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Health & Fitness

Road to College - Managing Your College Admissions Process

Follow few basic steps to manage college admission process

Month of September puts College Admissions process in the high gear for High School Seniors. By now your kitchen table/ family room is probably overflowing with materials you have received from colleges in mail or during your visits. Your dinner table conversation is mostly about which colleges stay or go from your list and your weekends or holidays are scheduled around college visits. There is also a good chance that with everything else going on in your senior’s life, they are also trying to prepare for one more SAT or ACT test.

College admissions process is perplexing, arduous and filled with anxiety. To keep your head above water it has to be managed like a project with deliverables and deadlines. Key is to know what requirements colleges have in their application process and how the time line stacks up.

Get Organized:  Start by creating a matrix with all of the colleges you are considering on it. This will be one time where nothing less than a spreadsheet software – like Excel in Windows or iWork for those of you with Apple machines, will do. Pen and paper will not be able to keep up with everything you need to track and change. Scan the websites of the colleges you have visited and or are interested in and add their requirements and deadlines to this matrix.

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College Admissions matrix will require some effort and time but when done right, it really becomes your new dependable weekly/monthly planner. It will not only tell you whether your list is realistic but also how many essays you have to write, how many applications you have to fill, any interviews you have to prepare for and what kind of letter of recommendations you are going to need.

Line-up Your Troops: Teachers and Guidance Counselors are flooded with requests for Letter of Recommendations and Transcript at this time of the year. Make sure you give them advance notice and factor in your school’s timeline before making requests. A well written letter of recommendation helps bring together your application just like a well written college essay does. You don’t want to rush it through.

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Evaluate Your Selection:  Take a look at your college list – a reasonable goal is to apply to 8 to 10 different colleges. This number makes for manageable work load and ensures that you can spend time understanding what each college is about, what you like about their programs (beyond their website) and how your ambitions match up to what that college has to offer.

Few other things to remember:

  • Clean up online presence on Facebook, Twitter etc., preferably changing profile setting to private with a clean, presentable profile picture
  • Make sure email address for corresponding with colleges is boring, sober and simple. This is not the place to show creativity/individuality.
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