For four straight months, I angsted over word count and word choice, which extracurriculars to put where, what book or role model or artwork to write about in response to an essay prompt. From August to the end of December, I must’ve written, edited, and proofread close to ten thousand words in college admissions essays. My plight was largely self-made; every college I applied to required extra essays or had supplemental essays, and I applied to more places than most. The good news is that, in stumbling my way through applications, I picked up several strategies and tips on how to make the process more bearable.
Get started earlier than you think you need to.
The Common App, which is what I used for all my applications, typically opens at the beginning of August. My advice is to start filling out your information on the general Common App then. There are quite a few blanks to fill out, so chunking it into a few half-hour sessions helps keep the task manageable. The same is true for everything else: dividing huge tasks into more manageable portions does wonders for keeping yourself working steadily without burning out.
It's a good time to start using spreadsheets.
As soon as you can, put together a Google spreadsheet with the due dates for all the college applications and scholarships you plan on applying to. That way, you have all the information in a single place. I found my spreadsheet to be incredibly helpful for keeping organized—and I never woke up one day just to abruptly realize I needed to churn out three essays before midnight! That’s something you probably want to avoid.
Look at essay prompts early; spend time with them.
Even if you don’t start writing your essays right away, you can start rolling around ideas for how to respond in your head. If there are multiple prompts to choose from, you can think about which one you’ll be able to answer best. I advise you look first at the Common App personal essays prompts. If colleges require only one essay, it’ll be the personal essay, so it’s best to write that one as soon as possible. I choose to respond to the following prompt.
“The lessons we take from obstacles we encounter can be fundamental to later success. Recount a time when you faced a challenge, setback, or failure. How did it affect you, and what did you learn from the experience?”
Make sure you have a reason for picking a particular prompt.
For my personal essay, one thing I wrote about how school closures affected Blue, the school magazine I co-founded. I was able to demonstrate how I’m active in my school community, engage in creative problem-solving to overcome challenges, and reflect on my experiences to grow as a person. I received some of the best advice I’ve ever been given in an interview; after responding to several questions with standard boilerplate answers, my interviewer pointedly hinted that I should tell a story about myself.
In your personal essay, be sure to show who you are and tell what you’ve done that backs that up. “I’m a driven person” is a bland statement that anyone could make. “Despite having no institutional support to create the magazine, my co-founder and I established an annual literary magazine whose first issue was 124-pages of student-submitted literature, photography, and art” is something that far fewer people can say. Whatever prompt you choose, make sure you write an essay that only you could write.
Start thinking now about your favorite books, movies, and other forms of media.
You’ll probably get asked this at least once—or about five times, in my case. If you start reflecting now on what entertainment you like and why, you’ll already have one likely essay plotted out. Don’t be like me and get asked this question only to suddenly forget every piece of media you’ve ever consumed!
Spend extra time and effort on writing and polishing your first few essays.
The good news is that once you’ve written half a dozen essays, you can usually mine old ones for content when starting another essay. There are three or four sentences that I ended up featuring in about eighty percent of my essays. If you can get down a framework for an essay that can be refitted to similar prompts, it’s easy to color between the lines.
It’s never a bad idea to send an email to your admissions counselor at a particular college.
You can find their emails by Googling the school’s admissions counselors, then going down the list until you find the right geographical region. Grimsley’s region will typically be North Carolina, central North Carolina, or the Piedmont depending on how big of an area admissions counselors at a particular school cover. If you can’t find the answer to a question about a school online, you can always send an email to your designated counselor. You can also just introduce yourself—your name, academic interests, and what draws you to a particular school are a good place to start for an introductory email. College counselors are a fantastic resource, and I highly encourage you to use them.
Give yourself breaks when you feel yourself approaching the point of diminishing returns.
It’s a marathon, not a sprint. That being said, don’t be afraid to put all admissions materials down for a few days if your brain is feeling fried. After some point, stepping away does more good than trying to keep on grinding through. This step is vital to avoiding burnout. When you have to balance school and other extracurricular activities with applications, it can feel like you're buried beneath work. Learn how to prioritize what essay needs to be written today and which can wait and when to put your laptop down, and your mental health will thank you.
Of course, my perspective is limited to my own experiences. To try to avoid missing any useful advice, I also reached out to several seniors to hear about what they wish they’d known when they started their college applications.
Mallie Roley: Write essays that are the best representations of yourself and about the things that are the most important to you rather than the ones you think the admissions committee wants to hear about.
Nico Gleason: Things change. Your mind might change about certain places. Don’t worry if you add or remove colleges from your list as application season progresses.
Asia Marks: The hardest thing about college applications was trying to figure out how to start, so I wish I’d known where to begin. My parents didn’t know much, so Youtube turned out to be a great resource to start learning about everything to do with applications.
Eliza Benbow: I wish I’d understood how to pace myself. I basically lived on small bursts of motivation and creative energy to write my essays or fill out the Common App, which ended up causing more stress than I needed. Tackling an essay or a section of the Common App every week or two is a pretty easy strategy that would have helped me get my applications done sooner and with less stress.
Maggie Macintyre: I wish I had known about resources like the College Essay Guy before writing my essays. I also wish I had made a big spreadsheet with every due date including scholarships to keep myself more organized.
Anne Joy Cahill-Swenson: I wish I’d known how much you can use similar content and essays for different schools so you don’t have to write quite as many essays from scratch.
Eric Martineau: I wish I’d known what to expect as far as scholarships go and where to look for those that I’m best suited to apply for. I found resources on specific colleges’ websites and talked to my counselor, both of which I found useful for finding scholarships I wouldn’t have otherwise known about.
Emily McReynolds: I wish I’d known to look more into out-of-state colleges to expand my options! I would also suggest researching different programs at each school that you’re interested in. Combing through college websites can reveal some pretty cool opportunities as far as things like conducting research or studying abroad go.
There's no question that application season is stressful—almost as stressful as those thirty seconds logging onto student portals to see your admissions decision! Effective time management, planned work sessions, and researching admissions and scholarship information early go a long way in easing up the process. Certainly never feel shy about tapping current college students to hear their advice or ask specific questions! As always, you're welcome to contact us at @grimsleyquaranzine on Instagram or at our email grimsleyquaranzine@gmail.com with any more questions.
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