Category: College Applications

Summer Traction for College Essays and Study Skills

7/15/2025

Empowering Neurodivergent Learners to Start the School Year Strong

Summer Drift: When Laid-Back Becomes "Whoops, It's August"

Picture a late July afternoon: you're lounging in your favorite hammock, iced latte in hand, the smell of a grill wafting through the neighborhood, and the sun smiling its lazy approval. The freedom feels glorious. But two weeks later, you notice something gnawing at you. Where’s that college essay draft? The geometry review? The creative project you were so excited about?

That summer vibe is powerful. But for neurodivergent minds, unstructured freedom often turns into a summer slip, where momentum disappears faster than an ice pop in the sun.

Without routines or accountability, executive functions like planning, self-starting, and pacing can take a vacation of their own. And come late August, you’re left with that sinking feeling: Did nothing productive actually happen this summer? Then out of nowhere, you’re jolted awake by the late-summer panic.

“We want breathing room, but also don’t want summer to be a total wash.”

“Okay, so what can we do that actually helps without overwhelming?”

Brain Science: Why Structure, Not Spontaneity, Wins

Neuroscience research shows that in children with ADHD, the prefrontal cortex (the part of the brain that helps with planning, managing impulses, and remembering what needs to get done) doesn’t activate as strongly during activities that require focus or self-control, especially when there’s no external structure in place.¹ The motivation might be there, but the brain systems that manage follow-through are under-supported.

Family systems and developmental researchers have also found that daily routines offer more than just predictability. They create a steady environment that helps kids regulate behavior, build emotional resilience, and stick with tasks even when things get challenging.² In this way, routines serve as scaffolding: support structures that help children practice and strengthen executive function skills over time.

For older students, especially those with ADHD, coaching programs that include clear planning, consistent support, and built-in accountability have been shown to boost follow-through and academic performance.³ ⁴ Together, these studies highlight how powerful external structure can be at every age. As an example, rising seniors who build college essay writing into their summer plans often begin the school year with greater clarity and far less stress about applications.

Alex’s College Essay Win: A Summer Coaching Story

Alex didn’t enjoy writing essays. He often felt overlooked in high school, unsure what made him stand out, and uncertain about applying to college. Early on in our work together, he would glance toward his mom for help answering questions about his own interests and strengths. She later shared that she was especially worried about the college essay, concerned that his low confidence in writing and speaking up would hold him back, and unsure how to help him let his voice come through.

Through guided conversations, creative exercises and follow-up questions, Alex began to uncover stories that stood out for him.

He told me about a model airplane he’d received as a gift, and that he was excited to build it, only to be let down when it wouldn’t fly. His grandfather stepped in to help, and together they customized the design so the plane could finally take flight. Each time they encountered an obstacle, Alex peppered his grandfather with questions. When the rudder jammed mid-build, he tried out different replacement parts and landed on a fix using a piece from an old kit. He looked up motor specs online, replaced the faulty one, adjusted the battery placement to improve lift, and fine-tuned the wing angles. His curiosity and persistence kept him going.

With his grandfather’s support and his own tenacity, Alex got the plane off the ground.

Alex's memory of problem-solving and perseverance became the heart of a powerful essay that captured his quiet determination and gave admissions officers a real glimpse into who he is. His willingness to describe an experience that gave him a feeling of confidence helped him stand out, and ultimately earn a spot at his top-choice college.

Using his summer to develop his personal statement without time pressure reminded Alex how rewarding that model-building experience had been. Reconnecting with it gave him a fresh sense of pride and helped him relaunch a hands-on hobby that still sparks his curiosity and confidence today.

Summer Break as a Low-Pressure Launchpad

Summer break can be a chance to do something you've been putting off, such as tackling a project that feels intimidating or writing that college essay you’ve been dreading. With the right structure and support, it’s possible to take small steps without overwhelm.

While neurodivergent learners benefit from a rhythm that encourages follow-through on their goals and ongoing skill development, a flexible structure doesn’t mean turning summer into a school schedule. It means creating systems that allow creativity, rest, and progress to coexist.

Students with learning differences thrive when summer includes a healthy balance that offers some structure, clear expectations, and engaging challenges.

Gentle Summer Support That Actually Gets Traction

Inspired by Alex's story? Imagine a toolkit where you’re in control: a pick-and-choose productivity adventure designed around your needs and goals.

College Essays as an Exploration of You: Self-discovery meets storytelling. Through guided conversations, subtle prompts, and thoughtful questions, you delve into the moments that define what makes you tick. The result? Essays that reflect your values, insights, and unique perspective, without relying on stock subjects.

Academic & Study Skills as Skill Quests: Want to improve math reasoning, sharpen writing flow, ace test strategies, boost language abilities, or improve organization and time management? Coaching breaks each area into manageable levels. You unlock personal bests without the stress of grades. It’s structured but not stressful, more “level-up” than “pop quiz.”

Individualized Portfolio Projects: Whether you're writing a play, building skateboards, coding a simple game, designing art or mechanical pieces, coaching helps you break your vision into small steps. You’ll schedule progress, research how to complete each task, solve problems as they arise, develop unique solutions, and communicate your vision in a way that’s all your own and deeply engaging. Sessions provide guidance and structure to support momentum without overwhelm.

Don’t Squander Your Summer

Your summer can be a launchpad. Use it to face something you've been putting off, such as a college essay, a creative project, or a challenge that feels just out of reach. With just the right amount of guidance, you can make meaningful progress. You don’t have to figure it out alone. Get the external support, structured freedom, and tailored coaching you need to make it happen. Turn lazy sunlit days into summer traction that sets the stage for fall wins and beyond.

What could a little structure help you unlock this summer?

Ready to turn ideas into action? I’m offering a complimentary sample coaching session to build your personalized summer strategy. Momentum awaits.

As an executive function coach and academic tutor, I specialize in helping individuals with learning differences exceed their goals in academics, organization, college transition, and career success. Let’s work together to help your learner reach their full potential.

Citations

Monden, Y., et al. (2012). Reduced prefrontal activation during inhibitory tasks in ADHD. Frontiers in Human Neuroscience. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/PMC5487426/
Selman, R. L., et al. (2023). Routines and child development: A systematic review. Journal of Family Theory & Review. https://onlinelibrary.wiley.com/doi/10.1111/jftr.12549
Prevatt, F., & Yelland, S. (2013). An empirical evaluation of ADHD coaching in college students. Journal of Attention Disorders. https://pubmed.ncbi.nlm.nih.gov/23509112/
Advokat, C., Lane, S. M., & Luo, C. (2011). College students with and without ADHD: Comparison of self-report of medication usage, study habits, and academic achievement. Journal of Attention Disorders, 15, 656–666. http://dx.doi.org/10.1177/1087054710371168

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Use ChatGPT to Enhance, Not Replace Your Student’s Skills

6/25/2023

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Image by Mikhail Nilov

How to Use AI Chatbots to Aid Critical Thinking Rather Than Make It Obsolete

ChatGPT Guidelines for Students, Coaches and Educators

In related articles, we discuss how learners can use AI writing generators effectively as research tools, as well as how students can maintain rigorous standards with their AI-assisted academic projects.

Today, we provide an overview of some risks associated with using AI writers for school assignments, as well as guidelines on how to leverage them effectively as learning tools.

ChatGPT has arrived at the party. This sleek chatbot platform developed by OpenAI makes it painfully easy for students to cheat, write their college essays, and respond to take-home exam questions.

Naturally, students want quick solutions. They struggle with skill gaps resulting from pandemic learning loss, information overload, learning differences, and stress. They have every motivation to employ academic shortcuts.

Classroom educators are under intense pressure to help students make up for lost time, but may not have the resources to help each student raise their skills to grade level.

Enter ChatGPT.

This natural language processing app creates near-instantaneous writing that appears at first glance to be comprehensive, sophisticated, and well organized. What student wouldn’t be tempted to hand in a poem, opinion piece, or critical analysis presented in this way?

Educators and parents have long been concerned about academic plagiarism, but AI-generated writing cannot be detected by plagiarism checking software. Now, it is easier than ever for students to pass off prefab essays as their own.

The problems with academic misuse of AI chatbots are even deeper than that.

Students with learning differences are facing a crisis where the allure of letting AI tools do the heavy lifting may feel too strong to pass up. Yet they may not understand how to create effective research inquiries, or recognize when a chatbot’s algorithm is integrating low quality or inaccurate content into its explanation. To make matters worse, neurodivergent learners may not appreciate the value of academic struggle, and how circumventing a healthy challenge ultimately serves to erode their confidence.

It’s riveting to read text that is rooted in an individual’s concrete perspective.

Students build analysis, problem solving, and communication skills by responding thoughtfully to academic prompts. Averting atrophy of critical thinking while using chatbots requires that students understand how to use them competently, so that they further, rather than stifle that learner’s cognitive development.

The guidelines below can help your student leverage the positive features of using AI chatbots for academic work, and avoid some of their pitfalls.

Guidelines I use in my practice:

If your student is using AI chatbots as a tool for research or writing projects, you can make these recommendations:

Identify your unique priorities. Before using AI chatbots to conduct research or craft a piece of writing, it is important for learners to get clear on their own priorities and desired focus. A ChatGPT response to an initial inquiry may be too generic to be a useful starting place, other than offering a broad overview of relevant possibilities. It’s essential that students weed out inaccurate info or points that are not connected to their project’s focus. They must narrow what they think are the most important ideas to emphasize in their argument. Note to student: “A computer cannot tell you who you are, or what you believe.”
Keep asking follow up questions. ChatGPT has a dialog interface which is not available through standard internet search. This back-and-forth feature allows learners to refine their research by drilling down. Rather than settling with the first summary that emerges from a chatbot, or seeing it as the definitive truth, students can be encouraged to notice where it could benefit from deeper investigation. They can pose additional queries in the same dialog thread, asking the algorithm to produce more specific commentary, or to take a different approach. The chatbot’s iterations can reflect increasingly more focused explanations. Prompt for student: “What information would improve the narrative coming from the chatbot?”
Customize your angle. An AI chatbot’s iterative interface can engage learners’ active input, helping them identify what they find inspiring and relevant, sharpen their discernment, and clarify their own viewpoints. Students have likes and dislikes, preferences, and topics they consider snooze-worthy. They may not love every school assignment, but they can be guided to apply curiosity to their use of AI research tools. Their resulting academic exploration and work will incorporate themes they actually find interesting. Tip for student: “Discover how the topic matters to YOU.”
Know your unique stories. ChatGPT’s output can be antiseptic, dry, and boring. Your student, on the other hand, possesses colorful thoughts, impressions, and inclinations. A slick automaton cannot compete with the subjectivity of human stories and memories. It’s riveting to read text that is rooted in an individual’s concrete perspective. At the end of the day, telling their own story empowers the student and affirms the value of their life experience in their learning process. Suggestion to student: “Avoid being generic. Personalize it.”

The bottom line: Students can use AI chatbots as a starting point for research, but must learn to integrate details that illustrate their own insights and experience, eliminate unsuitable information, and craft a response or piece of writing using their own reasoning and communication skills.

Students do not have to be passive, disempowered or outshone by AI chatbots. ChatGPT can help your learner explore, but it does not need to remove the sense of agency and empowerment that comes with being at the academic driving wheel.

Is your student looking for guidance in using research technology to maximize their academic confidence? Schedule a complimentary information session.

As an executive function coach and academic tutor, I specialize in helping individuals with learning differences exceed their goals for academics, organization, and college transition.

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Are You the Missing Link in Helping Your Student Achieve Academic Success?

5/27/2022

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Independent, hands on research projects make academic exploration relevant to struggling students.

This One Thing Can Transform a Student’s Future

Do you have children with learning differences who are struggling to stay motivated in school? This may sound familiar. Your child is bright and capable, yet teachers tell you that they are not engaged during class. Their attention wanders and they struggle to complete assignments, or even pay attention.

You’ve done everything you know how to do. You’ve tried tutoring, reasoning, nagging, bribes, family rules, consequences, time outs, and nothing seems to work. You wonder when your child is going to start pulling in the grades you know they are capable of. Meanwhile, the end of the term is looming, along with a disappointing GPA, and you wonder if your child is going to consistently fall behind their peers. Will they have the same college and career options you hope for them?

You Do Not Have to Live in Fear of This Outcome.

The good news is that a more hopeful scenario is available. If this has slipped through your radar of possibilities, you are probably like most parents and don’t know what has been missing. Here’s the truth: students don’t automatically encounter real world applications of their personal interests in a school context. Because of this, young people with learning differences are often not able to draw a connection between the academic skills they are learning in school, and how they will matter later. They don’t foresee how they will need some of these problem solving tools when looking to advance academically and professionally.

Yes, this gap in perspective matters even at the middle school level. Why? Because young people need to visualize themselves interacting in a real world context, ideally with people who are doing things they find interesting.

How Can You Help Your Child Do This?

Whether your child is obsessed with designing skateboards, raising birds, weaving tapestries, tinkering with machinery, or sketching, hands-on career exploration gives a student concrete exposure to passions that can later grow into real world occupations in unexpected ways. A sketcher may end up designing computer games, a weekend gardener may end up majoring in environmental biology, and a jazz drummer may earn tuition money playing gigs in Vegas in between semesters of college.

A young explorer may ultimately go in a completely different professional direction, but the skills they hone while engaged in these activities - networking, creating, collaborating, testing, troubleshooting, refining, etc. - may translate into academic or professional capabilities they will need later on. They will practice applying a variety of cognitive tasks in a joyful context, and may later call up these abilities when tackling assignments.

The act of doing something engaging in itself can motivate a student by surfacing ways in which their school work might prove to be relevant in the long run. Hands-on career experience helps a student's focus and motivation by providing a much-needed reality check: they can finally visualize themselves years from now, and begin to understand how the skills they are developing while mastering academic challenges may in fact be a key that allows them to achieve personal and professional goals.

What Can Hands-On Career Exploration Look Like?

Perhaps your child would like to attend a performing arts camp, sign up for an outdoor adventure for students their age, or design and build a treehouse? Or, would they prefer a work experience that would allow them to delve into a special interest, such as a part time job at a game store, a bike shop, an art gallery, or a plant nursery?

If they are not quite ready to plunge headlong into an experience, fear not. Students can conduct career research by interviewing family contacts who work in an industry they are interested in, by browsing job postings to see what kinds of tasks, education and experience are associated with a desired role, or by searching for videos that show a day in the life in a work environment they are considering.

Specifics may vary student to student, but hands-on career exploration can consist of internships, guided internet searches, volunteer stints, interviews with professionals in their desired field, shadowing a potential mentor, visits to work environments they are interested in, classes, independent projects, online portfolios that showcase their talents, etc. There are a variety of ways a student can investigate whatever makes them curious!

When Is My Child Going to Find the Time for More Activities?

If you are concerned that your child is already busy with a variety of activities, consider that they can integrate hands-on career exploration into their schedule after school, on weekends, or during school breaks. Many teen programs are available during breaks, and this is also an ideal time for students to pursue an independent project. Most students are eager to carve out time during the week to do something inspiring.

The idea is for them to find ways to manageably enhance their school routine and round out their life experiences, without taking on anything overwhelming. While academics come first, and your child may also be active in sports and other activities that demand much of their time, it is often possible to fill slower times of the year with an enriching experience that will usher in a new perspective.

Why Does Hands-On Career Exploration Work?

Many students are peer driven and benefit from being surrounded by people who share similar passions. They also need like minded mentors who think the way they do, who care about the kinds of things they also find interesting, and who can help the student envision a successful future path. They thrive from interactions with professional role models and advisors who know the lay of the land and ideal training programs in a particular industry.

How Does Hands-On Career Exploration Work?

Concrete interaction with their passions can provide a welcome contrast to theoretical and abstract content young people are constantly bombarded with in a school environment. For a learner who struggles with attention challenges, applied learning opportunities are especially vital.

When students have fun, challenge themselves by tapping different parts of their brain, and apply concepts in practical ways, they are more easily engaged. They have opportunities to practice connecting a wide variety of cognitive dots. This translates into better concentration and focus.

Being creative, solving problems, and engaging with others who share their interests boosts their brain chemistry in beneficial ways. They will be absorbed and make associations between what they are being asked to do in school, and how they might need to use these skills later on.

What Makes YOUR Child Happy?

Playing board games, writing songs, raising dogs? It makes no difference. You may not personally enjoy these pastimes, but it is important to allow your child to find their own way.

If your child is encouraged to have in depth exploration of something that gives them joy, and become truly engrossed and inquisitive, this will exercise the parts of their brain that know how to stay focused on a challenge or task. It will also help them understand why what they are being asked to learn in school might become relevant when it comes time to translate their goals into academic and professional activities.

Want help creating hands-on career exploration opportunities for your child? Book a free no-obligation session now.

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