You 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.