In last week’s episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, host Beth Heaton spent the whole hour celebrating open “office hours,” focusing on listener questions and the next School’s Out! segment.

In last week’s episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, host Sally Ganga and her guests addressed a wide variety of topics: economical travel timing and destinations for college students, a check-in on the activities section of the college application during our Application Workshop series, and scholarship and loan scams.

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

The Common Application has been around for a long time. Since 1975 to be exact. And in the past several years, not only has the number of member institutions grown by leaps and bounds (today nearly 700 colleges in 48 states and 14 foreign countries accept the Common App), the application platform itself has become easier and more intuitive to use.

On the last episode of Getting In: A College Coach Conversation, host Ian Fisher and his guests explored a non-profit program providing free educational and career advice, strategies for presenting your extracurricular activities, and the role of personal debt in the financial aid process.

The Coalition for Access, Affordability, and Success will be releasing its application platform any day now, so it’s more essential than ever for applicants to understand this new submission option. If you want a more basic introduction, including what the Coalition is and why it exists, begin by reading the first two posts in this series:

• What Is the Coalition Application?
• The Coalition Application: What’s the Latest News?

High school juniors are juggling a lot right now. Between wrapping up the academic year, cramming for finals, and prepping desperately for the SAT or ACT, it seems a bit unfair to expect juniors to tackle any additional responsibilities at the moment. So if you find yourself with limited free time on your hands, file it away for later this month. But if you’re lucky enough to have already completed your end-of-year assignments and you (or your parents) are just itching to get a head start on your college applications, read on. This is the blog for you: your one-stop shop to everything you need to know about how to register your Common App account.

When news of a new Coalition application was introduced last fall, admissions counselors knew they would have to learn an entirely new application platform in order to help their students apply to college the following fall. As a college counselor, I was perhaps most interested in the way that the new application—and its essay requirements—might change the way my seniors were able to approach their work over the application season. Would students be able to engage in brainstorming in the same ways they had in the past? What sorts of essays would they need to produce? How much extra work would a new application require of them?

The Coalition Application is a new college application platform currently described by the popular media as a direct competitor to the Common Application. The group behind its creation is the “Coalition for Access, Affordability and Success.” According to their website, the Coalition is a group of schools “that share a commitment to providing students with the best possible college experience, beginning with the college application process.”

The Coalition states they came together because:

A growing amount of research has shown that students from disadvantaged backgrounds often do not participate effectively in the college application process, struggle with applying for financial aid, and often do not get awarded all the financial aid for which they qualify.

Mastering the Activities Section of the Common Application

College applicants are infamously known to stress about their essays. And it’s not uncommon for students to spend weeks (if not months) brainstorming their ideal essay topic and then editing it down to perfection. But our college admissions experts would like to point out that there’s another section of the Common Application that also requires a great deal of writing yet receives far less attention. Some application readers would argue that it also happens to be the section that applicants most often overlook and under appreciate.

What is it?

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

It’s now time to discuss what many students consider to be the most important (and stressful) part of the Common Application: the essay. While we won’t be using this particular blog share advice about what students should actually write, we will be focusing on practical, big-picture issues, like “Why aren’t my paragraphs indented in the print preview?” And if you’re utterly confused by the brightly colored charade known as the new “Writing Requirements” section of the Dashboard, here’s your chance to gain some clarity. (Spoiler alert: while we can explain some of the poor choices made by the Common App, we can’t fix them.)