March 2026

Happy March! It’s Spring Break season for a lot of students. I hope yours is restful and restorative.

I often get asked if I worry about AI taking my job, and I’m sometimes told directly (and condescendingly) that AI will definitely, soon, take my job. Maybe I’m just naive, but I don’t worry much.

AI is incredibly good at a lot of things. For example, thinking about this newsletter I asked ChatGPT “what are the overarching themes of college admission specifically in March?” And it did a pretty good job. It began with

“March sits at a very specific moment in the college admissions cycle: most decisions are about to come out, but very little new information can change outcomes. Because of that, the themes of March are less about building an application and more about anticipation, interpretation, and preparation for decisions.”

After a breakdown of seven different themes, it ended with

“In short: March is the month when the admissions process shifts from speculation to reality. The dominant themes are: decision releases; waitlists; financial aid clarity; emotional processing; beginning the final college choice.”

Also pretty good.

But here’s what AI is not good at, and something that I and many other people are: asking “how are you doing?" We can ask you open-ended questions and not wait for you to ask us questions. We can care, often very deeply, about your answers. Watch this video in which Fred Rogers brings Hollywood stars to tears in just 10 seconds. (It brings me to tears every time I watch it.) Will a day come when we consider AI programs among those “who loved us into being?” I don’t know; maybe. But not any time soon, and I can say—definitely, condescendingly—not this March.

—Benjamin

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Here’s what I covered on the website in February:

How do I put together a college list? You start your college search with at least 1,500 options, and you have to choose one. How do you do that in a way that's efficient and gets you to the right school?

Here are some blog posts from the archive that are good for this March:

Eight questions for juniors Here’s an outline of the conversations I’m having right now. If you’re a current high school junior, or a parent or loved one of one, then this may help you as well.

The element that’s missing in a lot of LOCIs In many LOCIs, there's a looming question a lot of people don’t address: if this is your top-choice school and you want to go here so badly, why didn’t you apply Early Decision? You’re writing this letter now saying that you love the college, it’s your first-choice pick, and if they accept you—even late in the summer—you will go there. The way to signal to a college that it’s your Number One and that you will definitely attend if admitted is to apply ED. So why didn’t you? You should address this directly.

A plan for stressed 9th graders The “am I worthy?” mindset believes that preparing for college is all about showing colleges that you are worthy to be accepted, and that acceptance from colleges is a validation of your worthiness. This mindset isn’t healthy, it isn’t realistic, and it isn’t useful.

Take a Spring Break trip! I strongly believe that Spring Break should be a break from school and stress. But I also know that lots of students and parents ask me what they can do over Spring Break to help with college applications. There’s only one thing I recommend: go on a practice college tour.

Have a look at this:

To avoid accusations of AI cheating, college students are turning to to AI. My guess is that these are some outlier stories and not the mainstream of how students who don't use AI are...forced to use AI...to show they're not using AI. But these outliers are fascinating in what they tell us about the future of integrity in college writing.