My sister is currently going through the college application process and has been pretty stressed out by the whole experience. She’s applying to 15 schools! WAY more than I did when I was a senior.
Between keeping up with deadlines, writing essays, and sending information to schools, she and my parents have had a tough time staying organized.
How many schools are you / your child applying to? How have you been managing deadlines?
My daughter applied to 8 schools. That entailed 19 essays. More than enough!
She had a spreadsheet but she applied early in August, well ahead of all deadlines, because she was in a musical in the Fall and knew she wouldn’t have time.
What my sister and parents found it most useful was to stay in sync with each other’s progress. Any time my parents want to see where my sister is the process, they use the site to check in on her progress.
The other big value proposition is the ability to store all your essays in one place and reference them later. Really tough to do that in a spreadsheet. I, personally, just used a google drive folder to store all my essays - but then it was always a pain to share it with other people and my parents.
@momofsenior1 that’s a ton of essays! How did you manage progress for all 8 applications and 19 essays?
I didn’t manage the process. My daughter did.
She was super organized, and started early. We started looking at colleges the summer between sophomore and junior year, looked at more through junior year, and then she finalized her list.
Her common app essay was done and edited in the spring of junior year. College specific essays done in August before classes started, and that just left honors essays to be completed in the Fall as they came in. Applications were her priority and she was totally done and everything submitted by the end of October. (She also did all of here standardized testing junior year so didn’t have that to worry about.).
As an aside: she also took a lot of notes during college visits and already had the makings of the “why us” essays outlined.
Wow that’s incredible. I definitely didn’t have the discipline to start early and make sure everything got done ahead of time. Very impressive of your daughter to do all of that. Best of luck to her for the rest of the application process!
The “start early” advice was given to my daughter by a neighbor who had just been through the process with her children. (I honestly don’t think she would have listened to me if I had given her the suggestion ; )). She says now it was the single best advice she got about the college admission process. She saw lots of friends frantic right before deadlines and it was a blessing to her to have had the time to really massage each application and essay.