During the dog days of summer I work all day long with students on their college applications, mostly via the CommonApp. One of the common mistakes they make, prior to coaching, involves a failure to properly prioritize their main application to-do list. Irrespective of how smart or high-achieving a student may be, sometimes applicants become overwhelmed with the sheer number of questions to answer, forms to fill out, and short-answer and essay prompts to respond to, and they start attacking tasks as they think of them (any task—even randomly) in an effort to move the whole project forward. Take A*****, for instance, a super-smart student bound for a highly selective college a year or so from now, who came for an application consultation the other day. I asked him what he’s been working on since last we met and how we could best spend our hour together.
“Well, I’ve been thinking about and writing up some of my Activities, thinking about my main personal essay, mulling over ideas for the approximately 12 supplement essays I have to write, and filling in some of the supplement short answer questions.” I started feeling a little anxiety myself listening to him describing all the plates he had spinning at the same time. He, like many motivated and ambitious students, needed help prioritizing a sprawling college application to-do list.
As with organizing big, medium, and small items in a cupboard or on a shelf or in a suitcase, the trick is to place the big pieces first, then the medium ones, and then see where the small pieces fit or add accents. As applied to the CommonApp, this means doing the THREE big pieces of the common part of the CommonApp first, and THEN turning your attention to the supplement questions, short answers, and/or extra essays.
So what are the three big pieces of the CommonApp? Good question, glad you asked. The first is the set of forms—what I call the “Simple Forms”—to complete under the CommonApp Tab: Profile, Family, Education, Testing. This creates the first picture of yourself—an outline really—based on your grades, test scores, senior year courses, languages spoken, and honors. The second is the Activities list. This is where committees go beyond the numbers and start to get a more three-dimensional construct of who you actually are: how you spend your time outside of class, how accomplished you are in various pursuits, and what your passions, values, beliefs, and goals are. The Activities list includes school clubs, organizations and activities in and outside of school, sports (V/JV and/or town sports), paid jobs, volunteer/community service, religious pursuits, and hobbies, and they ALL paint a picture of you.
It is against the backdrop of the Simple Forms and Activities list that admissions officers read your main personal essay, which is the third big piece. What is it about yourself and/or your high school career and/or about your hopes and dreams for college and/or career that you want to emphasize or elaborate on? Paint a picture of yourself that seeks not to impress the committee, but rather, as Tina Fey’s character in Admission says, “Make us fall ion love with you!”
Once these three BIG PIECES are in place, you’ll be able to do a much better and ultimately more effective job responding to the supplement questions and essay prompts. Relatively speaking, they are the little pieces that fit around or add a little sparkle to the big pieces. Moreover, as in the case os A****, you’ll be able to more easily wrap your brain around all the details involved in the supplements section, for example deciding which other topics to write about, with slight changes, to answer multiple questions from different schools.
If you need help filling out the simple forms, Activities List, main essay, or supplement questions and essays, that’s what we’re here for 🙂
See also:
CommonApp Getting it Done! Workshop (Fall)
