The Secret to Writing a College Admissions Essay That Stands Out from the Crowd

The Secret to Writing a College Admissions Essay That Stands Out from the Crowd If youre in the process of writing a college admission essay, youve already had a taste of the anxiety these types of assignments can cause. While choosing each word carefully, your mind probably spins with a series of questions: Will this essay keep me from getting in? Will they find it boring? Does it stand out from the crowd?Added to that anxiety are the often complex, or just plain strange, questions that many colleges will ask, like Do you believe we are alone? or How do you feel about Mondays? Whether the question is strange or difficult, overly simplistic or not even applicable to your life- here are some quick tips on the secret to writing a college admissions essay that stands out from the crowd of other essays the admissions committee will read along with yours.Less is moreMany colleges will give you a word count maximum but for the ones where a word count minimum is given, dont take that as an invitation to write over 800 words. The admissions committee who will be reading your essay(s) will also be reading a stack of other essays, and will not want to spend more time reading yours than necessary. Keep it concise to maintain their interest without taking up a lot of their time.Uniqueness countsThe key to writing an essay that stands out from the others is to be as unique as possible. While this might be a difficult task for many soon-to-be college freshmen, its worth your time and effort to think of something- anything- that makes you unique compared to the others. Maybe its a travel experience, a family history, a goal, a way that you think or something youve done?Dont cover everythingIf youve led an especially busy life as a high school student, dont try to cover everything youve done. Pick the highlights- the activities that were the most rewarding or the most impressive- and stick to those few things. If you write about 20 different activities within the span of a 500-700 word essay, your writing will inevitably appeared scattered and unorganized . Its simply impossible to write about that many topics with that limited of a word count and keep it organized.Be controversialMany people falsely assume that you should avoid topics such as religion, politics and the like in college entrance essays, but this couldnt be farther from the truth. Although you should avoid soapboxes and topics that might be against school philosophy (if applying to a religious-oriented school), voicing your stance and providing reasonable arguments for it and against it shows that you know how to think logically and coherently about important topics- a trait that you will need to succeed as a college student.Avoid mistakes in grammar, punctuation and spellingWhile this should be obvious, you would be amazed at how many students submit essays with glaring grammar, punctuation and spelling mistakes. The main reason for this is they depend on their word processors spelling/grammar check, which will not catch many of the mistakes that a flesh and blood edi tor would catch. Submitting an essay with these types of mistakes is a guaranteed way to get your application rejection. The admissions committee will believe (and rightly so) that if you have errors on what should be an example of your best work, your daily work in college will have even more errors. When they compare an essay with errors to an essay without them, and have to choose between the two, its obvious which one they will choose. And it wont be yours.Be accurateI am consistently amazed at the number of college admissions essays I receive that refer to particular works or authors, and then get those titles and author names wrong. While a good editor will hopefully catch such errors, its impossible for an editor to know about every topic and every author. For this reason, beyond the mistakes that can be made with spelling, punctuation and grammar, a big mistake that many applicants make is inaccuracy of information. When referring to a particular author who was an influence on your life and choices, be sure to get the name of the author and title of the work right. When discussing theories, research, or any topic for that matter, be sure that you are completely accurate in the context and use of this information. Otherwise, youll seem as if you dont know what youre talking about and are just throwing out information that youve neither studied nor learned.Be descriptiveWhen youre discussing something that youve accomplished or situations in which youve excelled, be descriptive because it lends a sense of credibility and humaneness to what you are saying. This is not to say that you should overload an essay with adjectives and adverbs, but adding details like this will make your writing more exciting and more vivid- two traits that admissions committees love in an essay.Be likeableThis one is perhaps the most important, as long as your grammar, spelling and punctuation are correct. When an admissions committee reads an essay written by a student who has excelled much in their high school years but seems pedantic, stuffy and just plain boring, that student still has a chance of being denied admission. College is as much about social interactions as it is about academics. If you fail to show that you can be likeable and fit in well with the college community, you have missed an opportunity to make your essay stand out from the rest.

Start Something Using Process.Start in VB.NET

Start Something Using Process.Start in VB.NET The Start method of the Process object is possibly one of the most underappreciated tools available to a programmer. As a .NET method, Start has a series of overloads, which are different sets of parameters that determine exactly what the method does. The overloads let you specify just about any set of parameters that you might want to pass to another process when it starts. What you can do with Process.Start is really only limited by the processes you can use with it. If you want to display your text-based ReadMe file in Notepad, its as easy as: Process.Start(ReadMe.txt)or Process.Start(notepad, ReadMe.txt) This example assumes the ReadMe file is in the same folder as the program and that Notepad is the default application for .txt file types, and its in the system environment path. Process.Start Similar to Shell Command in VB6 For programmers familiar with Visual Basic 6, Process.Start is somewhat like the VB 6 Shell command. In VB 6, you would use something like: lngPID Shell(MyTextFile.txt, vbNormalFocus) Using Process.Start You can use this code to start Notepad maximized and create a ProcessStartInfo object that you can use for more precise control: Dim ProcessProperties As New ProcessStartInfoProcessProperties.FileName notepadProcessProperties.Arguments myTextFile.txtProcessProperties.WindowStyle ProcessWindowStyle.MaximizedDim myProcess As Process   Process.Start(ProcessProperties) Starting a Hidden Process You can even start a hidden process. ProcessProperties.WindowStyle ProcessWindowStyle.HiddenBut be careful. Unless you add more code to end the process, youll probably have to end it in Task Manager. Hidden processes are normally only used with processes that dont have any kind of a user interface. Retrieving the Name of a Process Working with Process.Start as a .NET object gives you a lot of capability. For example, you can retrieve the name of the process that was started. This code will display notepad in the output window: Dim myProcess As Process Process.Start(MyTextFile.txt) Console.WriteLine(myProcess.ProcessName)This was something you could not do with the VB6  Shell command because it launched the new  application  asynchronously. Using  WaitForExit  can cause the reverse problem in .NET because you have to launch a process in a new thread if you need it to execute asynchronously. For example, if you need the components to remain active in a form where a process was launched and  WaitForExit  was executed. Ordinarily, those components wont be active. Code it up and see for yourself. One way to force the process to halt is to use the Kill method. myProcess.Kill() This code waits for ten seconds and then ends the process. However, a forced delay is sometimes necessary to allow the process to complete exiting to avoid an error. myProcess.WaitForExit(10000) if the process doesnt complete within 10 seconds, kill itIf Not myProcess.HasExited ThenmyProcess.Kill()End IfThreading.Thread.Sleep(1)Console.WriteLine(Notepad ended: _ myProcess.ExitTime _Environment.NewLine _Exit Code: _myProcess.ExitCode) In most cases, its probably a good idea to put your processing in a  Using  block to ensure that the resources used by the process are released. Using myProcess As Process New Process Your code goes hereEnd Using To make all this even easier to work with, there is even a  Process  component that you can add to your project so you can do a lot of the things shown above at  design time  instead of run time. One of the things that this makes a lot easier is coding events raised by the process, such as the event when the process has exited. You can also add a handler using code like this: allow the process to raise eventsmyProcess.EnableRaisingEvents True add an Exited event handlerAddHandler myProcess.Exited, _AddressOf Me.ProcessExitedPrivate Sub ProcessExited(ByVal sender As Object, _ByVal e As System.EventArgs) Your code goes hereEnd Sub But simply selecting the event for the component is a lot easier.