardian and the guidance counselor are all signing saying that I've applied to one
school early decision and if I get accepted that's where I'm going the decisions for early decisions start coming in around Nove uh December depending on the college's deadline i would say between uh December 1st
December 15th and then some go into the uh into into January you are not going to find out about financial aid for months after that okay so you have to be sure school like DEU that only offers early decision
um and costs about $90,000 a year to go to if you get locked into a BEu and finances are going to be an concern for you and you do not get a financial a decent financial aid package that could be problematic please do not apply to
more than one college early decision i had a student that did that several years ago she applied to Babson and Bentley she was being highly recruited to play tennis she had done visits to the campus did an overnight with the tennis team um and um both accepted her
i happened to know the coach at Babson College the tennis coach i went to college with him and he saw the name of the school called me and asked me um asked me about her and I told her she was a good student um and I I said and then I I noticed and I didn't say
anything but I noticed that she indicated to me that she applied to Bentley College early so what happened they were all she's on she's on a list that they all have access to bentley and Babson found out they both rescended their decisions okay so it's uh it is a
legal doc so please be very careful with that early action as many as you want early decision one you're not going to find guidance counselors that are big fans of early decision um for a lot of reasons not just the money but I've seen people that
have been that have I've worked with for four years and said "This is my dream school this is my dream school this is my dream school." And then at the end of the process end up going someplace else priority is similar to early action you can apply to as many schools
priority as you want um they usually have some specific stipulations that you uh specific to their college anybody here interested in nursing okay nursing programs are very difficult to get into and the reason
they're so difficult is there's a lot of people that want to be nurses there's a high demand for nurses but there's just not a lot of seats in these nursing programs umass Ammeris has a nursing program uh it's not what they're known for it's a good nursing program but it's not what they specifically known for
they only take 85 to 90 students a year they just don't have a lot of room and they don't take transfer students and most most colleges do not take transfer nursing students um if you were applying nursing I would recommend most of those nursing programs
are an early action program but if it just says rolling or regular decision I would apply if they have a priority I would apply priority you want to get that stuff in before i've seen students that are top-notch students get shut out not because of their grades but because
of the timing of their applications so that would be one case of a priority application regular decision deadlines begin January 1st and they run the first to 15th for the most part 1 and the 15th of the months um up until uh April um so
again each college like I'll give you so Bridgewwater State their early action deadline is November 15th the regular decision deadline is January is um February 15 boston University does not have early action they have early decision which is November 1st and they
have uh regular decision uh January 1st uh and then there's rolling admissions which is no deadline so there's a positive and there's a negative to rolling admissions positive is there's always a college to apply to so for example Massoyad is a rolling admissions and it says it's not just the community
college pl I believe is now rolling admissions bridgewater says they have a a uh February 15th but they're pretty much rolling at this point also um so there's always a place to apply to so if something happens things don't work out
there's always a school to apply to the downside with rolling admissions is the way rolling admissions work is you know you you go and you hand in your application they read it they make a decision next person hands in they read it they make a decision with the specific deadlines nothing's read until
the deadline hits and then they process all those applications in one pool and they take the best students people they feel the best so with rolling admissions once they fill up they fill up i give you an example i was talking to a student today about Nor Eastern nor Eastern is very very select
now but it's very difficult to get into Northeastern University um we have validictorians in the past that have not gotten into Northeastern when I was in high school they took 75% of their applicants uh I got into Nor Eastern um I didn't go but I got in
um but um it it's a very tough school to get into when I was first a guidance counselor way back we We used to have a lot of kids apply for it they assume their deadline at the time was a rolling deadline and we had kids that usually applied
anywhere from the 1st to 1st of January to like February 15th is kind of a window that they they chose to submit their applications and we never had problems getting kids into it wasn't here it was another school um few years
go by and I had on January 15th and a couple months later he gets a rejection from Nor Eastern and I'm looking at the kids transcript and he was a strong candidate so I called Nor Eastern because I had a couple of kids some of the other counselors had a
couple of kids also that ordinarily would have gotten in and weren't getting in i called admissions and Northeast tells us yeah um everyone applied in the fall this year they were filled before Christmas um so Nor Eastern now has a
hard deadline but um that's the downside to world admission so Like I said there's always some place to go but you got to be careful it's a very high demand school um they may fill up earlier certainly later this page here has important information that you are going to need
to complete your application it's our school code our address phone number fax number the correct spelling of Mr brandan's name correct spelling of your counselor's name phone extension email
address um all that information you are going to have to put into your application again just look for details on these things um my name Stephen is s e pen i don't care how you spell it you can spell it with a v you can spell it s
e i don't care but it's those things that they notice when they see my signature and they see my name typed in an application one way but by me and then the student took a shortcut um they notice those little things they look you know you've you've all heard how
competitive colleges are they're looking for reasons to narrow their pool down so don't give them one of those reasons now if I happen to you know I know when the counselors meet the students I I try to go over their common app with each student that's using it and if I notice it I'll correct it um but there are some
students that decide they just want to go off on their own and do it and they submit things and they've they've made some mistakes um some of whom they were able to recover others they just had to live with so um again I would always say try to check with the council before you send any of that stuff out to make sure
from our end everything looks like it's in order your class size we purposely did not list your class size because um past history tells us that we may lose or gain a few people um between now and the fall so when you come back for boot camp uh and we've re sorry not boot camp
when you come back for uh the fall um once we uh know what our official class size is we will get that information out to you folks um your years attended Middleboro High School for you guys it would be 20 September 2022 to June
2026 unless you transferred here if you came in at a different date you just need to be careful about that uh that start date and your anticipated graduation date is June 6 2026 um so that is the information you're going to need the school
information you're going to need for your application the essay we talked a lot about start early and we get some tips in there for writing your essay we talked a lot about that stuff already and as I told you here are the
2025 2026 essay prompts from Common App there's eight of them okay usually they're looking for an experience where you've learned something about yourself an obstacle or a challenge you've overcome uh you want to u make sure that whatever you are writing about um if you
are uh I have a friend of mine that was admissions counselor for years at Boston College and he used to tell me he used to come and uh do a presentation for me at my first school and he used to tell the students the parents you know what we read the most wonderful stories about grandma and grandpa in essays and how
they were inspirational and motivational and just uh and all that and we gladly accept grandma and grandpa to our college you always have to bring that essay back to yourself as an as a result of my experience with grandma grandpa or
a mentor of any kind these are my values my beliefs uh my goals in life and these are the things that I've learned and I'm going to take with me and I bring to your school um so always bring it back to yourself when you're writing about it if none of these are have have any
interest to you at all number seven is a topic of your own choice some people are relieved when they hear that some people are really bugged out when they hear that um but if you do not like the other topics and you want to write a topic of your own you're certainly welcome to do that also again
I would make sure that you are have asking an English teacher to proofread you make corrections proof read you'll see in the next workbook a flowchart arrow just keeps going round and round okay until you have a nice clean copy of your of your essay do not open up a Common App
account if you are going planning on going to college application boot camp okay we will do that together so we make sure that you are using the right email addresses you are saving passwords and we will make and we will go line by line you will be about 95% completed with the
process of boot camp which we'll talk a little bit more uh in a while um by the time you walk out at the end of the week um if you try to open up a Common App right now you are opening up this year's Common App um and they are redesigning it they told us so you want to make sure
that you are using next year's it's not usually available to August 1st uh but you want to make sure that uh that you are uh if you like said if you're going to boot camp don't open it we will walk you through that process and make sure you are where you need to be by the time
that week ends so let's talk about college application boot camp how many people have heard of college application boot camp all right how many people are thinking about going good very good highly recommend you talk to any student that's gone they're going to say it was well worth a couple hours each day it's
it's uh we offer four different sessions uh but they're weekl long sessions it's two it's roughly two hours each day uh either a morning or an afternoon uh you'll be with an English teacher for four of the days and you'll be with your school counselor for one day the day
with the counselor is a three-hour session the reason for that is because like I said we're opening up a common app account we're syncing it with your score account so they speak to each other um and we are going to make sure that you have answered every question provided you have the information with
you we ask you to bring and that like I said you would be about 95% complete with the process um so the program um it's only uh boot camp is only for students applying to four-year colleges we're using the common application so schools like Massoya Bristol Community
College Cape Cod Community College are not on the common app they have their own paper application oh they have an online one too and um that's something that we can fill out individually with you in probably about 20 minutes so you don't need to spend $75 in a whole week and you don't need an essay for
community college there are some smaller schools four-year colleges that also um have their own applications that don't subscribe to the common app it's probably about a thousand colleges that use the common app um but even if you have just one college that you're
applying to on it and you want to use it it's one application you don't have to keep answering the same questions over and over again um you don't get bonus points using the college's own application over the Common App if they subscribe to it then they want you to use it it just saves you a whole lot of
time it's only it's one essay you don't keep writing a whole bunch of separate essays highly recommend it all right so how to prepare for boot camp u most So as I said the Monday session is from a uh is a three-hour
session and the rest of them um are two-hour sessions uh and then the things that you need to bring to the boot camp in order to be able to answer all the family information is right here um so if you can have that just you know print this
page out and just write the information right next to it we'll send an email reminder for the students that have registered for boot camp um so uh and if you can uh bring all that information and have your activity sheet complete then you will breeze right through the boot camp and be able to answer all your
questions uh so these are the uh the times the dates and times so the first group will be the week of August 4th there's a morning session and then there's an afternoon session
group two um so the morning session starts at 8 the afternoon session starts at 12 and like I said it's five days two hours a day except for the Monday and then group three is the week of the 11th and group four is in the afternoon of of the 11th so if if those one of those works for you I would sign
up ahead of time as soon as they're working on the advertisement now it'll probably be a Google registration i would recommend if you have a tight summer plan with vacations signing up sooner than later because um once the sessions fill up um then you're going to
have to force a different uh different session the cost is going to be $75 um if there is a financial need I would recommend speaking with your school counselor and uh we will uh talk with Mr brandon about that and try to
make some arrangements um you uh the payment goes to Mrs homer in the main office it has to be cash or money order payable to the town of no personal checks the registration deadline is August 1st i would not re recommend
waiting till August 1st to register um if you have not submitted your came before boot camp you will not be admitted into the boot camp um this link was last year's link i'm waiting to hear from uh Miss Casey who's the one of the English teachers that is um setting up
the uh the essay side of things to see if she's still using that link so I make sure we email this out to you that we have the correct link in there also and mark your calendars we just talked about the boot camp college planning for seniors and their families
will be in the fall of 2025 if you participate in boot camp you do not need to go to the college planning night in in September parents might want to go just so they were on board with things but students wouldn't need to because they've already got they will have
gotten that presentation uh we also will record it like we do each one and post it on our website will be under this presentation will be under the counseling department junior information link the uh the senior one will be under the senior information uh financial aid
workshops there are several financial aid workshops that are scheduled by NEIFA which is the Massachusetts Educational Financing Authority um they haven't posted them yet but as we get that information they do virtual and in person and they will help walk you through the financial aid forms um as I
said before there's not a thing you can do about financial aid until October 1st so do not even sweat the financial aid process right now uh do not let the money be a factor in where you apply right now yes college is very expensive um but you don't know what you're going
to get for financial aid and you could end up going to an $80,000 school for it would cost to go to a $30,000 school um and we weigh that out it's not just how much aid you're getting some of that a lot of that is low interest student loans it's the PEL grants and the free
money you get to keep the cost down because the whole purpose of going to further your education is to be able to get a good job to make some decent money so you can live a certain lifestyle and if you got 20 years to pay off half a million dollars that lifestyle is not
coming anytime soon so it's a balancing act okay um scholarship information night was usually the week before February vacation so um there won't be any information going out on that until uh probably until uh the first year
after the first year um and then the big scholarship night is during usually the Wednesday of senior week that's when the awards are given out to the students national College signing day is May 1st that is the date that you need to put a deposit down at the college you wish to attend and then you'll have your senior
week activities um usually of May beginning of June and then graduation will be in June of 2026 um so that is that and then the last part of the book is as always are the sample forms is the teacher
one the counselor one and then we actually wrote out how to word your activities so this will help guide you through the activity sheet and then we have the glossery of terms in the back a lot of acronyms in education and you may
not know what some of these things mean so we tried to include as many as we could there so that is it it is 6:58 i kept it under the one hour mark um I'm going to open it up to questions i haven't seen the sheets on
school yet like I've looked down in like my profile i haven't seen it yet so you look at my profile and you scrolled all the way to the bottom and I saw like a I think it's like a principal assessment form yeah it would be below the principal assessment you didn't see anything there it's in my
drive at the bottom okay i'll check when I get check on it it's not okay other questions i got one yes how much are deposits for college i'm gonna defer to Miss Burn on that okay says she has a
freshman um all right so my daughter's a freshman and last year we paid $400 for the deposit that was due May 1st it's transferring this year and it was 500
that I paid so it's about three to five do they apply that deposit to the tuition okay all right thanks was there a question here oh yeah um so when you were talking about the letter organizations you said to be
an considering like I want to go to art college so if I were to perfectly appropriate to use an art teacher yes yep no good question other questions question i couldn't have done that back
on the job folks come on well I'm going to defer to you on that since you've been through it already hopefully my daughter's only 14 so um yeah so you can't you can't fill out the FAFSA um
until October 1st that's when the class of 26's FAFSA will be available um and so you just really can't do anything until then but um what you can do in the meantime is all the colleges are required to have a net price calculator
on their website and so it's it's kind of a basic little formula but it's going to ask you a few questions about your family size how many kids are in college um your income um it'll give like a range of income um you know a few more
questions and then it will tell you approximately what you might end up paying