Whether you’re applying to 5 Ivies and 6 other schools or you’re looking at staying close to home, getting college applications done early has real advantages.
Applying to college takes the same amount of work whether you spread it over 6 months (June – December) or (Sept – December).
The obvious question is, “How miserable do you want this to be?” You can wait if you want. the fall of senior year where all the pomp, pageantry, and “lasts” to be flavorless, colorless, or even–as one mom put it to me “feel anxiety-producing” When college apps are hanging over you, every minute spent not working on them is tainted.But, Test Guy–a harbinger of Doom and Zoom–we want to enjoy these last precious months. You can wait if you want a seemingly fun summer where admissions looms over your head. You just need balance, and everyone’s balance is different.
You can have your college acceptance and your summer too.
One of my go-to lines with families is, “I can’t stop applying to college from being hard, but we can keep it from being soul-wrenching, miserable, and sleepless.”
Making things less traumatizing doesn’t make students less competitive. But I’ll tell you, our admissions results for highly selective colleges (<30% acceptance rate) are much better for students who work consistently and meaningfully over the summer.
Here’s what you should do the summer before senior year:
College List
By now, you know at least some of the colleges you’ll be applying to…
Make a Plan
You don’t need to know every college you’re applying to. Get started. There is a plenary of items that don’t need school to be open or the Common App to “open” (more on that at the end).
Create a Common App Account – A simple way to get started.
Recommendations, now
Ask the people you intend to recommend you to college before school ends. Ask in person. Ask for a “strong” letter. That evening, when you get home, follow up with an email. That email should contain a couple of points about your relationship with them–fodder for the letter-writing mill–and attach a resume or your school’s brag sheet. Immediately follow that email by adding them as a recommender on the Common App. (See the point of the last step?)
Who should you ask?
Typically you need one core teacher (STEM, English, History); one teacher (any kind, including core, will do); and you may need a 3rd letter which can be from anyone.
Common App Essay, Bab-ay
The prompts are evergreen, and they’re not even really prompts. They just exist to give you an idea of the scope and depth of a good essay. Good essays are memoirs. Great essays are a window to the soul of a young person on the edge of adulthood. There are X number of students in the class of 2024. There are at least 5X that number of good essays. We’ll be covering essays in more detail in video and articles as summer cometh. We also have essay coaches handy to help you make an essay that is personal and powerful.
Where can we help?
We’re here to make things more efficient. To help you navigate these hard things and make them better. Most of all, we make sure you’re spending your resources the right way: and the most valuable resource is time.
With The Test Guy, you have an arsenal of experts who can save you time and energy and guarantee better results. Our team is booking up quickly, so we recommend starting your college counseling plan this summer – instead of scouring for triage in the fall.
