As a head mentor, I’m always looking for ways to nurture even more successful students. One of the ways I’m tackling that this year is through 1:1 college counseling for my rising seniors. When I was in high school, I didn’t have access to very deep resources even though I went to a fancy private school, so I wanted to share the resources that I put together on my own and have been using to coach 7525 students.
Picking the right college
There are a bunch of reasons to pick which college to go to: major, scholarship, vibe, etc. However, plenty of students don’t consider all of the other factors that come along with moving somewhere for 4 years: does it snow there? Will you be able to reasonably get to a city to see a major concert? Is the school so small that you’ll meet everyone in your major in the first month, or so big that you’ll never meet them all? There is no universal right answer for any of these, but you should definitely think about them. Especially when given the fact that plenty of people change majors during college (and that that’s totally okay), you’ll want to be in an environment that you still like.
Writing the dreaded “common app personal statement”
It’s 650 words. It can be about whatever you want. Really. I wrote mine about driving 30 minutes to a coffee shop at 10pm. I almost wrote it about my favorite fonts. College admissions officers will be reading it pretty quickly (along with the rest of your application), so you want to give them something to remember you by that isn’t covered elsewhere on your application. Your essays shouldn’t be rehashing your resume or activities section, because those AOs will already see that. I highly recommend reading Hack the College Essay by John Dewis, which goes more in-depth on how to find different topics to write about and how to avoid common pitfalls. It’s only 35 pages long, and I know you all ready the game manual so you should be fine. Also check
The college tracker spreadsheet
Clicking this link will make you a copy of the tracker. I’ve tried to compile as many helpful sheets as possible into here for your benefit!
An overall checklist so you can view progress through the process,
A student profile, where you can fill in your GPA, APs, SAT/ACT, etc. This can be a helpful snapshot of you who are as a student for when you ask others for help picking colleges.
A college factors tab. I have written out about 60 different things to consider. The sheet will ask you to rank them on scales of 1-5, so you (and others) can get a rough sense of what you actually care about. As you go through, you can also add in some notes. For example, if I put “temperature” as a 4 (and therefore important to me), do I mean I want hot? Cold? Snow? Humidity?
A list of potential colleges to research. This page will help you organize which schools you’re exploring, so you can compare them across several different factors.
The application and essay tracker. This sheet will let you fill in which schools you’re applying to, when their deadlines are, and which supplemental essays you’ve completed.
What should my timeline be?
Here is a super rough recommendation. It’s what I stuck to and what I recommend to my students. Adapt it as you see fit.
Summer: Write your personal statement and complete a rough list of schools to apply to. This list can change, but you want to have a good basis to get started with.
August-October: Start filling out supplemental essays, preparing for the Early Action and Early Decision deadlines! I highly recommend submitting applications in the EA period if you can so you can balance your workload across the semester.
November-December: Complete your Regular Decision applications!
As I’m sure many of you are beginning your common app personal statement, i thought I’d provide a guide for a self-paced exercise to help you generate ideas.
Using freewriting to draft your personal statement
Grab pen and paper (not your computer. Write this by hand!)
Set a target, either # of pages or # of minutes spent writing
Write until you hit that target. You should write as fast as you can, limiting the amount of time you spend thinking about what you’ve written. Ideally, there is no delay between when you have a thought and when you write it down. Don’t worry about handwriting, spelling, or even complete sentences. You can get halfway through a thought and then bail, that’s totally fine. The idea is to push yourself further fhan is comfortable with brainstorming.
After you’ve hit your target, use a different color/highlighter to point out the ideas you like! This might be 0, 2 per page, whatever. You’ll likely be throwing away most of your work at this stage, so it’s totally okay if the freewrite doesn’t result in much.
Repeat
With your first personal statement freewrite, start super broad. Cover everything and anything that might be a good topic. Personal experiences, activities, relationships with people you care about, the time someone pushed you over in 4th grade, whatever.
After you’ve done the first freewrite, pull out the good topics. Pick your favorites, and then expand each one of them into its own freewrite. Dive into all angles. How did it make you feel? How did you change? How do you apply what you learned to new situations?
Keep repeating this process at all levels until you feel good about your topic, and THEN move it to a google doc to write your first rough draft.