Applying to college: the phrase alone can instill terror in the hearts of high school seniors, and even in those of us who have lived through the experience.
Each year, the college application process seems to obtain more complex, and more intense. If you're students, you might be reviewing rumors and horror stories about this classmate of yours with perfect grades and a 1500 SAT score who somehow got rejected out of every Ivy League school. If you're a parent, you could be afraid of simply how much the college admissions system has changed and grown more competitive since you're the kids'age, or simply you never had to navigate this system at all.
One of many biggest fears of numerous students and parents could be the sheer anonymity of the process. You, the college applicant, been employed by hard through high school, earning great grades, expanding your worldview through extracurricular activities, and causing your community… and now, it could seem pretty unjust to throw yourself at the mercy of an application system that seems arbitrary, blind to your personality, or even uncaring.
There's good news, though.
The college application process features a logic to it—and it's the one that you, the applicant, can both navigate and trust. Those essays, those forms, all those questions? They're about getting you in touch most abundant in authentic and vibrant version of yourself. In fact, if tackled with intelligence, reflection, and organization, the college process can offer you a chance to make the admissions process about you as an individual, as opposed to about a remote name on a screen. What is the Common Application?
You could be knowledgeable about the Common Application, Common App for short, which serves as a single application shared by over 900 colleges, including every Ivy League school and similarly elite universities like Stanford, Caltech, and the University of Chicago. The Common App enables you to enter information like your name, demographics, extracurricular activities, and more only once for every school that uses it. It's also where you'll encounter “The Common App Essay ,” otherwise called your personal statement (PS), that will be what this guide will focus on.
Though not every school uses the Common App—many state or public schools usually have their own systems—the task you do in writing your Common App Essay will last in every other element of the method, including signing up to non-Common App schools and writing the secondary and supplemental essays that always accompany both types of applications.