Gwen Elise

About Gwen Elise

Gwen is an avid traveler who feels most at home in Kentucky and Argentina. Her closet is full of dark dresses, and her walls are papered in colorful maps. She likes to make puns, read, write, and translate to and from Spanish, and she misses Vassar College, her alma mater, which helped her get better at all of those things.

How to Choose a Major — If you’re in college and faced with the task of choosing the right major, you’re no stranger to anxiety, second-guessing yourself, and stressing about your future. Your feelings are normal, and many of your fellow sophomores and juniors are struggling with the same uncertainties. Fortunately, while choosing the right major […]

How to Go about Choosing the Right Major

This entry was posted in Career on February 3, 2017 by Gwen Elise

College application checklist for juniors — If you have friends or classmates who are seniors, you know that exhaustion and hard work characterize the college application process. Do your future self a favor, and start thinking about applications now! Although you won’t have access to application and FAFSA forms until the fall, you can use this […]

Spring Semester Checklist for Juniors Planning to Apply to College

This entry was posted in Admissions on January 26, 2017 by Gwen Elise

Eight Tips for Making Your English Major Worthwhile — Before I started college, I’d always heard that English was a soft subject, that it would never help me get a job, and that I’d go into a mountain of debt just so I could spend a few years reading. So, naturally, I wanted to prove the haters wrong. I […]

Eight Tips for Making Your English Major Worthwhile

This entry was posted in Study Skills on January 17, 2017 by Gwen Elise

A girl writes in a notebook with a red pencil. — If you spent the fall semester of your senior year of high school applying to college, rejoice! Your applications are in, and you have but one semester of high school left to go. That deserves a congratulations in its own right, but don’t get too carried away with the celebrations. […]

Spring Semester Checklist for Seniors Applying to College

This entry was posted in Admissions on January 10, 2017 by Gwen Elise

Why Networking with Classmates Is as Important as Networking with Professionals — Whenever I log on to LinkedIn, I am invited to scroll a never-ending list of people I may know. There they are—my high school and college classmates—and most of them, including the ones who used to fall asleep in study hall or skip class to watch movies, have multiple degrees […]

Why Networking with Classmates Is as Important as Networking with Professionals

This entry was posted in Career on December 19, 2016 by Gwen Elise

Five Tips for Bettering Your Focus after a Vacation — I get it. I really do. Getting back on task and into the swing of things after taking time off is brutal. Heck, my brain is trying to come out of vacation mode as we speak. Just last week, I was in Florida (why, yes, I did live out a […]

Five Tips for Bettering Your Focus after a Vacation

This entry was posted in Study Skills on November 28, 2016 by Gwen Elise

Scholarships for Undocumented Students — After a vitriolic election season, many young undocumented students want to know if they can go to college. The future is uncertain, unfortunately, but for now, students without authorized immigration documents can absolutely pursue higher education in the United States, whether they have DACA or not. That being said, these […]

Scholarship Opportunities for Undocumented Students

This entry was posted in Money and Financial Aid on November 21, 2016 by Gwen Elise

Are test scores important? You are more than your scores. — In the fall of my junior year, we were sent to homeroom to collect our PSAT scores, and it was impossible to keep the results private. “What did you get?” everyone wanted to know, already comparing themselves to friends, classmates, famous people, and the “average student profile” on the websites […]

You Are More than Your Test Scores

This entry was posted in Admissions on November 14, 2016 by Gwen Elise

Seven Reasons to Apply Early Action — Information from this article previously appeared here. We’ve revisited this topic to remind students about upcoming EA deadlines. Early action (EA) is an admissions policy that allows prospective freshmen to get a head start on the college application process. Applicants who have taken standardized tests and completed all other application […]

Seven Reasons to Submit Early Action Applications to Colleges

This entry was posted in Admissions on October 27, 2016 by Gwen Elise

I Thought about Transferring Colleges but I Stayed — When I was a college sophomore, someone placed a tray of index cards, tape, and pens on top of the toilet paper dispenser in one of my dorm’s bathroom stalls. “Spill your secrets,” urged the first index card to be taped to the stall door. The secrets appeared steadily, and […]

I Thought about Transferring Colleges but I Stayed

This entry was posted in Admissions on October 23, 2016 by Gwen Elise

Keeping in Touch when You're Far Away from Home — Right after I graduated from college, I won a research fellowship and moved to Argentina. I’d been there before—I actually studied abroad there my entire junior year of college—so I thought I knew what I was getting myself into. I knew the subway and bus system, I knew the language […]

Keeping in Touch When You’re Far Away from Home

This entry was posted in Travel on October 16, 2016 by Gwen Elise

Facts about Study Abroad — You probably know that study abroad programs give you the opportunity to live and take classes in a foreign country for part of your college career; besides that, study abroad really can be what you make of it. There is no typical study abroad experience. Most students find that studying […]

Eight Little-Known Facts about Study Abroad Programs

This entry was posted in Travel on October 11, 2016 by Gwen Elise