Acceptance
A Legendary Guidance Counselor Helps Seven Kids Find the Right Colleges--and Find Themselves
-
-
4.4 • 10 Ratings
-
-
- $5.99
-
- $5.99
Publisher Description
An engrossing profile of an extraordinary guidance counselor who helps kids get into the right colleges through focusing on self- awareness
Gwyeth Smith, known as Smitty, is a nationally renowned guidance counselor who believes that getting into college should be a kid's first great moment of self-discovery. In Acceptance, David L. Marcus, Pulitzer Prize-winning former education writer for U.S. News & World Report, spins an absorbing narrative of a year in the lives of Smitty and "his" kids.
At a diverse public school in Long Island, New York, Smitty works his unique magic on students' applications and their lives, helping them find the right college by figuring out who they are, rather than focusing on what their test scores, grades, and finances reflect. Loaded with advice that readers can apply to their own college searches, Acceptance is a book that thousands of students and their parents will find indispensable.
PUBLISHERS WEEKLY
The college application process is a time of major anxiety for high school seniors and their parents. Fortunately for all concerned (including administrators, teachers, and private coaches), Marcus, the Pulitzer Prize winning education writer for U.S. News and World Report, has documented the year he spent at suburban Long Island's Oyster Bay High School closely observing the rather unorthodox college counselor Gwyeth Smith and seven college-bound seniors. In this insider's look at the college application process, Marcus reveals the personal realities the kids and their parents face, the way college decisions are made and how and why Smith manages to ease the powder keg of worry and emotions with good advice, eventually helping make the "right match" for each student. Readers meet all kinds the kid who doesn't test well; the one who is depressed after an early admission rejection; the high-achieving Asian-American at odds with his parents; the good girl looking for something "different"; the athlete with mediocre grades. In sometimes the most counterintuitive ways, Smith helps them by demonstrating how each has the ability to write good application essays, find their true "passion" and represent themselves as people colleges will want to accept. A wonderfully enjoyable antidote to the spate of books focused on the college admissions "game" of "getting in."
Customer Reviews
Everything you wanted to know about college
This was the only book I read during a certain week-I could not put it away. Dave Marcus tells the story of seven kids' journey, their maturation, and the drama that is the college application process. Acceptance makes you look at education, ambition, and maybe even life in new terms. As a non-fictional work it is relevant, awe-inspiringly authoritative, and absolutely unpretentious in presentation. But for all the verifiable facts there is just as much humanness in this book. You will envy, curse, commiserate with, and cheer for the characters. In short it is a descriptive, entertaining, brilliant, and inspiring book. I'll leave the seven reviews on the back cover to speak for themselves.