Dealing With Potential Red Flags On Your Application

It sometimes happens that a student has something lurking on their application that they know isn’t going to make them look very good. It could be a bad grade, a less than stellar test score, a disciplinary infraction, anything that they might be unhappy about in their past that, unfortunately, could affect their chances of success in the future.

The thing about academic dips or issues in a student’s past is that they often have a good explanation, as long as you know the student and their context. But how do you communicate that to a college, who doesn’t know the student? How do you deal with potential red flags, if you have them?

For some students, their response is often to try and hide these issues, adopting the “put your head under the covers and hope the monsters go away approach”. But what works for an ostrich doesn’t work for college applications, and in fact, it ends up making the student look really bad if they have a big issue in their application and they haven’t dealt with it. The most common thing I see is a grade dip, or failing out of a class, and that’s an impossible thing to hide.

When I worked with a student who had ended up failing a class, it changed the nature of the degree she would be getting from her school, which meant that she had a lot going on on her application that was important to make clear to a college. It may seem insane to you right now, what I’m about to say, but colleges do actually know that you aren’t perfect. They get it. They know you’ve struggled, and made mistakes, that you aren’t good at everything, that you’ve probably had difficulties dealing with some of your educational challenges. It’s okay to admit that, but how you do it can mean the difference between representing yourself as a mature thoughtful person with a full perspective on their life and…not.

The place you would deal with this would be that elusive tricky “additional information” section of the common application or similar spaces provided in other forms. It’s an optional section, and it was built for things like this. So how do you approach talking about something you know to be a potential problem in your application, something that might tip the scales from admission to rejection? 

The first thing you have to remember is that what you are giving is an explanation, not an excuse. Candor, self-awareness and clarity are the watchwords of this concept. You need to talk about your issue, set up the context within your own life, be clear and succinct about the problem, and then talk about how you’ve bounced back since.

So if your issue was an expulsion from school, you would want to set up why you got expelled first of all. Maybe you were under a lot of stress and you acted out. Maybe there was something going on in your life that put a lot of pressure on you. Maybe you were dealing with some issues at home and it came out at school. Be honest, take responsibility for what happened, and define the emotional context of the issue without dipping into melodrama or revealing all the gory details.

Then, you would want to talk about what has happened since this issue, how you dealt with this expulsion, how you turned it around, and how you’re back on track.

Remember, this isn’t a diary entry, and it isn’t a pity party. It’s a chance to explain yourself, to own up to your mistakes, and to make it clear that you have learned from them. So treat it seriously, but don’t avoid it. You aren’t defined by one mistake; don’t let your application be overshadowed by it either. It’s only a red flag if you let it be one.