Many applicants to the most selective university programs share high grades, high test scores, solid recommendations and generous doses of community service and volunteer activities. Yet, if they want to set themselves apart from the pool of exceptional students, a significant research experience in STEM or the social sciences helps.
When boiling down the college experience to its essence, students usually best remember getting to know one or two professors who were pivotal in sparking their curiosity and jumpstarting their motivation.
Richard Light of Harvard School of Education in his Making the Most of College, Students Speak Their Minds, describes the factors that define faculty who ‘make a difference.’ Professor Light interviewed over 1400 students to isolate his list of important factors
Learning is more effective when done collaboratively. In generations past there was a taboo about working in groups; school work was supposed to be done individually. Research from Richard Light of Harvard unequivocally indicates that students working collaboratively learn more effectively, and are far more likely to achieve their academic goals (such as graduating from college and attending graduate school). His study, which consisted of in-depth interviews with over 1,600 college students, found virtually all struggling students shared one key trait: they tended to study alone. Collaboration can be the difference between a lackluster performance and a fully engaged student.
Richard J. Light, a professor in Harvard’s Graduate School of Education, in his book on student engagement, Making the Most of College (Harvard University Press, 2001) tells us that of all the skills students desire to strengthen, writing is mentioned three times more often than any other (p. 54). Despite that being the case, over half of the recent matriculating California State University students enrolled in a remedial writing class; further, all the entering freshmen at Harvard are required, without exception, to take an expository essay writing class. Obviously, writing is not an easy subject to learn, let alone attain mastery over.
