I’m currently a junior and picking courses for my senior year. I’m unsure about loading up on all AP because I don’t want to be stretched too thin from college apps and academics. I’ve heard from people taking BC Calc that there is about 2-3 hours of hwk every night. How much work(in terms of hours) do you have to put in for a good college app? I know colleges want to see a rigorous schedule but is it too much to take all APs and do a good job on college apps?
College applications are a lot of work. But if you are the type of student eligible to take all APs, you can likely handle it along with the application process. You have to be ORGANIZED. That’s the key.
It depends on how many colleges you are applying to and how many essays you are able to reuse.
If you have a college list, go look up all the essays required for this year’s application. Count how many supplements are needed for honors and scholarship programs. Figure out how many interviews you will need to schedule.
It depends on what schools you’re applying to. My safeties all took about 20 minutes each. On the other hand, I’ve been been working on the short essays for all my reaches for weeks or even months. I’m in 5 APs this year, including Chem and Lit, and I probably overestimated myself. I did 5 last year as well, but they were a bit easier in terms of workload. My safeties were both rolling admissions, so I applied to them as soon as the app opened. Once I was admitted, it was a big relief, but it also allowed me to drop some of the schools on my list that I didn’t have time for and didn’t like as much. Basically, find a school you like and can afford with rolling admissions and go from there. There’s no shame in dropping schools you don’t like as much if you have time constraints (as long as those schools aren’t your safeties).
Safeties can be less work, but not necessarily. My daughter did six essays for honors and scholarship programs at her two safety schools. Her her reach schools have a total of six essays, not counting her reusable Common App essay. So, no difference in essays by selectivity here.
Depending on the length of the college list, applying to college is like another high school English class. If you’ve got a long or reach-heavy list, it’s like an honors or AP class.
@ski_racer gives you good advise. It’s all about getting organized and managing your time appropriately combined with a smart strategy on selecting schools. If you are going for some highly selective schools for your reaches, remember course rigor is important in their evaluation.
As you head into the summer, IMO, you should be narrowing your list of schools to 10-15 max with an appropriate mix of safety, match and reach schools. Of those schools, how many are Common App and how many have their own app? How many have merit scholarships for which a separate app or essay will be required? My D and S both set up spreadsheets over the summer of their junior year with their list of schools, requirements (testing, LoR’s, etc…) and deadlines. When the Common App was opened, they started to fill in all the non-essay portions and started to work on the essay they were going to choose. The essay topics don’t drastically change from year to year so you can take a chance and choose to work on an essay based on the prior year’s list. You can clear a lot of brush before school even starts.
As the school specific app’s opened, they added to their spreadsheets the essays that each school required to get an idea on how many essays they had to write and if any could be recycled (at least to some extent). If you have schools with rolling admissions, get those done asap. If they are higher on your list than other schools, you can drop the lower ranked schools from your list if you get in. I would also suggest applying EA to one of your top schools (ED if you have one clear favorite and financial aid is not an issue). If you get in, you can then drop a bunch of schools from your application list. Assume you do have an EA/ED school on your list, you should aim to have 2-4 other app’s ready to go by the EA/ED deadline date (schools you might apply to even if you got in your EA/ED school), with the remainder to be completed in the remaining 2-3 weeks if you do not get in your EA/ED school.
If you set aside a few hours each weekend to work on essays, and finish the non essay portions of the Common App and start on your Common App essay before school starts, the college app process should be manageable.
Excellent post by @BKSquared. D had drafts of her essays ready to go by the end of rising senior summer. Fine tuning them and completing the other portions of the applications in the fall was not a big chunk of her time.
“How much work(in terms of hours) do you have to put in for a good college app?”
It does depend upon which schools you are applying to.
However, college applications is not the only thing that you need to think about senior year. There is also of course the issue of deciding which schools you are interested in. College visits can take a lot of time and effort. You will probably want to do online research into schools. Preparing for SAT or ACT tests can take time and effort. Once you start to hear back from schools, you still need to figure out where you want to go. Both of my daughters ended up doing multiple visits to the school that they ended up attending, and to the top 2 or 3 competitors.
I think that my daughter’s efforts in terms of the effort spent on university application was probably the equivalent of another AP class.
Some colleges change their essay questions from year to year, so it can be hard to complete them all over the summer.
Load up on courses as much as you’re comfortable with. I don’t think you’d want to have college application work influence what your course load should be. It is all very easily manageable IF you start on time and spread out the college search work starting around the end of your sophomore year. It’s a lot of work, research, reading but over a long stretch of time. Also, make sure to involve your parents in this process. They can be a good resource.
It depends on the colleges you’re applying to. Places with no additional essays can take you all of 5 minutes but some places with several coughStanfordcough can take you hours and hours and hours.
Create a Common App account (or not, if the schools you’re interested in don’t use it) and check out the application lengths for colleges you’re considering or may consider later down the line.
Generally most colleges don’t change their prompts from year to year; I would recommend starting your essays during the summer. Yes, some may change come August 1st but most won’t and I’m sure you can look up online or on CC which schools change their prompts. At least work on the ones that lots of colleges ask for (like ‘elaborate on an EC or work experience’) or ones that a school has had for years (such as ‘why us’).
Thanks for the advice everybody! I’m planning to apply to 10-15 schools, but it looks like if I manage my time well I shouldn’t have a problem taking all APs. When should I make my CommonApp account? Is it too early now?
10-15 is a lot. My kids worked really hard for 8 each. If you are applying for financial aid, that can be time consuming. Will you have all your testing done, including subject tests by end of junior year? Do you plan to do any more visits in the fall? Both are time consuming.
No, it’s not too soon to make a Common App account. Come August 1st your main Common App will remain but all of your individual college applications will be wiped so remember to save essays on your computer.
I agree with @incandescentpenguin that 10-15 is a lot! I went into senior year also thinking that I was going to apply to around 11 or so colleges, but, as I was responding to the specific “why this college” prompts, it became evident to me that I wasn’t actually as interested in around half of the schools on my list than I had initially thought I was. Additionally, a significant portion of my original list of colleges were top tier schools, which I soon found out would eat up an exorbitant amount of my time. So. Many. Essays.
Ok thanks for the advice. I plan to have all my testing done by the end of junior year unless I really have to retake the SAT. What’s a good number of schools to apply to? What should the ratio of reach/match/safety be?
Please, and I mean please, do your application over the summer; write your essays and do the common app; when November/sept/dec/ roll around and you’re calm with no stress and a finished application you will thank the living heavens that you listened to random advice from a website; if you do this I would also suggest taking the BC because you wont be stressed
Ok thank you so much for the advice! My hope is to take BC now.