We have been so busy this week with final junior year meetings!
Our goal is to have our students finished with the following by the end of 11th grade:
Common Application
Common Application Main Essay
Teacher Recommendation Information #1
Teacher Recommendation Information #2
Counselor Recommendation Information (some schools have not released this yet)
Generic Supplemental Essay Work (we prepare four separate pieces of writing to repurpose later)
We are obviously checking up on any outstanding tasks multiple times per week, but the final meeting of the year serves as a good checkpoint to measure what has been accomplished against our initial goals. I am happy to report that most of our students have been done with them for a while!
The main purpose of the meeting is to finalize the student’s college list based on final junior year grades, final test scores (not this year, haha) and all of the research that has been completed up to this point.
Once we finalize, we are able to jump right in and work on school-specific supplemental essays (as well as the Coalition Application, if needed). I do not like to begin any school-specific tasks until we know for sure what the list will look like because I don’t want to waste our time working on something that isn’t needed down the line.
We have developed a method that categories every supplemental prompt into one of the following categories:
Why This School?
Why This Field?
Why This School and Field?
Quirky Topic
Meaningful Activity
We then work with our students to help them re-purpose material from the already-prepared pieces of generic supplemental writing to fit each school-specific prompt, but our approach to doing this differs depending on the category.
If you are interested, you can see some of this year’s supplemental topics here:
University of Georgia 2021 Supplement - DC College Counseling
University of Michigan 2021 Supplement - DC College Counseling
University of North Carolina 2021 Supplement - DC College Counseling
Villanova University 2021 Supplement - DC College Counseling
Our current clients will start to see these pop up in their google drive folders over this week and next. As soon as a topic is released, we like to start working on it to get it out of the way!
Last year, we did a ton of detective work and identified an incredible number of Class of 2020 essay topics in advance of the formal release date of August 1. This year, we’re going to stick most of this content into the membership vault (and of course our individual student folders, as always) - along with our guides and activities to help with each of the supplemental prompts above.