The Common App allows you to enter information like your name, demographics, extracurricular activities, and more just once for every school that uses it. You might be familiar with 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. In fact, if tackled with intelligence, reflection, and organization, the college process can actually offer you a chance to make the admissions process about you as a person, rather than about a distant name on a screen. All those essays, all those forms, all those questions? They’re about getting you in touch with the most authentic and vibrant version of yourself. The college application process has a logic to it-and it’s one that you, the applicant, can both navigate and trust. You, the college applicant, have worked hard through high school, earning great grades, expanding your worldview through extracurricular activities, and contributing to your community… and now, it can seem pretty unjust to throw yourself at the mercy of an application system that seems arbitrary, blind to your personality, or even uncaring. One of the biggest fears of many students and parents is the sheer anonymity of the process. If you’re a parent, you might be afraid of how much the college admissions system has changed and grown more competitive since you were your kids’ age, or perhaps you never had to navigate this system at all.

If you’re a student, you might be reviewing rumors and horror stories about that classmate of yours with perfect grades and a 1500 SAT score who somehow got rejected from every Ivy League school. 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.Įvery year, the college application process seems to get more complex, and more intense.

Hemingway editor grade explanation