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.

Why am I getting so much mail from colleges?

If you have taken a national standardized test in the last few months and checked the box allowing colleges to send you materials and publications, you’ve probably felt your inboxes swell with electronic and print publications over the last few weeks and months. Don’t worry, swelling is normal and will die down in a couple of years. Nonetheless, with a sudden affliction of this variety, families will have questions. Let’s diagnose the phenomenon together.

Some years ago on a soccer sideline somewhere, or maybe in the chatty pre-show moments of a high school theatre performance, a mom or dad started the dreadful rumor that one must complete hundreds of hours of community service in order to even be considered for admission to the top colleges and universities in the country. Since that day, this misinformation has been taken as gospel by college-bound high school students and their parents. But they’re wrong.

Let’s all pause for a moment and say this together: there is nothing extra special about community service.

Now that I’ve said that, let’s throttle back from the edge so you can understand what I mean. When colleges and universities consider a student’s extracurricular profile, they are looking for the ways students have made an impact on their communities. One student might run track. Another might join the wind ensemble. A third might tutor elementary school kids. A fourth might volunteer at the local soup kitchen. As a college admission officer, I had no preference for one of these students over any of the others.

Do Colleges Look at PSAT Scores?

If you’re a 10^th or 11^th grader, you were probably shuffled into a large auditorium sometime in the not-too-distant past to take the PSAT, a practice version of the College Board’s SAT. If you’re anything like the majority of students I speak with every year, you’re probably a little confused about the relevance of the test or the reason for taking it. And when your results arrived just a week or two ago, you were probably a little perplexed by the numbers and what they mean for the future. Hopefully this article can help you make some sense of the whole experience, and give you a better idea of how it fits into the admissions process.

What Do My PSAT Scores Mean?

In and of themselves, your scores don’t mean a whole lot. Colleges will never ask you for your PSAT results, and you’ll never have to report them. Because of this, I love thinking of the PSAT as a really useful data point for my students; it’s a dry run at the SAT with no stakes. At the very least, you get to see how the SAT will feel when you take it for real, and truly savvy students can use their results to “predict” their SAT scores a year down the road.