The Roller Coaster of College Application

"College essay writing can be stressful. It's not the problem the essay itself, it is the problem of our desire carried in it. When we put to much hope on a 300-500 word essay hopping to impress an admission officer who we know nothing about, it's a challenge with no doubt.  "  -Sukee Parker

J got accepted when we just arrived at our San Lucas All-Inclusive hotel to begin our Christmas vacation. The Yes! message from his dream school made his day. I still remember the look of shock and happiness on his face. This was the satisfying ending to our seven-month-long roller coaster ride of college applications.

Six months prior, at the start of summer vacation in June, I discussed with my husband the need to help J prepare his college applications. "We need to start early to avoid last minutes panic." "Yes, we will start asap." We checked in with J several times during the summer. Time flies. J took some summer jobs, and we arranged two trips to Las Vegas+Utah, and Hawaii in between.  

Fast forward to Labor Day weekend, when I asked J to send me his application for review, and to our surprise, there was not a single word written. We had hired a consulting company to help us, but we did not pay attention to their reminders. Now what? Nothing on paper, and the deadline is November 1st for early decision submissions. The atmosphere was filled with anger and anxiety. 

Then, I put on my professional project management hat and took the challenge to get this project back on track. It has to work out. 

We have to get down to the details: what needs to be done and when. All the essays and ideas (research) must also be well-tracked. We create a Google folder called "College Application" with subfolders for different categories: 

• Project Management for project plans
• Common Files for essays that used for multiple schools 
• Teacher Recommendations for teacher recommendation letters 
• School Folder ( each school has its own folder)  

We then create a project plan in the "Project Management" folder tracking to track the progress of each essay being written for each school. The document is shared in Google Folder for easy editing and sharing. There are several key elements in this project plan: 

• School column with "All" for general tasks and each school's name to differentiate specific tasks. The "All" category includes common applications and teacher/counselor recommendations. 
• Check column indicates if the task is completed. 
• Type column includes "Follow" for follow-up and "Essay" for essay writing. 
• Name column provides the name of each task, such as "Teach-Recom-1" for teacher recommendation 1 or "UT-Essay-1" for the first essay needed for the UT application.  
• Prompt includes the full text of the essay prompt.
• Words column lists the word count requirement.
• Research column links to the Google document for the research results
• Link column links to the final essay write-up. 
• The plan also includes a column for each day from 9/6 until the end of the application process. Yes, it's daily. We have to hide the finished columns later for daily tracking and planning. For each task, we mark the required each day. For example, each essay is planned with 5 edits followed by a review with the consoler so that each article is marked with 1st, 2nd... 5th for revisions and rev for reviews.

The plan works well, as each deliverable can be tracked right from the plan. 

After submitting early decision applications, the tracking process can be reduced to a simple checklist format to confirm submissions and create a new plan accordingly. 

Please refer to the demonstration video for the details. We hope this information is helpful to you, and we wish you the best of luck on your college application journey.