College Admission: Application Process In General

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You know that you need to do a lot of important self-reflection and research before you actually begin applying to college. But once you have done that work and developed an appropriate list of good-bet, possible, and long-shot colleges, the next step is tackling the applications themselves. You’ll want to present your qualifications to college admissions committees in a way that will distinguish you from many other applicants with similar credentials. The article discusses the application process in general. 

Preparing a strong college application takes work. There’s no way around that. A typical application asks many questions, and your answers tell a lot about your academic abilities, background, talents, and interests. Less obviously, your answers also send subtle messages about your degree of interest in a college and how much time and effort you have put into thinking about yourself. The best applications do both.

Getting Off to a Good Start

Although the competition for admission to selective schools is greater than ever, the actual process of filing an application has never been easier. Now almost every college not only accepts but actively encourages electronic submission of applications. Some even waive their application fees if you submit online. Colleges differ a great deal in their use of technology in the application process, but the trend is clearly toward a paperless process where materials are submitted electronically and read from a computer screen.

Gone, fortunately for good, are the days when the only way to prepare an application was with a typewriter and a bottle of correction fluid. Many parents reading this will remember how hard the old-fashioned way was. It is a major advantage to be able to update and edit your application easily until you submit it. It can now be as complete and accurate as you can make it, without having to go through the agony of starting everything over because you forgot to include something or changed your mind about how to phrase an answer.

Fight the Urge to Procrastinate

Certainly, completing a college application is not fun. It is hard to answer all those questions and distill yourself into little boxes of two hundred words or three hundred characters on a form. It also takes precious time, something often in short supply in senior year. And on top of it all, just thinking about college, as exciting as it may be, can make you nervous. Where will I be next year? Will I have friends? Will I be happy?

The natural tendency in a situation like this is to put off dealing with it as long as possible. The advice here is don’t. Do your research on colleges early, and begin the actual job of applying. Fight the urge to procrastinate.

I’ve always left things to pretty much the last minute, and it’s never been a problem. In character, I left my most important college application to the day before it was due. I planned to rework an essay I had written for a college that had an earlier deadline, so I wasn’t too worried. After spending all day Sunday putting everything together, I was ready to submit my application electronically at 9:00 pm. Then I realized the program cut off the last seven sentences of my essay. No matter what I did, I couldn’t get the whole thing in. My mom looked at the essay, and we agreed that it would be really hard to cut. She suggested I look at the paper app—maybe it would fit in there. It did. I then spent the next two hours filling out the paper app by hand and doing cut-and-paste onto the form for my essay. It was after 11:00 pm when I finished. I had school the next day, but my mom mailed it for me and met the postmark deadline. I was accepted and am now a sophomore. But even I agreed I cut things too close. I could have really blown it.  - College sophomore

 Everyone experiences it. But procrastination never helps, and it can really hurt if it means that you put your college list together hastily and it does not really fit your needs, or that you rush to meet a deadline and don’t make it. Procrastination can result in missed opportunities, such as when your favorite teacher regrets that she won’t have time to write your letter of recommendation because you asked her too late. It can mean less thoughtful (and usually more wordy) answers to questions, since you won’t have time to carefully review and edit them, or benefit from feedback from others. Overall, it can mean that you don’t have a chance to make your best case for admission. The wise student starts early, makes a time line indicating what is needed and by when, and then just gets it done.