Applying to college? Don’t let your mom do all the work

It’s about that time of year again when high school seniors are running to the mailbox, eager to find acceptance letters from the colleges they applied to.

(At least, I think that’s what they’re doing. Do colleges even snail mail things out anymore? Maybe they’re tweeting out college acceptance letters now, I don’t know. But I digress.)

The point is, some seniors will be accepted and some won’t. Colleges in Washington received a record breaking number of freshman applications for fall 2015.

What are the chances if you’re applying to be a freshman at Seattle Pacific University? Admissions says they received about 6,000 applications, and they have room for 740 incoming freshmen.

I chatted with two admissions counselors at the university about what they look for in an applicant and, even more interesting, some of the mistakes people make.

One of the most common trends: the over-involved parent. Assistant director of freshman recruitment, Ineliz Soto-Fuller, said she receives emails that are allegedly from students who are actually coming from their parent’s email account. And when they meet in person, the parents often slip.

“When you’re talking with them they’ll say, ‘Yeah, when we were working on the application,’ and, ‘On the essay it said this and I was, I mean, we, were working on it.’ And I’m like, ‘Uhhh, who’s applying to the college?’ I mean, they do that a lot.”

Parents will also sit in on appointments with the admissions office, SPU admissions counselor Kim Gilnett said.

“You’ll ask the student a question and the mom will answer it and you’ll ask the student another one and you’ll see the poor student is just embarrassed like crazy by it,” he said. “There are times, over the years, we’ve asked parents to step outside so we can meet with the student.”

Kids are often too busy to do the work themselves, Gilnett said.

“Probably 20 percent of the time I get a parent call and they start by saying, ‘I’m really sorry, they’re busy doing swim, or doing this, so I’m actually filling in for them today.'”

But a helicopter parent won’t necessarily kill your chances of getting into college.

“The students are the ones who are taking the SAT and the ACT, they have to do that by themselves,” Soto-Fuller said. “And they’re the ones getting the grades. So when it’s really obvious that an essay is not written by a student, we’ll contact that student and say, ‘I don’t think you wrote this essay.’ Or, ‘ You need to rewrite this essay.’

“But, for the most part, if the parent is just really involved, we do also recognize that this is a family affair and that the parents have an important part in the admissions process, in paying for college and all that. So we welcome parent involvement. Even if the parent is ultra-involved, we still want that student.”

Another trend is how diverse their applicants have become, Gilnett said.

“We’ve had three times the number of Latino students who have confirmed at this point from last year. It’s really exciting,” Gilnett said. “What’s great is you have these incredible essays from these students. We were talking about controlling parents before, here you have parents who haven’t even finished fourth grade.

“In one case, a student in her essays talks about her father, never finished fourth grade, but nine of the ten youth in her family are college graduates and she wants to be the tenth. That’s just really moving to me.”

Both Gilnett and Soto-Fuller said the essay is a big part of the application process. Soto-Fuller said she sees the same cliches over and over again.

“‘Be the change that you want to see in the world.’ Martin Luther King quotes. I want to be a doctor because I want to help people,” Soto-Fuller laughs. “Those are ones that I see so often.”

They want to read about who the student really is.

“Literally, you are moved to tears by what these students have gone through as part of the process,” Gilnett said. “I’ve seen a lot of ones trying to be off the wall and be something different but really, for me, what I love is when I learn something about that student and their family that is really personal about them.”