{"id":11699,"date":"2018-12-04T12:48:34","date_gmt":"2018-12-04T18:48:34","guid":{"rendered":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/?p=11699"},"modified":"2018-12-05T09:30:56","modified_gmt":"2018-12-05T15:30:56","slug":"andrew-guiang-shares-his-mpa-college-counseling-experience","status":"publish","type":"post","link":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/2018\/12\/04\/andrew-guiang-shares-his-mpa-college-counseling-experience\/","title":{"rendered":"College Counseling at MPA: Andrew Guiang ’08 Shares"},"content":{"rendered":"

\"AndrewMPA\u2019s college counseling process is driven by careful consideration of each student\u2019s unique set of interests, priorities, and aspirations, balanced with an understanding of the current college admission landscape. MPA alumni Andrew Guiang ’08 shares the\u00a0most valuable part of the college search process at MPA and how it prepared him for his future. Read the Q&A with Andrew below and more about college counseling at MPA here!<\/a><\/p>\n

Q: What was the most valuable part of the college search process at MPA? What did you appreciate about MPA\u2019s approach?<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: I liked that, at MPA, it’s cool to be smart, and that fact makes applying to college that much easier. I also like that MPA has a good mix of people who stay local or go away for college, which makes the application process less stressful, since there’s no pressure to choose one region over another.<\/p>\n

Q: Once you left for college, did you feel prepared?\u00a0<\/strong><\/p>\n

A: Without a\u00a0doubt, the most valuable part of an MPA\u00a0education is the writing\u00a0instruction. When I showed up for college, I had all the writing skills I needed to be successful. That fact stemmed from several unique things about how MPA educates its students. First, MPA students just do\u00a0a lot more writing than students at\u00a0other schools. At MPA, writing is not a skill\u00a0confined to\u00a0just a few\u00a0small\u00a0assignments in a few English classes; it’s a crucial part of every aspect of the\u00a0curriculum. There’s writing assignments in science\u00a0class, in history class, in seminars, and so on. Second, MPA exposes students to many different types of writing. We learned the classics\u2014Shakespeare, Dickens, Faulkner\u2014but we also read works by authors from other parts of the\u00a0world, with many different\u00a0experiences and with varying levels of fame and success. The diversity of\u00a0this curriculum\u00a0exposed us to many different styles, themes, and general approaches to writing, which in turn gave us a greater knowledge from which to draw when we did our own writing. Third, and finally, MPA actually teaches students how\u00a0to write. When I showed up in college, there were many\u00a0students who were still stuck on five\u00a0paragraph essays. At MPA, however, my teachers had encouraged me to structure my essays in more creative,\u00a0dynamic, and\u00a0effective ways.<\/p>\n

In my first year of law school, I had to enroll in a legal writing\u00a0course, which covered proper grammar and effective sentence structure. While much of the material was\u00a0completely new to my classmates,\u00a0much of it was the same thing I had learned in\u00a0eleventh grade with Ms. Slocum. Although it’s not like she was teaching us to write a cert. petition, she did instill valuable\u00a0skills, like how to\u00a0avoid both the passive voice and\u00a0excessive use of adverbs. In short, I learned not only how to use compelling language, but also how to put\u00a0that language into effective sentences, and then organize those sentences into a cohesive whole. This is just not something that people learn at other schools\u2014at least not to the same extent. And that’s why\u00a0the writing\u00a0curriculum at MPA has proved\u00a0so valuable.\u00a0I’m very thankful for all the work my teachers did! They’re the best!<\/p>\n","protected":false},"excerpt":{"rendered":"

MPA\u2019s college counseling process is driven by careful consideration of each student\u2019s unique set of interests, priorities, and aspirations, balanced with an understanding of the current college admission landscape. MPA alumni Andrew Guiang ’08 shares the\u00a0most valuable part of the college search process at MPA and how it prepared him for his future. Read the […]<\/p>\n","protected":false},"author":12,"featured_media":11701,"comment_status":"closed","ping_status":"closed","sticky":false,"template":"","format":"standard","meta":{"footnotes":""},"categories":[30,19,26,28,24,29,13],"tags":[],"class_list":["post-11699","post","type-post","status-publish","format-standard","has-post-thumbnail","hentry","category-admission","category-alumni","category-blog","category-current-families","category-featured-posts","category-homepage","category-upper-school"],"_links":{"self":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11699","targetHints":{"allow":["GET"]}}],"collection":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts"}],"about":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/types\/post"}],"author":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/users\/12"}],"replies":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/comments?post=11699"}],"version-history":[{"count":3,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11699\/revisions"}],"predecessor-version":[{"id":11704,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/posts\/11699\/revisions\/11704"}],"wp:featuredmedia":[{"embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media\/11701"}],"wp:attachment":[{"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/media?parent=11699"}],"wp:term":[{"taxonomy":"category","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/categories?post=11699"},{"taxonomy":"post_tag","embeddable":true,"href":"https:\/\/www.moundsparkacademy.org\/news\/wp-json\/wp\/v2\/tags?post=11699"}],"curies":[{"name":"wp","href":"https:\/\/api.w.org\/{rel}","templated":true}]}}