S3E7: How to Succeed on the Common Application
Today's question of the week- "How should I approach the common application?"
LISTEN NOW
Today's question of the week- “How should I approach the Common Application?"
In this week’s episode of the "Admittedly" podcast, host Thomas Caleel discusses the opening of the Common Application and the beginning of the college application season. He provides essential advice for students and parents on navigating the Common App, including the importance of attention to detail, strategic planning, and understanding the various components of the application process.
The Common Application Opening: The Common App opens on August 1, signaling the start of the application season for students worldwide. Parents can also create an account to view their child's progress without interfering.
Data Entry Importance: Accurate data entry in the Common App is crucial, with attention to detail in spelling and punctuation being highly important. Admissions officers evaluate these aspects as part of the application.
Strategic Planning for Applications: Students should select their schools early, understand supplemental requirements, and ensure their activity lists are well-curated and relevant. Each application component should align with the student's overall strategy.
Crafting Effective Essays: The Common App essay should be integrated into the broader application narrative and tailored for different types of schools if necessary. The additional information section should be used for significant disruptions, not for extra essays or resumes.
Managing the Application Timeline: It's important not to rush the application process, as quality is more important than speed. Early submissions do not receive extra consideration, so students should focus on creating the best possible application within the given timeline.
The Common Application season is a critical time for students aiming for higher education. By planning strategically, paying attention to details, and understanding each component of the application, students can present themselves effectively to their chosen colleges. Thomas Caleel encourages listeners to stay calm, take their time, and reach out on social media for any questions during this process.
Have your own question you want answered? Leave us a comment on social media @admittedlypodcast for a chance to be featured.
About Thomas
Thomas is a parent and alumnus of the University of Pennsylvania. After earning his MBA at the Wharton School in 2003, he moved to Silicon Valley. For three years, he was director of admissions and financial aid at Wharton School. He worked closely with admissions professionals, students, alumni, and professors to create the best possible MBA class.
Thomas has been an entrepreneur his entire life in the fields of finance, agriculture, wellness, and sporting goods. As the founder of Global Education Opportunities, he works with diverse and underserved communities to help them become successful college students. Thomas started the podcast Admittedly because he is passionate about demystifying the application process for parents and applicants.
Related Links
Apply to be a guest: www.thomascaleel.com/apply-for-podcast
Follow Admittedly on Social Media
TikTok: @admittedlypodcast
Instagram: @admittedlypodcast
-
Welcome to the Admittedly Podcast. I'm your host, Thomas Caleel. And I'd like to welcome you to the most wonderful time of the year. No, it's not the holidays, it's August 1, when the Common App opens and the supplements are available, and hundreds of 1000s of students from around the world begin to enter their hopes and dreams into this large computer program that will help them determine the next four years of their life. There are of course, other applications University of California system, University of Texas, Georgetown, MIT, several other schools have their own admissions systems. But the Common Application is by far the largest and most prevalent, and that's what we're going to start talking about right now. We will have several podcasts dedicated to the Common App, the essays, supplements, we're going to break it down for you. We're going to be publishing on social media, welcome your feedback, interaction and questions. Because this is an absolutely critical part of the application and admissions process. For parents, the Common App has added something new, which is that you can log in and create a parent account, so that you can see what your child is seeing won't be your child's application. And sometimes it's good to set up your own. So you can kind of noodle around in there and see what's going on and see the questions being asked without kind of interfering in your student's progress on their own Common Application. Students, what do you want to do? Well, you want to set up your Common Application, get logged in, you want to if you have schools, you know, you want to apply to add them to your supplement list. And you want to start doing your data entry. There is as you are about to find out a staggering amount of data entry in the Common Application. It is very, very, very important. I cannot, I cannot emphasize strongly enough how important it is to take your time and do this right. spelling, punctuation, all of it matters. Am I being nitpicky? Absolutely. Are you being evaluated on it? Absolutely. There's something called attention to detail that the admissions officers will take into consideration. And the bottom line is with the competitive pressure for each seat. If you can't be bothered to double check your work. They really question how serious you are about the process. Now, don't panic if you make one little mistake, okay, that's fine, you'll survive. But if you're consistently making spelling mistakes, punctuation errors, that will count against you. So double check everything, maybe have a friend or a parent look, and just make sure everything looks correct. You can use abbreviations assume that the readers are smart, and that they will understand basic abbreviations. Now, the other thing that you want to do as you're inputting everything, you're going to need transcripts, you're going to need to set up your recommender invitations. If you haven't already decided who your recommenders are going to be. Once you do, you need to input their information into the Common Application, which will send them an invitation so that they can do their recommendation. You'll have to set up your school counselor, and a few other things. Do not leave this until the last minute. Absolutely will talk about recommendations in another podcast. But nobody wants to be jammed up against a deadline because you did not plan ahead. Now, in addition to the Common Application, the other thing that you need to do is start selecting schools. You might know what schools you want to put into your supplement list and you may not. If you don't, it's a good time to start doing research. But if you do, you want to bring those schools over and you want to start looking at those supplements. Now it's very, very important. You need to do the data entry asked in the supplements as soon as possible. Why? Because when you select majors when you select Programs, oftentimes it will unlock new essays. So I every year have people panicking because they looked at the supplement and maybe there was one essay, oh great, 250 word essay. I can write this down and they write it and then they go in and they select their major and three more essays pop up. And there's panic because now it's right before the early decision or early action deadline and And they've really kind of made a mistake and they have to scramble. Don't be that person. Think ahead, fill in the basics, make sure you see all of the essays that you need to write, and your heads up and aware of what you need to do. Then what we want to do with the Common Applications, we want to take a step back. Okay? This is a strategic document. And what a lot of people do they make this mistake, they kind of do it in parts, right? And it's like, the old saying about, you know, if you have six blind people, and you lead them up to an elephant, and ask them to describe it, they're each going to describe a very, very different animal, because that's the part that they're touching at that moment. And so when you look at the Common Application, you want to take a step back and say, Okay, this is a strategic presentation of myself to a university. How do I want to present myself, too, I want to present myself as a stem candidate, as a liberal arts candidate, as a writer, as a poet, as a sculptor, as a scientist. And this is really important, because it should shape everything that you say, and everything that you do in the application, it affects your activity list. So your activity list is a very important curation of the 10 things that matter most to you that you've done, they should not be activities from grade school should be activities you've done over your high school career, it's fine if they started in grade school. But it shouldn't be something you did in seventh and eighth grade, that doesn't count. And you want to rank order those in order of importance in order of importance for your strategy. So if you're presenting yourself as a computer science major, right, you don't want to put your computer science activities, number five, six, and seven. Okay, we really want to put those up towards the top. And ideally, those will be the ones that you care about the most anyway, and the ones that you spent the most time on going to ask you things like how many weeks per year, how many hours per week, please don't make the mistake of saying 52 weeks per year, unless it's something really specific, like caring for a family member, for example, you're not involved in a club, 52 weeks a year, you don't work at a job, 52 weeks a year, use a reasonable number, because as soon as you put 52 weeks a year, the reader is going to not believe you. And it's like, you know, if you watch any courtroom dramas, you know, like law and order. As soon as it gets you caught in a lie once then it discredit everything else that you say. So we want to be very careful about that. Then what we want to do is we want to look at the essays. And this is very important. Don't look at the Common App essay, your 650 word main essay, as a standalone piece of writing, it has to fit into the overall strategy and for your regular decision. But most importantly, for your early decision and early action, it has to really tie in with your supplement essays. Now, keep in mind that you can submit, if you want to do a different Common App essay, for every school you apply to. Many of you might apply to, for example, technical colleges, like Cal Poly, right, or Carnegie Mellon, where you're really focused in on this like really technical STEM education. But then you also want to apply, for example, to Columbia, and get that more liberal arts approach to stem. So in that case, you might want to have two different Common App essays. Because you're approaching things differently. Other students might apply, for example, to both secular and religious based universities. And that's going to be two very different messages as well, especially if the more religious focused supplement essays are asking you about your faith about your journey, you might want to weave a little bit of that into a separate Common App essay that you use for those schools. There are two other essays in the Common App one asks you about the impact of COVID. What I would say and I'm anticipating that they're going to phase that out pretty soon, if they don't phase it out this year, even is if your experience was fairly standard. If like the rest of students you studied from home, it disrupted your schedule and your social life. But you did okay, you made it through. You don't necessarily need to write something there that's really for something that materially affected your grades, your education path, disrupted you in some way that is not on the let's say normal path, the other essays, the additional information essay, and you're going to hear a lot of different opinions on this. Okay, I'm going to share my experience having worked almost 20 years in admissions, you can take it or leave it value at how you will. The additional information essay is not a place for you to cram in long explanations of your activities. It is not a place for you to write an additional essay just on Whatever you want, it is not a place for you to drop your resume in. Alright, that can count against you. Because you're not following instructions, right? Read the instructions carefully it is for additional information, maybe you failed a course, maybe you had a family member that fell ill and so you had to take care of them, and disengage from all your extracurricular activities. These are important things for you to disclose, disclose that in the Additional Information essay, maybe you got arrested, all of these things are absolutely viable conversations to have in that additional information essay. It should not be long, it should be to the point, we're going to talk about essays more, but you know, you can say two years ago, my grandmother was diagnosed with advanced dementia. Okay, we don't need the reader doesn't need a whole backstory there. They know exactly what that means, right? Be to the point talk cleanly and clearly about how that affected you, not your grandmother. And you know, as somebody who has been touched by that in my own life, you know, I'm not being you know, uncaring about that. But the focus here is you everything in this application has to focus on you, because the admissions officer is evaluating you, they want to see what you've done, what has impacted you, how you have impacted others, and how you are now bringing that to this application process. And that gets to the strategy. So now we turn to the supplements, what are we looking to do in the supplements? Well, in almost every supplement, the school is going to ask, Why do you want to study here? Why are we the right school for you? All right, this is not a place for you to talk about how great the school is, okay, this is for you to say, look, you're not going to write this. But look, I would like to go to your school. And your school has one of the best engineering programs in the world. But it also has a great poetry department. And I'm really interested in the poetry department. So don't say that you don't need to talk about anything else. You don't need to talk about the football team, you want to talk about those things that are part of your experience. What do you want from this program? Have you really gone in and done the hard work and look, and said, Okay, this is my path. These are the classes I want to take. These are the professors I want to get to know, these are the seminars I want to attend, I'd like to spend a year studying in Florence or Paris or Shanghai, whatever it is, you need to understand your unique path at that school, how you can contribute, and how that school is going to help you achieve your goals. You need to do that both inside the classroom and outside the classroom, or the school wants to see a nice balance of how am I going to be involved academically, but also how am I going to be engaged involved with the community? And as far as community involvement goes, I get a lot of questions around. Okay, should it just be all the things I'm currently doing? Should it be new things? And I think there's a balance, right? I think you want to show the fact that, hey, I've never done this before. So I'd like to try this there. But also I've been doing this other thing for the past five years. It's deeply meaningful for me. And so I'm going to continue that involvement and engage with the chapter or the group at your university or college that is doing that great example was a student I had from Saudi Arabia. And she had gone she had gone to boarding school and said to herself, what can I do here that I cannot do at home? And one of the answers was rowing crew. And keep in mind, this is a person who was probably about 110 pounds soaking wet. Not your ideal crew rower, but she absolutely she dove in headfirst, she worked really hard, she trained train train, she got an erg. She set it up in her basement at home, because obviously she couldn't be out rowing on the water and trained she eventually became captain of the rowing team and went on, you know, and pursued that in college as well. Was she recruited? No. But it was something that she developed as a passion and something that she wanted to continue. So it's great to take risks at you know, no matter where you're going boarding school, college, graduate school, and weave that into your narrative. So the last thing that I want to talk about here is that this is not a race. All right now, the last time I posted something on social media, I got a lot of people saying well, you know, deadlines, these flexible deadlines, look at your individual school. If there are rolling deadlines, then it is a bit of a race because first one in It's earlier consideration gets better look for financial aid. So if you're applying to a school that has a rolling deadline, get your application in as soon as possible. But I deal mostly with what I would call highly selective schools, and highly selective schools that have a November one early action, early decision deadline. Every year you read in the newspaper about how somebody submitted their application on August 2. And I'm very proud of that fact. And personally, I think that is a ridiculous and dangerous way to go about your applications. Why? Because you can submit on August 2, and you can submit on November 1, and your application is not treated any differently. So for those of you especially out there who are getting nervous, because your friends are saying, Oh, it's August 15. And I'm already done. You know, I always question that, because two weeks three weeks is not really enough time for you to dig in and do the introspection and hard work required to put together a compelling and effective application. So do not panic, do not look to the left of you or to the right of you. You're a racehorse, you've got your blinders on. And all you see is a finish line. Right. And so you are laser focused on that November one deadline, the more you can get done in August, obviously, the better before you go back to school, because your senior year is extremely demanding. And you need to maintain top grades and all the other activities, you're now probably in a leadership position for varsity sports, a lot of time commitments, but do not rush this process. Every year. I have students I work with who are done by the end of August, sometimes because we've started much earlier, and other students who just they they don't have it, they don't have the strategy set. They don't have their story set. We're still wrestling with variables. And you know, sometimes we take that all the way down to the middle or end of October. It's not ideal. But I'd much rather submit the right application later than a hurried application now because again, you don't get any extra credit for submitting early. So on that note, we're kicking off an application season. There's a lot of stress, a lot of things to do. We welcome all of your questions on social media, @admittedlypodcast on TikTok and Instagram, and we'll look forward to continuing this conversation. Good luck.
