The early applications are in and the house is calmer. Good. Use the calm, because the next six weeks decide whether December is a scramble or a formality.
Week one: set up the portals
Within a few days of submitting, each college emails a link to its applicant portal. Students ignore these emails at a rate that would astonish you. The portal is where the college tells you what it’s missing: a transcript that never arrived, a recommendation stuck in a counselor’s queue, a test score it expected.
Have your student make a simple list — college, portal link, login, status — and check it every Friday. A “missing document” message in mid-November is a two-minute fix. The same message discovered in January is a problem.
Interviews
Some colleges offer alumni or admissions interviews after you apply. They’re rarely decisive, but they are real. The preparation is short: know why you applied to that school specifically, have two questions ready that aren’t answered on the website, and be able to talk about one thing you’ve done in the last year that you actually cared about. Thirty minutes, done.
Mid-year reports
Colleges will want first-semester senior grades. Your school counselor sends these, usually in late January or February, but the request has to come from the student at many schools. Ask your counselor now what the process is. Senior grades matter more than students think — admitted students have had offers reconsidered for a bad final semester.
Build the Regular Decision plan now
This is the part families skip, and it’s the part that saves December. Assume, for planning purposes, that the early school says no or defers. What’s the full list of January 1 and January 15 applications? Which supplements can reuse paragraphs already written? Which ones need something new?
Write the list, put the deadlines in a calendar, and draft at least the “Why us” essays before Thanksgiving. If the early school says yes in mid-December, you’ve lost a few hours. If it says no, you’ve gained three weeks of sanity.
What parents should do
Mostly, nothing visible. Ask about the portal check on Fridays. Keep a copy of the family’s financial-aid login somewhere you’ll find it. And when your student wants to talk about the waiting, listen rather than forecast. Nobody can read tea leaves from an application status, and trying to just makes the house louder.
By Jeff Thompson, Phortex Campus · November 12, 2024 · ← All posts