<p>So the suvey says…Get essays done during the summer and then only be left with schools like Chicago in the fall.</p>
<p>Working with an 11th grader now & hoping to use this strategy. Hoping it will work.</p>
<p>My daughter did complete her common application essay this summer. However, a lot of the schools she’s applying to have supplemental essays which were not published until late September or early October. Plus, Pitt is not on the common application and has its own application to complete. My daughter is also applying to WashU & Wesleyan which for her happily do not have supplemental essays. It’s just a lot of work. I will be happy once January is here and this stuff is all completed. Then we just have to suffer through winter weather and wait to see where she was accepted.</p>
<p>Doing essays over the summer…good luck with that. We tried and tired to get son to do his essays over the summer to no avail. OTOH, his school requires some pretty heavy duty summer reading that includes a lot of essay writing, so he felt like that should be his main focus over the summer. His summer is also vastly shortened because of football workouts and then practice, so he didn’t have a lot of extra time.</p>
<p>Or it could have been because he is a major procrastinator who works best under pressure. :)</p>
<p>Hey - let me still dream she’ll get some done in the summer!</p>
<p>^^The goal of writing in the summer is a fine one, and I wish you and your daughter the very best. Another good thing to do now if she hasn’t done it yet is to put together a resume. That makes filling out the endless forms so much easier.</p>
<p>Exactly…in a perfect world all essays would be done by the end of the summer. I tried that too but it didn’t work out that way. The Common App essay (and additional info) were the easy part. D’s fist choice school does not take the Common App and their application was extensive. Many of her other schools all had supplements. And then there was the U of Chicago… to a math science nerd, those essays were torture. Perhaps that’s why she didn’t get in. Hind-sight and all, it wasn’t a good fit after all.</p>
<p>Longhaul - I’m not sure if your kid can get them done over the summer, so much depends on the kid’s personality. The Common App questions don’t change from year to year, so theoretically he/she could start today. What I did at the beginning of the summer was to list the essay questions for my son and give him some ideas on how he might approach each one. He still didn’t finish the final draft until November 1 for an SCEA app (and may have made some slight revisions thereafter). He also had another essay that he wrote to expand on one of his ECs and used one or the other on every app that he filed (12, I believe). Even the short essay questions tend to repeat themselves and I don’t think that he felt they were much of a bother. The only one that threw him off was Rice and the question about what you will bring the the college community. He had answered that for several other colleges and was prepared to send the same one off to Rice when he realized that Rice wanted a 500 word essay (not a couple hundred words or less that most schools wanted).</p>
<p>OTOH my son applied to Chicago partially because of the essays. He figured they would be fun to do, and they were. Also, he figured that the less imaginative kids wouldn’t want to do the essays and won’t even apply, so he’d only be hanging out with creative types if he gets in.</p>
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<p>Yeah, after doing a bit of research Chicago was one of the main schools that really appealed to me. I ended up not applying though because the essay questions just seemed pointlessly absurd. I do wonder sometimes whether I would’ve been accepted if I had submitted the essay I had written for Caltech.</p>
<p>@ignatius:</p>
<p>What are the scholarship projects for Tulane? Did we miss something?</p>
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<p>The Dean’s Honor Scholarship and the Community Service Scholarship. The Dean’s Honor Scholarship covers full tuition; both scholarships (Dean’s Honor and Community Service) require additional “written commentary” :).</p>
<p>Yeah, with my second son I am going to push him into writing a couple of essays over the summer! Heck its going to be here in less than 2 years time!!</p>
<p>Older son is the typical last minute procrastinator type! Younger one likes to plan ahead and schedule. Lucky me!</p>
<p>summer was our plan too, but just didnt happen. son doesnt like essays at all, and leaves til last minute. they have been the most stressful part of all of this. i think what is the most frustrating for him, is doing the initial app, then once accepted having to do supplemental apps for honors programs or additional scholarships. wish they had a way to do it all at once. some of these honors ones give very short notice ie 2-3 weeks to complete once notified. they add to the stress though as now you know this may be a feasible school and the scholarship money may be the deciding factor.
ut dallas selective scholarship has it right in my opinion, you apply WITH the essays, they hold off on letters of recs unless you make semi finalist and then they request those…so they also are considerate of teachers time.</p>
<p>A couple of years ago, S could simply not tell Stanford what he thinks his roommate should know about him. (It’s not something he would care about anyway!!) He did the rest of the app but couldn’t bring himself do to it.</p>
<p>S is a B student and has applied to 13 schools, fishing for financial aid. George Mason (an “up and coming” in US News survey) sent him an e mail with an already set up application out of the blue. So he plowed in, and the “advantage app” required three more essays. It just wasn’t worth it.</p>
<p>Maybe they are looking for persistance!</p>
<p>S hated the “why ______?” questions also. Made a hash of the ones that asked that, as he couldn’t think of anything besides “heck if I know”. </p>
<p>Come to think of it, couldn’t they be a little more creative?</p>
<p>Yeah, Chicago’s essays have traditionally been a weeder, I think. Tufts, too.</p>
<p>UMD’s 300 word essays were torture. Some were not terribly well phrased and S had a lot more to say than 300 words. Can I say I hate the tweet prompts?</p>
<p>Agree that if a student can’t come up with some good reasons to applying to a particular school (even if one can’t visit in advance), it’s a red flag about whether one should apply.</p>
<p>S1 dumped Stanford over essays and thier insistence on no supplements, not folding forms, etc.</p>
<p>In thinking back to a year ago, I’m trying to remember the essay angst. S applied to 15 colleges, so there were a lot of essays and short answers. I do know that his essays for the EA and special merit scholarship schools were done early and well (except for one place). Towards the end of the application odyssey, though, he was struggling to get those last essays/short answers done. I think the struggle was reflected in some of them, and he didn’t get into two places that he should have admitted him (no big sadness, though; they weren’t his top picks anyway – he got into his top pick but couldn’t go because of inadequate finaid).</p>
<p>He waited until the last minute to do the UChicago essay, although I suspect he’d been mulling that essay for quite some time in his head. (Yes, he got into UChicago.)</p>
<p>I think the “Why ___ college?” are a very reasonable question. Every student should be able to answer something, and it’s probably a good exercise for them to do a little homework and say something besides “You’re pretty high up on the USNWR list and the right size in my preferred location.”</p>
<p>Younger son hasn’t written his Tufts essay yet, but he’s looking forward to it - he’s going to answer the question about imagining the US if we had lost at Yorktown.</p>