Keys to Success


Shedding Light on the Dark Ages of Junior Year

Back when I was in high school, revisionist history notwithstanding, teachers sometimes referred to the Middle Ages the Dark Ages.  Perhaps a misnomer, the term Dark Ages was meant to suggest that during the Middle Ages—the period in Western History between Antiquity (Greeks and Romans) and the European Renaissance—nothing very interesting happened as far as historians were concerned. Hence, it was dark. (Sidebar: Readers of Dan Millman’s Way of the Peaceful Warrior know there’s something interesting happening every moment, but the term was coined long before the book was written ;-)). By analogy, the long period in the junior year sandwiched between […]


Got ACT Soon? 5 Tips for Cramming

If you’re taking the ACT next weekend and haven’t been able to prepare as thoroughly as you’d like—hey, we understand, end of school, start of summer, yada yada yada—do not despair. You don’t need to spend nearly as much time prepping as you do for the SAT. The ACT is, in fact, a much more “beatable” test than the SAT, especially when time is short. There are two bodies of material you need to know: math (key topics in Arithmetic, Algebra 1, Geometry, Algebra 2, and ~15% of Precalc) and 10 key grammar rules. Send us a text @ 413-329-7540 […]


Prepping for the Personal Essay: Who Are We and How Did We Get This Way? Aka, Two Apples a Day…

[Originally posted 6/16/20, but still all true in 2023, and you can’t say that about MANY things.] There are many ways to understand who we are. We are, for example, in a literal sense, what we EAT and drink and breathe. When we digest things, we literally take the external world and make it part of ourselves (hence the magic of the pig, who, as Jim Gaffigan has noted, can take an apple—basically garbage—and miraculously turn it into bacon!). Less literally, we are the sum total of our THOUGHTS and FEELINGS, in that what we think about all day and […]


Summer Strategies for High School Students

With standardized test preparation, application writing, and summer reading assignments ramping up as the fall looms on the distant horizon, summer is no time to go academically soft. Just as athletes lose ground without regular practice and training, students can forget math facts and vocabulary words, or begin to slip in writing skills and study habits, if they aren’t intellectually challenged through the summer months. There are three specific areas in which students can get substantially ahead during the school break: standardized test preparation, academic (math, English, and other study) skills, and summer reading. Prepping for Standardized Tests Junior year […]


Writing College Applications in the Sweet Spot: June, July & August

Many college-bound students make one of two critical mistakes when it comes time to thinking through and writing college applications: they do it too soon, or they do it too late.  Too soon, you say? Clearly you haven’t met my mother. Is there really such a thing? Yes, there really is. Emphatically so. Many high school teachers and administrators, both public and private, do their juniors a disservice when they stress them out about writing college applications during the spring of junior year. It’s one thing to go through the personal essay prompts and even write a MOCK essay for the […]


Finishing STRONG! Tips to Maximize GRADES

It’s easy for juniors to forget during the standardized testing crunch of May and June that the most important thing you can do to get accepted to competitive colleges is to earn the best grades you can in whatever courses you’re taking. Period. Here’s some good advice to remember down the home stretch: Conventional wisdom is that the first impression we make is the most important, but when it comes to impressions grades make on teachers, the LAST impression is the most important, i.e., the most LASTing. Take it from a 20+ year classroom teacher: When teachers go to enter […]


12 Hot Tips for SAT and ACT Game Day

If you’ve been preparing over weeks or months for an ACT and/or SAT, then you’ve probably spent most of your time learning and reviewing all the math and English grammar covered on them. If you’re shooting for a competitive score at the most selective colleges on your list, I bet you’ve also been taking practice tests to develop effective strategies and recognize common question types. In the end, your SAT or ACT score won’t likely correlate with any meaningful aspect of your future, but it WILL be an accurate measure of two things: knowledge of highly refined academic material and […]


Six Quality Summer Activities for Success in the College Admissions Game

Ah, summertime. The long awaited break from the rigors of academia during the seemingly interminable haul between September and June. Time to sleep in every day and finally get to new levels in all your favorite video games and indulge all your other couch potato fantasies.  Right? Um, wrong! The last thing you want to do in the college admissions game is be a complete couch potato over the whole summer. There are plenty of productive, meaningful, and FUN things to do between final exams and back-to-school BBQs that will give you a feeling of accomplishment AND impress college admissions […]


7 Tips for Writing New Year’s Resolutions in the College Admissions Game

On behalf of everyone at CollegePrepExpress, I wish you a happy, productive, successful, and COVID-free 2023! At CPE, we’re great believers that “today is the first day of the rest of your life,” that you can choose to wipe the slate clean and start fresh any day and time you choose, with new thinking, new activities, new routines, and, over time, new habits. But there are two ideal times for students, in particular, to pause for serious introspection and reassessment, two ideal times to set new goals: the beginning of the academic year and the beginning of the calendar year. So RIGHT […]


Catch the Back-to-School Wave

One of my favorite things to do is bodysurf.  I remember when my dad taught me how on a Florida vacation back in the early, gulp, 1970s.  He explained how good timing enables you to harness the full force of the swell just as the whitecaps begin to break at the crest of the wave.  If you jump too early or scramble to catch up, you’ll miss it: all the puny human exertion you can muster against the wave’s weighty power proves useless if you try to fight it.  The trick is to catch the wave just right and then LET […]


On Writing Well: 3 Tips for Getting the Words Right

Since it’s college application writing season for many rising high school seniors (please see Writing College Applications in the Sweet Spot), we thought it might prove helpful to re-post this brief piece from our blog originally published in October, 2012… The most important skill for college-bound students to acquire in high school is also the most difficult: WRITING. Not many students will disagree that moving ideas from their heads onto paper (or into pixels) is extremely challenging. I love Gene Fowler’s quip: “Writing is easy. All you do is stare at a blank sheet of paper until drops of blood […]


Be Mindful of When You Choose Not to Be

Be Mindful, But Give Yourself a Break In his beautiful compendium of teachings, Peace Is Every Step, Vietnamese Mindfulness teacher Thich Nhat Hanh gives us the secret to finding happiness every instant of every day. “Every breath we take, every step we make, can be filled with peace, joy, and serenity. We need only to be awake, alive in the present moment.” The whole book, as well as Thich Nhat Hanh’s other Mindfulness teachings, is all about what it means to be awake, alive in the present moment. Through meditation and focused awareness of what’s going on in our bodies, starting with […]


Old Class, New Format, Still FREE! Mindfulness-Based Academic Stress & Test Anxiety Reduction Workshop

The format has morphed, but the class in hardly new. Resuming Wednesdays on Jan 5, 2022, Dr. Yo will present and help students practice well-researched and effective techniques to stay focused, in-the-moment, and in control of their thoughts!   Come to one, or come to one a week, always FREE.   Wednesdays nights 7-8pm ET.   Click for FREE Registration


What’s Next After the PSAT for Juniors: SAT or ACT?

For many CPE students, the answer is….YES! Please allow me to explain. You know how you can tell a really bad college advisor? S/he gives the same generic advice to every student regardless of college dreams/goals and level of academic and extracurricular achievement. AT CPE, we don’t do that. So to help begin answering the question of the moment—What’s Next After the PSAT for Juniors?—use the broad-strokes categories below. But also feel free to schedule a one-hour consultation with Dr. Yo to discuss specifics about your or your kid’s standardized testing strategies, overall academic program, and athletic/extracurricular/community service/school spirit goals. […]


Don’t Make This Classic Mistake! Time-Management Tips for Fall Seniors

Year after year we see senior after senior making the same time management mistake as they play their last quarter in the college admissions game. It’s a mistake that has two negative consequences: first, it prevents them from doing their best work, and second, it inevitably leads to greater stress for them and their families. And their #1 accomplice in this crime? Their well-intentioned parents who simply want them to get their applications done… NOW! Most of the seniors with whom we work at CollegePrepExpress are busy during the fall getting the best grades they can, preparing for their last […]

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