Examples could include, among others:

ROB ROY:

Liam Neeson returns to his village which has been pillaged by the British & his wife attacked by a British officer. He won't blame the outrage on, and will love, his wife's soon-to-be-born baby. ("De-"R"ed movie version available).

DEBATING ROBERT LEE:

High School girl encourages nerdy boy who feels unwanted. She overcame her similar feelings when she found out her solid middle-class parents viewed her as a burden when she was an unexpected pregnancy.

IN AMERICA:

In contrast, a poor family views a difficult pregnancy as a blessing.

JUNO, BELLA, COME WHAT MAY:

Three films where pro-life themes are central. One minute excerpts could be presented, as a counter-cultural theme compared to Hollywood in general.

College Admissions may accept a student with average GPA, SAT/ACT scores, and orthodox extra-curricular if they have unusual or leadership experience like we have focused in Part B.2. and throughout this website. In addition:

Helping those in need via community service if done for genuine concern to help others and not just for a "resume builder" is a worthy effort. More and more students are doing "community service" in a bigger way by taking a "gap year" off (www.GapYear.com) after high school and before they go to the college that has accepted them a year hence. This year could be spent learning about cultures of far off countries and helping the people there with literacy or health initiatives. High fees could be involved but if students can afford it they could take a break from pure academics and develop maturity and a real-world perspective. Students can go a big step further after community service work and help all future people in need!: Gather information about underlying causes of why the need is so large. If you are helping flood victims, do further research with your teacher/professor mentors to see if poor flood control infrastructure in the country or area you were in adds to flood risk. Or maybe the underlying solution is a civic literacy initiative to help voters support non-corrupt leaders who would not divert funds to friends who have built substandard waterways.

Students have, e.g., gathered donations of used clothes to send them in large volume to African countries. But, baring time-sensitive disaster relief, many Africans did not want free clothes because it undercut poor business owners in Africa who were trying to expand their retail clothes stores. What they needed were U.S. charitable volunteers to sell the clothes to the Africans and use the funds to expand such "sustainable" help that builds a poor country's overall economy. The poor who cannot afford the clothes prices should be helped with expanded work programs to earn enough to afford life's necessities. See www.acton.org/impact for promotion papers and research for these kinds of efforts. Research consistently shows that when non-disabled people do not work but receive non-contingent welfare assistance year after year, their work ethic and moral character can atrophy.

This type of effort could influence your very career decisions. Regardless of your chosen major, you can at some point use your expertise to work in, or influence government by working for research organizations that produce studies showing how government can better use its resources or pass better laws. Conservatives sometimes think negatively about working for the government. But talented professionals are needed to make the scholarly case for optimal choices the government could make that can involve billions of dollars used efficiently or not. For example, you could use your civil engineering background, perhaps with advanced work in statistics, to help with studies showing that government agencies would save money and increase safety by better justifying more bridge maintenance funding now and less later to prevent "penny wise and pound foolish" corners being cut in the early years.

Career assessment programs are sometimes dismissed by students who even when high school age, are genuinely certain of the major they want to choose in college. Yet some of these students still change majors midway through college, adding to the time and costs of getting a degree. These students may benefit from a quality career assessment program; they would be subjecting their choice to the "crucible" of the case being made for other career choices, given their talents and aptitude. If they still maintained their original career choice it may therefore be based on a more certain conviction.

Practice speaking before over 100,000 people! Pick a topic you like and formulate a 1-minute comment and question. Call a major local or even national radio talk show to talk about it. You may pick a time when a famous guest is on. They may restrict discussion to a topic you are not ready for, but they do announce the free topic time in the week. If you can develop a comfort level talking to hundreds of thousands of people in radio-land, the pressure of job or college admissions interviews or parts in school plays or speeches were given running for school government will seem easier. You can even name drop in your interviews, referring to a famous guest on talk radio you challenged with a question. There are techniques we can give you to minimize getting busy signals when you are trying to get on the more popular shows.

Be aware of how some experience on your resume is perceived by some colleges. In the "No Longer Separate, Not Yet Equal" study by Princeton Professors Espenshade and Radford, they studied 8 (undisclosed) elite and selective universities to determine what factors on resumes/applications were most determinative of acceptance. Overall, Asians and whites were much less likely to be accepted than other races with the same qualifications. Working-class whites were actually less likely to be admitted than whites from professional families, but the opposite was true for black applicants! Leadership in 4H Club, Future Farmers of America, and Junior ROTC or significant activity in many churches were actually NEGATIVE factors. (One wonders about Eagle Scouts). See more detail at Princeton U. Press or a summary at "Bias and Bigotry in Academia" by Buchanan at www.wnd.com. On a positive note, the above, or business owner experience (Part B.2.) may be all the more important to enough other colleges that if such compelling experience were a negative for a few colleges, you may not want to be in that environment anyway.

Please contact us for more life-changing examples to help students and mentor-parents get the most enduring benefits from their education and, simultaneously, build their resume to get into their "best fit" college.

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(1) C. S. Lewis, in his 1939 "Learning in War-Time" speech made the case to Oxford students worried about going to war, that their liberal arts education should still be their important focus:

"To be ignorant and simple now - not to be able to meet the enemies on their own ground - would be to throw down our weapons, and to betray our uneducated brethren who have, under God, no defense but us against the intellectual attacks of the heathen. ... Most of all, perhaps, we need intimate knowledge of the past. ... A man who has lived in many places is not likely to be deceived by the local errors of his native village: the scholar has lived in many times and is therefore in some degree immune from the great cataract of nonsense that pours from the press and the microphone of his own age."

Albert Einstein wrote a letter to the N.Y. Times on Oct. 5, 1952:

"It is not enough to teach a man a specialty. Through it, he may become a kind of useful machine, but not a harmoniously developed personality. It is essential that the student acquire an understanding of and lively feeling for values. He must acquire a vivid sense of the beautiful and of the morally good. Otherwise he, with his specialized knowledge, more closely resembles a well-trained dog. Premature specialization on the ground of immediate usefulness kills the spirit on which all cultural life depends."

Two thousand years ago in Roman poet Virgil's story of Rome's founding, the hero, Aeneas, is counseled by his deceased father from the Underworld:

Others no doubt will better mold the bronze

To the semblance of soft breathing, draw, from marble,

The living countenance; or learn to measure,

Better than we, the pathways of the heaven,

The risings of the stars: remember, Roman,

To rule the people under law, to graft tradition

Onto peace, to battle down the haughty,

To spare the meek. Our fine arts these, forever."

**from "The Affinity of Literature and Politics" by Prof. David M. Whalen.

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(2) Wall Street Journal,10-09-09, pg. W13.

(3) Current Magazine, 01-02, pg. 28.

(4) Cambridge Scholar Jamie Dettmeria, Insight Mag., 3-11-02.

(5) "The Political Assault on Art Education," WSJ, 6-25-10, pg. W11.

(6) Dr. M. D. Aeschliman, "Saving Remnant" (review of physicist "Michael Polanyi", by Mark Mitchell), National Review Mag., 2-12-07, pg. 45.

(7) A panel of scholars from Harvard, U.'s of Cal & Tenn., etc. from isi.org: "The Fifty Worst (and Best) Books of the Century at http://www.mmisi.org/ir/35_01/50worst.pdf

(8) See Robert George's Wheatley Institute lecture at BYU.

(9) Court documents reveal much detail on these cases at www.alliancedefensefund.org.

(10) A quote from a review by Jonah Goldberg, National Review columnist, and author.

(11) Full text of Virgil's classic is in vol. 13 of Brittanica's Great Books of the Western World.

(12) "What's Behind the Research? - Discovering Hidden Assumptions in the Behavioral Sciences," by B. Slife & R. Williams, 1995. "John Rawls: Unfair to Justice," by Prof. Wallace Matson in Modern Age Magazine, Fall 2001. "Darwin Day in America - How our politics & culture have been dehumanized in the name of science," by Dr. John G. West. Also, read various C. S. Lewis works on "scientism." The Holbein painting's message is described in detail in "The Wreck of Western Culture," by Dr. John Carroll.

(13) Students may be taught in science classes by secular professors like Dr. Pianka or the hundreds that applauded him (see Part 4. above). Dr. Born's quote or Pianka's positions refer to science unmoored from religious or moral ethics. Science as its own moral compass basically says "if you can do it, DO do it." The subtitle of Darwin's Origin of the Species, "The Preservation of Favored Races in the Struggle for Life," would certainly give a purely materialistic and powerful ruler a pretext for carrying out the "survival of the fittest" as a geopolitical goal.

The last phrase of Dr. Born's quote, that man has lost his freedom, is consistent with a common theme in prominent secular professors' curricula. Per Matson in (12), Dr. John Rawls has been selected in surveys of faculty teaching these topics as the most influential economic philosopher and was given the highest citizenship award by Pres. Clinton. Rawls and his adherents in neurosciences and psychology assert that human choices reflecting hard work or sloth, brilliance or stupidity, wisdom or folly, etc., are inevitable results of purely materialistic chemical causes and effects so that blaming people or even using terms like right and wrong is inappropriate because the freedom to make moral choices is an illusion.

Thus, if a person reaps large profits from brilliance, acceptance of risk, and hard work, these latter 3 human characteristics came from inevitable cause and effect chains and nature's lottery of birth and nurture; therefore government must redistribute the lucky profits to others to further fairness and justice. Grudging concessions to real life are acknowledged by letting successful people keep some of their profits, per Dr. Martin, p. 376:

"So what would be both just and reasonably prosperous would be a society in which the progressive income tax took exactly that amount from the more advantaged, to give to the lesser {people}, such that taking any more would provoke a strike of the producers as imagined by Ayn Rand in Atlas Shrugged (1957)." A nice problem, to determine this point in advance."

Along with this argument, to use the prestige or aegis of "physical science" to justify "transferring wealth" to make things "fair," there is the social science cousin of this approach in happiness theory. (e.g., Professors' essays in Daedalus Magazine, 2-04). Research does show that people's happiness is similar in towns where everyone either has small homes or everyone has large homes. Thus, people thinking they are happier with large homes is self-deception. What causes distress or decreasing happiness is when people with small homes see owners of large homes around them, which could be related to the universal trait of envy or feeling inferior. So why should we "let" people have large homes if it causes distress among people, and, in any case, having large homes as opposed to small ones does not increase one's absolute happiness, only a negative characteristic of haughtiness in seeing that your home is bigger than mine. Thus, overall community happiness would be maximized if high producers who caused angst or resentment among the majority of people were not around. There are rebuttals to this theory without contesting the small-versus-big-home research, and students should be aware of it because the socialistic case as above can be very alluring, and also for the simple case of diverse learning, about the major views on life's big issues.

(14) Edmund Burke wrote this essay warning star-struck nation-builders like the revolutionaries that wanted to construct a utopia after throwing out the French monarchy, in 1790:

"The science of constructing a commonwealth, or renovating it, or reforming it, is, like every other experimental science, not to be taught a priori. Nor is it a short experience that can instruct us in that practical science; because the real effects of moral causes are not always immediate; but that which in the first instance is prejudicial may be excellent in its remoter operation and its excellence may arise even from the ill effects it produces in the beginning. The reverse also happens; and very plausible schemes, with very pleasing commencements, have often shameful and lamentable conclusions. In states, there are often some obscure and almost latent causes, things which appear at first view of little moment, on which a very great part of its prosperity or adversity may most essentially depend. The science of government being therefore so practical in itself, and intended for such practical purposes, a matter which requires experience, and even more experience than any person can gain in his whole life, however sagacious and observing he may be, it is with infinite caution that any man ought to venture upon pulling down an edifice, which has answered in any tolerable degree for ages the common purposes of society, or on building it up again, without having models and patterns of approved utility before his eyes."

Some people may think Edmund Burke is difficult to read, but remember that many of the works of Burke were studied in high schools in WWI times.

(15) Search this topic at the National Institutes of Health and Mental Health. Dr. Ruben C. Gur provided expert testimony on adolescent brain development at www.abanet.org/crimjust/juvjus/patterson.html, and "Adolescence, Brain Development & Legal Culpability" from the ABA Juvenile Justice Center.

(16) On the web: "Does Professor Quality Matter - Evidence From Random Assignment of Professors." by S. E. Carrell & J. E. West.

(17) As cited by Frederic J. Fransen, exec director of the Center for Excellence in Higher Education in National Review, 10-18-10, pg. 43.

(18) Higher Education?, by Prof.’s Hacker and Dreifus, 2010, pp.’s 211-212.