9.20 Warning! The Common App will go down!

Calling all college applicants! Have you been telling yourself, “Right! I am definitely getting a jump start on my college applications this summer”?“Hmm . . . just as soon as I catch up on 10 months of missing sleep, and get back from my class trip to save the turtles, and finish the problem sets in chapter 16 of my mathematics textbook, and wait, my mom booked an afternoon with the tennis coach and the surf’s up today!”This warning is for you!

Image from the Common App group on Facebook

Athena Advises

If you were planning to work on the Common Application “soon,” you might want to make that “sooner”! The Common App is taken offline for a number of days each summer. The down days in 2018 will be July 27-31.Plan ahead! For example, you can copy the prompts for the personal statement into a document on your hard drive. That way, you won’t be caught later this month not knowing how to start the essay that will go to every college to which you apply.If July sounds way too early to begin your college applications, look at it this way: by the time the Common App is back online, it will be August first.You can also spend some time in the next days filling in the blocks of data required on the Common App. Are you thinking that’s a waste of time, because the database will be erased when the Common App refreshes toward the end of July?That may have been true when your older brother, sister or friend applied a few years ago. It’s no longer true. The information you enter into an account you create now will carry over to the next application cycle. That is, any data you have entered or will enter into an account will be there in August when the Common App rises like a phoenix from the ashes of your July barbecues.Wishing you the best of luck with the Common Application,Dr. Marlena CorcoranFounder and CEOAuthor of Year by Year to College, on amazon.com, amazon.de and many national amazon sites