College Essay News and Tips: CEA’s Weekly Link Roundup

Welcome back to our second installment of our new series, College Essay Link Roundup!  We had a great time reading up on the latest admissions and college essay news (with a glass of lemonade on our lounge chair, OBVS), and have lots to share with you.

Between our last Roundup and now, the internet exploded with commentary on William Deresiewicz’s piece in the New Republic, warning parents not to send their kids to Ivy League schools.  Everyone from the New Yorker, to Salon, to the New Republic again had an opinion.

Clearly this is a topic that deserves a good, long exploration. Might we suggest that you talk amongst yourselves?

In other, less incendiary, news:

•  The Onion goes on campus tours with you.
• Slate Magazine’s Rebecca Schuman wants you to stop right-click-thesaurasizing everything you write.  Otherwise, she will give you the “you keep using that word; I do not think it means what you think it means” talk.
• Essay-writing tips by an international student for international applicants that can work for domestic applicants too.
• Hate standardized tests?  Some schools are starting to agree with you.
• A Boston University application reader listens to the James Brown Pandora station on her “pajama days” reading applications.  How many essay writers just turned on some James Brown right now?  We bet at least half of you are writing in pajamas already.