610: Admission Nutrients (Part 4 of 6: Consistent Engagement): Important Ingredients for a Well-Balanced College Admission Process—And Life with Dysean Alexander
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Release Date: 07/08/2025
623: Standing Out in STEM: Practical Advice for Future Scientists, Engineers and Techies
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Welcome back to the College Essay Guy Podcast. Today’s episode is hosted by Tom Campbell, Community Manager & Senior Essay Specialist at College Essay Guy and a former admission officer at Pomona College and Holy Cross. We’ve polled the thousands of students who participate in our live webinars and courses and ask what they’re favorite subject is, and consistently, STEM reigns supreme. By a lot. In this episode, Tom sits down with Jay Zhang, college counselor at College Essay Guy, to dig into the biggest questions students and families have about preparing for and applying to STEM...
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622: Inside the Personal Statement Process (Part 4): Supplemental Essay Deep Dive with Alisha, HS Senior
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Hey friends, and welcome back to the College Essay Guy podcast. Today’s episode is a behind-the-scenes look at Alisha’s supplemental essays. If you’ve been following our Inside the Personal Statement Process series, this episode zooms out a bit—you’ll hear us work live through several of her supplements and talk through how to bring clarity, intention, and personality into each one. In this session, Alisha and I explore: What makes a great “list” response for Columbia—and how to avoid filler How to refine a topic that feels “too common” into something that might stand out...
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621: Financial Aid Tips for International Students (and Their Counselors)—2025 Edition
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Welcome back to the College Essay Guy Podcast. This is a very special session with a dear friend of mine and an honored guest in my world, Joan Liu. Joan is the founder of Second Chance, an organization that helps high achieving students from around the world secure full scholarships to universities after their original offers fall through. This conversation is adapted from a live webinar that we hosted where Joan shares some of the most practical, candid advice I've heard for international students who are looking for full financial aid and for the counselors who support them. In our...
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620: Navigating Student Health in College: A Doctor’s Guide to Sleep, Stress, and Student Life
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
The transition from high school to college is something that thousands of students struggle with each year, and it’s not something people really talk about. There’s a lot of pressure for students to “have it together” in some broad sense. That's why today I'm excited to talk to Dr. Jill Grimes, Dr. Jill Grimes, author of The ULTIMATE College Student Health Handbook: Your Guide for Everything from Hangovers to Homesickness, for a frank conversation about things that are often stigmatized. Content warning: We get into some pretty serious topics such as mental health, drinking, and...
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619: Inside the Personal Statement Process (Part 3): How Reflection Leads to Insight with Alisha, HS Senior
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Hey friends, and welcome back to the College Essay Guy podcast. Today’s episode is the third and final episode in our series called Inside the Personal Statement Process. If you’re just tuning in, this series takes you behind the scenes as I work one-on-one with Alisha, a current high school senior applying for the Fall 2026 term. Find Part 1 and Part 2 . This episode was recorded just a few days before Alisha submitted her early applications. The focus of this episode is on one of the most challenging—and perhaps, the least discussed—aspect of writing the personal...
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618: Inside the Personal Statement Process (Part 2): Discovering Values Through Revision with Alisha, HS Senior
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Hey friends, and welcome back to the College Essay Guy podcast. Today’s episode is part two of our series called Inside the Personal Statement Process. If you’re just tuning in, this series takes you behind the scenes as I work one-on-one with Alisha, a current high school senior applying for the Fall 2026 term. In the first episode, we got to know Alisha through her brainstorming and outline. In this episode, we pick up right where we left off — Alisha’s second draft. We get into: How did the new outline work for Alisha? How to approach trimming—not just words,...
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617: Inside the Personal Statement Process (Part 1): The Sand Essay with Alisha, HS Senior
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
In our new series, Inside the Personal Statement Process, we’re taking you behind the scenes with Alisha, a current high school senior working through applications right now. If you've ever wondered what it's like working with Ethan in a session, this is the podcast for you! You might remember a similar series where we got to see her whole application process. Rather than focus on the whole application, I wanted to just dive specifically into working with Alisha through the personal statement process. In Part 1, Alisha and I get into: How did Alisha approach brainstorming and...
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616: Authoring Your Life: Why the Personal Statement Is About (Much) More Than Getting into College
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
In today’s episode, I’m joined by my long-time colleague, and our Chief People Officer here at CEG, Sandy Longworth. Sandy has worked as a therapist, a researcher, college counselor — among other things — and has spent years studying the role that narrative storytelling plays in how teens develop their identities. Important note: While Sandy trained as a therapist, and we do talk a lot about therapy in our conversation, I want to make clear that I do not hold that college counseling and essay coaching — or what we do at College Essay Guy — to be therapy. It isn’t....
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615: Rethinking “Best” Colleges: Tools, Tips, and Mindset Shifts for a Better College List with Jay McCann and Dr. Steven Antonoff, Co-Authors of The College Finder
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Hi friends, and welcome back to the podcast. In today’s episode, I’m joined by two special guests: Dr. Steven Antonoff and Jay McCann, co-authors of the newly updated 5th edition of The College Finder: Your comprehensive guide to finding colleges that fit YOUR unique path. In this conversation, we dig into some of the biggest questions students and families face in the college search today, including: What—if anything—are rankings good for in 2025? Beyond starting salaries, which outcome metrics actually indicate value? What’s a responsible way for students to use AI in the search...
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614: 13 Mistakes High School Students Make When Creating Their College List
The College Essay Guy Podcast: A Practical Guide to College Admissions
Welcome back to the podcast. It’s September, which means many students are building the list of colleges they’re applying to. Today I’m joined by New York Times Bestselling Author, Harlan Cohen, who walks us through his 13 most common mistakes students make when they’re creating their college list. We cover, among other things: The importance of shifting from what “they” want… to what you want The problem with rankings The importance of doing “future math” Why treating college as a one-year experiment can lower the stakes And more Harlan Cohen is the...
info_outlineIn Episode 4 of our series on Admission Nutrients, Tom Campbell is joined by Dysean Alexander, Assistant Director for West Coast Admission at Lafayette College, to discuss Consistent Engagement. In their conversation, they get into:
- Why consistent engagement is a valuable nutrient to fold into your high school experience
- How it’s talked about in an admissions office, and how admission readers like Dysean (and his team at Lafayette) measure it
- Tips on “translating” your own examples of consistent engagement to an admission officer audience
- Advice for counselors on how to explain the value of this nutrient to students and families
- And more!
Counselor by day and stand-up comedian by night, Dysean Alexander is a first-generation college graduate of Ursinus College (PA) where he earned a BA in Media & Communications while being an all-conference football player. After his first year as a college admission counselor (Albright College), he served as the Assistant Director For Middle School Enrollment at Moravian Academy (PA), allowing him to gain additional knowledge on high-level high school curriculum and communities. After 6 years working at Lafayette College, he has been able to work with Army ROTC recruitment and POSSE selection, and has covered territories all over the globe, domestically spanning from Long Island, NY to Southern California, where he now serves as Assistant Director Of West Coast Admissions.
Play-by-Play:
- 2:39 – Welcome and introductions
- 7:12 – Where does consistent engagement show up in an application?
- 10:09 – How do institutional priorities impact admission?
- 19:19 – What does consistent engagement say about the student to an admission reader?
- 25:50 – How can students brainstorm and prioritize which activities to show on the application?
- 36:30 – What is the balance of quality over quantity when it comes to activities?
- 45:05 – FAQs about consistent engagement
- 45:28 – What if I decide to change activities midway through high school?
- 52:23 – What if I had to stop my activity?
- 53:49 – What if I transferred schools and didn’t have time to engage consistently?
- 57:49 – What are some tips for counselors and educators in this process?
- 1:07:06 – Closing thoughts
Resources: