Let's Talk College

Julie Neunreiter (nine-rider) Byrd is an expert on helping students write their college essays. We sat down to talk about the writing process, what makes college essays different, and how to help students get discover their own voice in the writing. If you want to contact Julia for more information, here's her information. Email: julia@essay-coach.com Website: https://essay-coach.com/ Phone: (571) 606-5325

This is the first episode in what I hope will be a series where I get to talk with admissions officers from colleges and universities. Of course, I had to start with my alma mater Texas Tech. Rex Oliver, the Director of Recruitment at TTU, and Jennifer Mauppin, Regional Manager for the Dallas-Fort Worth area sat down to talk about their unique approach to recruiting students to the Ivy on the Plains that is Texas Tech.

Headed into her Senior year at Texas A&M, Katherine has a unique major, Industrial Distribution, that is a combination of engineering and business. It's not the sort of major that most students know about when they think about majoring in engineering.

Having graduated from from Columbia just 6 years ago, Srishti makes me wonder what I've been doing with my life. Currently working at her 3rd start up, she's been involved in 2 others, both of which have had successful exits. Along the way she worked for Dell, but she found the atmosphere of a start up suits her better. She shares what that means for her and how she discovered that interest.

Sameer is a 2nd lieutenant in the U.S. Army currently serving in South Korea. He attended Baylor University and earned his commission through an Army ROTC scholarship. In a era of continually rising college costs, and ROTC scholarship remains one of the best ways to pay for college. Sameer shares what it meant for him and how students can qualify.

Mike McGibbon is the founder and CEO of Mathchops, an online program that helps students improve their math skills. Mathchops approach to the process is to gamify the tasks in a way that is engaging and meets the student where they are. It helps math concepts on the SAT, ACT, ISEE, and others. Click here to visit the Mathchops website. Click here for a video walkthrough of the program.

Michael Cone has done a lot of things. Business owner, classroom teacher, youth minister. For 28 years now, he's been involved with Young Life, currently as an area director for the organization. Now as a parent of 4 girls, the oldest of whom is starting to think about college, he's looking at the entire process from a range of perspectives.

I often talk to students who are preparing on their own for the SAT or ACT. They are often making simple mistakes that, if fixed, could help them get higher scores faster. In this episode, I also reference an earlier College Insights where I talked about using QAS and TIR dates. Click here for that episode.

It's not every week you get to sit down with a Hall of Famer. Kendall Pryor was inducted into the University of North Texas Hall of Fame in 2017. She now coaches at Denton Ryan High School. She shares her experiences as a player at the Division 1 NCAA level, how she got to that level, and what it means in her approach to coaching today. We talked about overcoming adversity at all of those levels as well. https://meangreensports.com/honors/north-texas-athletics-hall-of-fame/kendall-juett/207

Kylie graduated from UT-Austin with a degree in Communications in May of 2020. The last year convinced her she wanted to do something different with that degree. When we got to talk for this podcast, she'd just finished her first week in her Educator Preparation Program (EPP) at SMU. In this wide ranging conversation, we also talked her unique college application, how she got into UT but was not in the top 6%, and the semester she spent at sea while getting her degree.