I am trying to flesh out my son’s college list (he’s a hs junior) with information related to supplemental requirements.
Do I find this simply by creating an account on Common App and clicking into each school and seeing what criteria pop up? Will that happen even though admissions time is not yet open for the 2018-19 year? And how likely do you all think it is that those criteria might change?
I just saw that Common App has already published (or re-published) its 7 essay prompts for next year – good to know. Now that we know what’s up with the CA essay, I need to help him start thinking about how to create/organize/track the (many?) supplemental requirement(s) individual schools might have. By this, I mean the stand alone special essay for that school (in addition to the CA essay), any short answer type stuff, special requirements for engineering programs, etc. I’m really asking if any of you out there developed tricks/shortcuts for keeping track of the items that extend beyond the CA. Is there a site that summarizes or tracks a list of colleges showing one, whether they accept CA, and then 2, what supplementals they require in addition to CA, along with dates and other information unique to that school. He is also applying to UC’s so I guess there’s a whole host of different concerns with those. Or maybe simpler? Did you create your own spreadsheet to track? Find one online that you’d recommend? Or – am I overthinking this and on my own?
TL;DR. What’s your best advice for organizing supplemental essays and other requirements that go beyond the CA?
My kid is also a HS junior, and I’m curious too. I’m assuming that many schools will tweak or change their essay prompts some time this summer, but I haven’t seen a hint of when that change usually happens. I’m guessing sometime between May and July? I went through the Common App to find this year’s prompts for the schools he is interested in and I copy/pasted them into a Word document for him to read. That doesn’t help with tracking completion.
I suspect it’s better to work on one application at a time, anyhow, rather than trying to bounce between apps.
My son did create a spreadsheet. Don’t remember what all the different columns were, but in the beginning when we were agreeing on the list of where to apply, the columns involved things like has certain majors, good ROI, total cost. After we agreed on the list of where to apply, I didn’t see the sheet again and he made his own columns to track things.
Probably because in posts we’re quickly writing and using abbreviations and shorthand so we all use “you” and “I” instead of the more formal “one”, but you don’t really mean you personally would be creating a Common App account or doing spreadsheets, right? Surely you’d just make suggestions or answer questions and he’d do the work. Or, if you’re really talking about you being the one to do all this stuff, I’d say yes, you’re overthinking it. Not only will he feel more ownership over it if he does it, but if he’s ready to go to college, he’s ready to do this research and organizing himself.
(BTW, my son wasn’t some sort of organizational genius or anything. He’s a champion procrastinator and it was really, really tempting for me to try to step in and do some of this stuff. And because of his procrastination/dragging his feet, he didn’t get everything done he wanted to get done and should have gotten done. So it was a good thing we prioritized the list in order of most important and earliest deadlines on down to least favorite and later deadlines. But I still think it was the right thing for him to have been the one doing the organizing and work. He owned it and improved some of his somewhat lacking project management skills - which he’ll need for college.)
We had our own spreadsheet, many tabs and columns!