College Admissions Deadlines, Reckless Drivers and Fire Ants

Wednesday, 25 August 2010 20:06 by Andrew Flagel

Image The New York Times recently ran an article about high school students anxiously waiting by their computers for the Common Application to go live so they could immediately submit their college applications and have their submissions be THE FIRST to be received by their universities of choice. Yikes! 

I'm sure these are probably the same people who would gun their engines on the highway to get in front of me and then immediately slow to a snail's pace afterwards.  In my perfect world, every driver would have a special apparatus with the ability to launch a platoon of fire ants directly into the car of such individuals.  No, wait.  First you would shoot honey at them, and then the ants. I digress, but I think you get the idea. 

So I started thinking, maybe the people who send in their applications in the middle of summer have the same idea (about getting in front of other cars, not about fire ants).  Possibly, they imagine their applications mercilessly cutting right in front of other applicants.  Perhaps they picture the application entering into the admissions office with appropriate fanfare: Trumpets heralding the arrival of the first application as choirs sing their praises and skyrockets explode triumphantly overhead. Or not.   

In reality, few offices actually check the dates on the applications as long as they meet the deadlines.  Applying by early admission and (the evil, awful) early decision deadlines may give the applicant some advantages in the decision process, but it's unlikely that being much earlier has any influence. 

There are, perhaps, some college admissions officers and/or committees who carefully check the arrival date of each application, but that date is usually an overall COMPLETION date (the date when everything needed for your application is received).  In fact, many high schools will send transcripts out in batches, often well after these obsessive summer submitters post their applications. As a result, there's a good chance that the college admissions committee will have no idea who submitted the first application. 

The moral of the story is that you can take all the time you want to turn in your applications.  That is, until the deadline for the college or university of your choice -- then you'd better hurry up and get your application submitted.   

So relax, and go back to squeezing the last juice out of your summer while you obsessively visit colleges, explore college websites, stress out about your senior year, and recklessly pull in front of traffic and then slow down -- we'll have your fire ants waiting.   

Be seeing you. 

About Andrew Flagel 

The Admissions Diary: Simplifying The College Application

Wednesday, 14 October 2009 00:02 by Lena

ImageThis week, high school blogger Olivia Duell discusses how she uses the Common Application to save time and simplify the complicated process of applying to college.

Back in August, I made a list of all the colleges I definitely wanted to apply to. Staring at the names on paper, it hit me how fast all the deadlines were approaching and how in under a year, I’d hopefully be heading off to one of these universities. Then I became very nervous; thinking about all I had to complete made me worry about missing the deadlines and I got the urge to fill out all my applications RIGHT THAT INSTANT. I do realize that it was August, that I wasn’t applying to any college for early decision, and that I was crazy. But I still felt the need to get a head start, so I ventured onto the internet and began checking out all of the colleges’ websites.

First, I headed over to the admissions page at NYU. Let me just say there was a ton of information, and at the same time I couldn’t seem to find the answers to the specific questions I had. The same was true when I headed to Drexel, then to Temple, and finally, grew frustrated. I was applying to seven colleges, and I didn’t want to hunt through seven different admissions web pages. What I did notice was that most of the colleges recommended applying via the Common App, so I checked out the website just to see if this was an option that would work for me. Fortunately, the information that the Common App provided was a bit more organized. After signing up with a user account, the site basically told you all you needed to know.  It listed what colleges accept the Common App, allowing you to keep track of the ones you wanted to apply to on your user profile. Luckily for me, six out of my seven choices were affiliated with the Common App (Temple has their own system) and I realized this would greatly help my application process.

It’s pretty easy to get started and fill out your general information: address, parent info, activities (you can even upload a document if you’d like to add a brag sheet), etc. It’s all pretty self-explanatory to the extent that you’re alerted if you leave a section blank. It does get a bit confusing at times; the test section, for instance, allows you to record standardized test scores, but you still have to send in the official scores from the College Board and from ACT. Guidance counselors and teachers also need to be invited online in order to fill out recommendations; because not all teachers are familiar with the Common App, it’s probably best to make them aware the invitation is coming.

The biggest pain is the college-specific supplements. Each college tags on their own supplement that needs to be filled out along with the regular application.  Often, this requires more writing work explaining why so-and-so college is the right choice. Yet, if the college doesn’t require this kind of essay in its supplement, it’s likely you’ll be forced to create “alternate” applications (once you submit your first application to one school, you can tweak it before you send it to other schools). In this case, you make your Common App personal essay college specific, because you aren’t allowed this opportunity in the supplement. It gets really confusing, and you need to keep track of which personal essay to send to each college depending on their supplements. I was forced to make yet another hand-written list.

Over all, though, the Common App is pretty solid. It’s helped me get organized, it breaks the application down for me, and it even tells me my due dates. Plus, a ton of colleges accept the Common App and consider it equally to their own custom applications. It’s easy, efficient, and I recommend it to anyone going through the college application process.

For more stories from students themselves, check out the archives for previous columns in The Admissions Diary.

The Common Application Makes Applying to College Uncommonly Easy

Thursday, 11 June 2009 15:04 by Barbara

ImageYou work hard to set yourself apart from your classmates and are feverishly planning your strategy to get noticed among the thousands of college applications that will be sent next fall. It might surprise you, then, to find out that it pays to be common—by using the Common Application, that is.

The Common Application lives up to its name in a big way—you fill out one college application (which also means writing just one essay!) that can be submitted to over 340 colleges and universities across the country. That’s right—all those teacher recommendation forms are the same, too. Even if you’ve got a dozen or so colleges on your wish list, the odds are very good that they might all be Common Application members.

With the Common Application, both high school seniors and transfer students can create user accounts on the website and submit the paperwork online—easy for you and good for the environment, too. (You also have the option of downloading, printing out, and mailing in the application forms.) The only bummer about the Common Application is that you’ve still got to pay the application fee for each school, but the time you save is money saved.

Some students might be leery of using the Common Application, fearing that they might insult the colleges to which they are applying if they don’t use their regular apps. News flash—schools that offer the Common Application WANT you to save time. It’s the very reason they sign on to become a member of the Common Application in the first place. Admissions counselors realize that the mounds of paperwork that high school seniors must endure takes time away from more important things like school work. In fact, there are 124 colleges and universities (and counting) that have made the Common Application their only application. These “exclusive users” include such collegiate titans as Yale, Carnegie Mellon, and Smith, as well as great state schools like University of New Hampshire and University of Virginia.

The new online Common Application goes live on July 1st. Why not take a look and see which of your prospective schools are BFFs with the Common Application? Then, start planning how you’re going to use all that free time that you’ll have now that you don’t have to write so many college essays.

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