My D26’s is 650 words. When she pasted it into Common App, it was 651 (it formats differently than Google Docs, I guess) – so she had to remove an adverb or something, lol.
She finally heard back from her college counselor with some suggestions that she didn’t necessarily like, and we’re still waiting to hear back from a good friend who is an AP English teacher and agreed to take a look. So chances are the essay will get one more edit, but not a total overhaul at this point.
Oy, between STARS and official test score, why is Pitt such a pain? 
Every other school on my kid’s list is fine with unofficial scores until you accept an offer, so I didn’t even realize this about Pitt. Dude.
D26’s school uses SCOIR (like Naviance), and they swear that they have some special back-end way to automatically fill out the STARS, that they’re figuring it out now, and that D26 should not do it herself manually. So, she hasn’t touched it. I’ll have her follow up in a couple weeks.
D26’s is at 600 right now, but she wants to elaborate a bit on something, so I suspect she’ll write some more and then pare down.
Had a few bouts of tears. The essay has been by far more challenging than she expected. She is a super private person, shies away from attention, so writing ABOUT herself is HARD. This level of vulnerability is so uncomfortable for her, so she’s taking a break and will resume next weekend. She has time.
C26 has also found it hard, but even more so finds the activities sections, brag sheet etc harder. We come from a British-modeled society where you don’t brag and usually instead understate accomplishments, which you just can’t do in college apps here where most people tend to do the opposite, so that’s what they are finding hard.
This was her biggest challenge with recruiting. Selling herself to coaches. She’s getting better. Am planning to help wordsmith her activities section next weekend.
It is hard. Mine wrote about her creativity, and she’s got great light and funny anecdotes, but the counselor wanted her to add how she sees the world differently every day because of this characteristic.
D26’s response – “I don’t effing know.”
I’ve gotten a lot of this lately.
Here’s a tip we got from D26’s college counselor that I’m sharing in case it is helpful to others. D26 had lots of ideas for her supplemental essays answers for different schools, but seemed to be stuck/struggling with writing much down other than bullet points and rough notes. Counselor suggested that one of us sit down with her and ask her about the questions, and then be essentially a scribe and just type up exactly what she said for her, so that she could later than take all of the things she actually said, and clean up, edit and turn into an answer. We tried it today and it was incredibly successful. For one question on leadership she was having a hard time with and uncomfortable writing on, the conversation turned to an area of leadership that she is really excited about and thinks she is good at and she talked about a whole bunch of examples of where she has exhibited that and how she hopes to continue to develop that leadership in college. D26 made huge progress on the supplementals in this session, and it was literally just asking the prompts, and follow up questions and then writing down what D26 said.
it’s SO HARD for them to write about themselves! And clearly she has talents or she wouldn’t be an athletic recruit!
D26 officially submitted 3 schools today - 2 are her likely schools, one is a high target (but IMO a reach) - only target because we are in-state. so many more essays to go…. and each one is a mini battle.
Oh how I wish this process could move along more quickly.
I used this technique with D24 and it worked really well. Basically had the kid ‘think out loud’ and while she spoke, I typed out everything she said. She used a lot of that stuff in her essays.
We made some progress today too. Most of the Common App is filled out. He’s working on the essay as well. I think he has a decent start on it. Still trying to figure out where else to apply to.
D26 worked on some College Counseling class HW today - a worksheet where you had to pick one major at a college you’re interested in and write down 5 required courses for that major and its prerequisites. Also had to put down all of the course credit granted at the college for any AP exams you passed + note if there’s any special AP credit restrictions.
It was very methodical and clearly the idea is for the student to do that same thing for the rest of the classes on their list. 