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College Applications: Three Anytime Hacks to Help Your Favorite Student (Your Kid).

Christine Schneider
6 min readSep 17, 2021

My daughter is strong-willed, independent, self-aware, and very likely to ask me to butt out if advice is given in anything other than a candy-coated, subtle way. So as she was beginning the process of starting her college applications, I wanted to provide general thought guidance, without imposing in a way that would shut me out of the process altogether.

Having been a co-chair of the Brown University Alumni Interviewing Program for six years, I had personally interviewed well over 100 local high school students for admission. And I still remember today, two years after my stint as an interviewer ended, the students who stood out. They were the young people who had reflected on who they were and who they wanted to become. They understood and could talk about how their unique combination of lived experiences, interests, passions and skills had combined to produce beautiful rough cut gem stones who only needed the polish of their college experience to shine. And they knew how to connect what Brown had to offer to what they needed.

There was Max, the German exchange student who came out of his shell while traveling in Spain and who was going to be an engineer. There was Bethany, who had learned to blow glass beads, and had created a beautiful bead reward system for elementary…

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Christine Schneider

Atlanta, Georgia. Books, cocktails, theatre, art, writing, music, real estate, but not always in that order. Vice Chair of Board of Actor’s Express Theatre.