Happy New Year! We’re just seven days into 2016 and we hope that means many of your resolutions are still alive. Whether you’re going to the gym more, eating healthier, or resolving not to look at your phone while you drive (good one!), January 1 is a great time to think about what you want to improve in your life. For high school juniors and their families, the application work looming in the fall threatens to interrupt all kinds of progress. We’ve got some resolutions for students (and parents!) to help keep you on the right path over the next twelve months.

Students

1)  I resolve to do well in AP US History not just because it will look good in college admissions, but because it’s a fascinating class.
This is great advice no matter the class, and no matter the activity. If you throw yourself into your work, you’ll be much more satisfied than if you feel like you’re going through the motions.

How Long Does It Take for SAT Scores to be Sent to Colleges?

When students find themselves at the edge of their college application deadlines, I find they tend to whip themselves into a frenzy over every component of their applications. Many students are concerned that test scores may not arrive in the hands of colleges and universities on time. And this is a reasonable concern. For the vast majority of schools, you need standardized test results to be submitted by the testing agencies in order to receive a decision from colleges.

At this late date, many students are still submitting scores to places like the University of California or the University of Washington and wondering what to do to get scores submitted on time. Our resident Common App expert and jack-of-all-trades, Elyse Krantz recently placed a call to the College Board—administrator of the SAT and all its derivatives—to get answers to the most frequent questions from our students.

Why You Should Ignore the College Rankings Hoopla This Year and Every Year

At this point, it feels like an annual tradition in higher education. The US News and World Report releases its rankings for the “best” colleges and universities, sells a huge number of copies of their magazine, and triggers an avalanche of responses from academics and thought leaders who assault the value of one-size-fits-all rankings. I weighed in two years ago on this blog, breaking down the methodology for the US News and World Report college rankings (which remains largely the same), and encouraging students to think more generally about the value of their education.

Get Outside The Top 10

Students all around the country are returning to their high schools this fall, and seniors are heading back with the special thrill and anxiety that comes with college applications. Those who have made the most of their time this summer will be pretty close to finishing their college list and will have a serviceable draft (maybe even a finished draft!) of their college essays. But even if you’ve taken care of a huge part of your college apps on your end, you’ll need to enlist the help of your high school guidance counselor to ensure everything is finished by the appropriate deadlines. A little extra thoughtfulness will go a long way towards making your application even stronger, and improving your chances of getting into your top choices. Here are some steps you should take to make the most of your high school counselor.

1. Establish a timeline that works for your high school guidance office

How to Ace Tough College Interview Questions

In my time spent as a senior admissions officer at Reed College, I must have interviewed hundreds of students. And I asked weird questions, too. What would be your useless superpower? Is math discovered or invented? If you had one question for God, what would it be? Sub-question: Would you rather he give you the answer to your question or tell you the question you should have asked? My goal was to keep students on their toes, then to catch them off guard, and then, when their expectations had been flipped upside-down, I would find out who they really were.

Most interviewers won’t ask questions quite as odd as the ones I used to ask, but their objective is largely the same: get a sense of the student’s personality and style of engagement.

Update: Read the latest tips for the 2017-18 Common App.

The Common Application launches today, and students around the country will have the opportunity to login and begin filling out the information within. While we recommend students create an account and begin to poke around the application’s dashboard and other tools, we also want students to know that there is no inherent value in submitting the application as quickly as possible—especially if that means sacrificing the quality of the materials within. Every year an article highlights the kid who submitted the first application of the year. Pay no mind. When apps are read months from now, there’ll be no timestamp on the forms—no priority list based on when apps come in.

For help with the Common App itself, return to us often. In addition to comprehensive posts on the Common App’s new interface for this year, our Common App expert Elyse Krantz joined fellow educator Beth Heaton on College Coach’s Getting In: A College Coach Conversation radio show this week to help make sense of all the ins and outs of the app.

Your Guide for High School Tips and Preparing for College

When I was in high school, we used to argue about when you become a senior. Does it happen the second you walk off campus on the last day of your junior year? Or do you have to wait in summer limbo, becoming a senior only when you return for classes the fall? Now that I’m an admissions counselor, I can say definitively that your senior year starts in the summer. And why? Because you have so much you need to do to prepare yourself for the coming fall: coaxing nascent essay drafts into riveting final copies; shaving your college list down from twenty to the final seven to twelve to which you’ll apply;  organizing yourself for your final year of high school and the transition to college.

Your Seasonal College Visit Checklist

This summer, families around the country will be filling up the gas tank or boarding a plane to visit colleges around the country. Because students and parents have so much flexibility in their schedules, and because you can pair college visits with vacation time, summer is one of the most popular times to see colleges. But is it the best time? Maybe not.  When you see a college can seriously affect what you think about that college. At Reed, we used to give out popsicles to students on our summer tours—not exactly common practice in rainy Portland, Oregon! Following are some ideas and strategies to keep in mind as you prepare your schedule for college visits this year.

Summer Visits

Summer weather makes for gorgeous photographs and relaxed staff, but it’s hard to get a sense of what your experience might be like during the academic year. If you’re going on a summer visit, try to see as many buildings as you can to develop a sense of the place.

As a college admissions consultant with College Coach, I’m frequently asked to compare academics at two different institutions. “Which school offers the better academic experience?”  This is an impossible question to answer because of the incredible variability between institutions and their offerings, not to mention the incredible variability between students (goals, talents, abilities, learning styles, comfort zones, etc.). Nevertheless, it is a question that is asked and so I thought I’d provide an answer… at least to a part of it.

Below is my nearly verbatim response to a student who asked me to compare academics at a large public research institution (call it Big U), a medium-sized public liberal arts and science hybrid (call it Hybrid State College), and a small, niche liberal arts college (call it Lakeview College). Names have been changed to reflect the generality of the discussion:

Most students begin thinking about where to attend college by assessing academic programs, and rightly so. Your education is the reason you are going to college, after all, and you’ll want your school’s academic offerings to provide you with the skills you need to achieve your goals. But college is about more than just textbooks and papers. Over the next four years, you’ll spend much more time outside of the classroom than inside the classroom. What will you do? How will you get involved? What are your priorities? With whom will you connect? Asking the right questions—and finding the best answers to them—can help you identify the perfect social complement to the academic institution of your dreams.

Who Else Goes Here?

Faculty members are charged with teaching you the material on their syllabi, but you’ll learn just as much from your peers. What are they like? What attitudes do they have about education or life in general? If you’re passionate about social justice, you might want to find a campus energized by community service opportunities and engaged, informed students.