Bragging Right

With a school structure based on student performance -- tracked through class rankings, test scores and multi-tiered sports -- we've grown up believing that such measurements speak for us. "When you're in school, they assess you all the time, and you never necessarily have to put yourself forward," says Carol Dweck, a psychology professor at Stanford University and author of "Mindset: The New Psychology of Success" (Random House, 2006), which examines how people's self-conceptions guide their behavior.

Dweck and her colleagues conducted a study in which fifth-graders were divided into two groups. After taking a relatively easy test, half of them were praised for their intelligence, the other half for their hard work. Dweck found that telling children how smart they are is, in essence, a false promise.

"It's saying you can just sit here with your brains and talent, and success will come," Dweck says. "In real life, you've got to go out and self-promote. In the real world, how are people going to know about your abilities unless you tell them?"

Logically, we need to become better self-promoters the moment we leave the familiar, which for many begins with college admissions.

"It puts on students the responsibility of figuring out how to present themselves to people whom they're never going to know," says Nina Marks, owner of Marks Consulting, a college-admissions counseling firm in Bethesda. "It's so much easier if they can sit across the table from the admissions committee and read some signals -- but they don't ever get to meet them."

Without cues to guide them, many students try to present themselves as some ideal that they think colleges want, Marks says, creating a discord that ultimately hinders their case.

In today's hyper-competitive environment, "we get this message that our accomplishments need to be as unique and as extraordinary as possible," she says. "We're so tired of reading about saints and victims in the college process."

Disingenuousness flops because, let's face it, how can you self-promote when it's not the real you? So, when one student wrote an essay about how training her puppy taught her patience and persistence, instead of how she represented Uganda at a Model United Nations conference -- what she thought she should write about -- admissions officials loved it.

"It's got to be authentic," Marks says. "It's got to feel right to you."

Still, although it's important to be true to yourself, it helps to take into account how you'll be perceived. When another student titled her essay "All About Me," Marks promptly nixed it.

"She was very confident and actually a great person, but she didn't have the sense of how somebody who didn't know her might look at that title and think, 'That might be a little self-absorbed.' "

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