Son submitted his first application, to a state university, yesterday.
At the “Review and Submit” stage, we had some trouble, but resolved it, so I thought I would pass two tips along to help others avoid similar stress.
- Once the draft preview shows up, if you can’t see the box to click to move on to the next step, decrease the size of the window and you will see it at the bottom.
- We got an infinite twirling circle on Mozilla Firefox, but the draft preview showed up in one second when we switched to Chrome.
We had the same problem last night. It was not just the size problem. We actually did the opposite and switch from Chrome to the MS browser to get through the preview step. It must be some plugins not installed properly.
Another tip is to be sure that if a google doc version of the essay is loaded onto the common app, check that the essay is actually correctly transferred. When my kid did this a couple of years ago, she discovered to her horror that the version that appeared on the common app was littered with many random punctuation marks, all over the place. She didn’t realize until weeks later, and had to submit a corrected version to the college, who told her the same had happened to other applicants. I thought that must have been resolved by now, but there was a student here on CC the other day who had the same thing happen. Check your essay on the actual Common App before hitting submit.
I agree. Everyone should use “Preview” and do an absolutely thorough, word by word, reread of the entire application before submitting it. This forum is filled with “I made a mistake— now what?” threads… most of which could be avoided by paying attention to that step. The Preview shows exactly what Admissions will see. It is your last chance to catch any errors or formatting issues and then go back into the application and fix them.
Absolutely. I told my D to print it out and go through it carefully. Particularly for punctuations and special characters in essays, those often do not transfer correctly.