I think @MMRose/@MYOS1634’s advice is good, though there’s always nuance involved, and it depends on how many schools you intend to apply to, as well.
If someone was going to apply to 20 schools (which is a lot), this would be my plan:
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Make sure you have all the application deadlines for each school, including the deadlines for honors colleges and scholarship consideration. On your spreadsheet, also keep track of whether a school offers rolling admissions. The caveat for all the steps below is that you make sure to meet the deadlines you’ve marked down.
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Gather all the essay prompts for the colleges and see which ones overlap and where you could make minor modifications to customize the essay for a particular school (like changing out which professor has research interests you like, or clubs that you want to participate in, etc). It’s important to choose the essays prompts (when given a choice) that speak the most to you, but if you’re looking at a lot of apps (like 20), then being able to reuse the bulk of an essay becomes important.
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Start with schools that have easy apps and a high admittance rate (i.e. Stockton, or similar) and/or schools with easy apps that offer rolling admissions (like a UPitt). Easy apps would be those that require nothing more than the common app essay, or very little more. Rolling admissions can hopefully give you an early acceptance, and if you get a deferral or denial early on, that’s also important information to assess the rest of your college application list.
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Select a school that you’re interested in that does not award scholarships/honors based on the essay (i.e. it requires a separate application for honors/scholarships). That way, if it’s not your best work, it doesn’t matter as much. Do a couple of these, as this is where you’ll get some of your practice jitters out.
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At this point, order your list in terms of the schools you’re most interested in to the least interestsed in. There are people who end up getting burned out on the college app process and end of dropping schools near the end because they’re just done with college apps. If that happens to you, you want those to be the schools that you’re least interested in. If the last schools on the list happen to be the reachiest schools of all for you, you can always explain to your mother that you’ve heard that people’s writing gets tighter and better with the more applications they do (which can be true in many cases).
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Once you’ve ordered the rest of the list in terms of preference, I’d work on them in that order. If you have schools that you are similarly interested in but one has a significantly higher admit rate, I’d work on the higher acceptance rate school first over the lower admit rate one to get that additional bit of practice in. Keep on doing this until you’re done.