And they begin!
In the past week, three schools have released supplemental essay topics:
University of Chicago - boy are these rough, as per usual!
University of Texas - Austin - scroll down to “essay” and “short answers”
These join the personal insight questions (otherwise known as essays) from the University of California system, which have been out for a little while now.
In our office, all of our clients are either finished or nearly-finished with their main essays, so we try to knock these supplemental essays out when we can to avoid scrambling during the month of August after they are officially released. To do this, we stay on top of everything in advance to make sure we have the most up-to-date information on which essays are released and when. This way, we can plug away at them with our students a little bit at a time, all summer long.
We have family meetings in June or July, after we have final junior year grades and all standardized test scores are in. At that point, we try to finalize the college list. We keep a very large master list with each student’s name on the x-axis and every college you can imagine on the y-axis. As schools begin to release their prompts, Rebeccah keeps track everything on the master list and will notify students accordingly.
Some more recent news: there will be a variety of updates to The Common Application® that will be rolled out in July. I’m a little nervous about what this will mean for the activity section, because it sounds like that part has the potential to result in substantive changes. This part of the application hasn’t been updated in any meaningful way for a very, very long time, and I’m crossing my fingers that the changes won’t be too dramatic!
Happy writing!