Get ready for the new Common App

There is no doubt that the Common App has gone from relatively unknown to an almost mandatory pathway to applying to college in the past couple decades. The growth has been tremendous with 456 colleges currently accepting the Common App, and hundreds more poised to jump on board. This year alone, approximately 750,000 students have used the form to submit 3 million applications, a 25% increase from last year.

A recent article by Jacques Steinberg details the new system the Common App will be creating in order to accommodate future increases in traffic. According to Rob Killion, executive director of Common Application, “If we stick with the architecture of the current system through the end of the decade, with the growth we’re seeing, there would be delays during peak periods, for students and for our member colleges getting applications. This will all soon be groaning if we don’t do something now.”

Common App 4.0 aims to fix existing glitches including sections being truncated when an application is not previewed prior to submitting, or if too many characters are used in certain fields. Further, it will be capable of handling the continued growth which it is expected to receive including over 10 million applications filed to over 1000 schools.

Remember to check in with our recent reminders about double-checking your submission status with the Common App and especially your payment status for all your applications. Finishing your submission is a multi-step process, so make sure all your documentation, supplements, and payments have been received by your schools before you consider yourself finished.

Don't forget: Go to your My Colleges page and check the Application, Supplement, and Payment statuses for each of your colleges. If the status does not show as green, then you have not submitted that item--even if you think you have. Please do this now. It's much better to discover this today than after the deadline has passed.

Simple, but important, no? Make sure that your applications have fully submitted, and that the payments have gone through. As they say, much better to catch this today than after the deadline has passed.

Students should remind their counselors and teachers that any forms sent by mail should be addressed to the admission office of each college to which they are applying. This certainly sounds basic, but the good people at the Common App remind us with their helpful Facebook updates that these kinds of errors are anything but uncommon.

For teachers and counselors, please do not send anything to the Common Application offices. Though they will (thoughtfully!) post it return to sender, these kinds of mistakes, if made at the last minute, can weigh heavily on students. And if you know of people who are confused about where to send their recommendations, be sure to point them here.

Last school forms tip of the week: When you are completing school forms for a student, make sure that you do not have any other Common App account sessions open in other tabs, windows, or browsers. Running multiple sessions concurrently can confuse the system, resulting in lost work when you try to save. For example, if you are a counselor who has created a test applicant account, make sure that you are not logged into that applicant account as you are working on school forms in your own school official account.

This basically means that you shouldn't keep multiple Common App windows open at the same time. It's very easy to try and fix something in one window, then return to a second window and realize that not only is the info from the first window not saved, but the work you've been doing in the second window isn't going to save either, because the Common App site can't figure out which page your account is currently trying to access. It'll probably end up booting you from the system back to the login page.

The moral of the story is to keep everything simple and to-the-point when you're working on your college apps! Slow and steady wins the race.

Sounds simple, right? Well, after you submit your application, do us a favor and take a moment to check that the submission has, in fact, gone through correctly. Some students submit the payment (or just the supplement) and assume that the application will be submitted as well. This is incorrect! The application, supplement, and payment are submitted separately - so be sure to check and be sure that your submissions have gone out completely.

How do you know if your application is actually, finally, once and for all submitted?

Check the status in My Colleges. A submitted form or payment will show as "Complete" in green.

It is true that colleges cannot access school forms until a student submits his or her Common App, but that application can be submitted at any time, before or after school form submission.

Just remember to have your teachers and counselors listed correctly and to keep their contact info current! It's a common mistake to omit the key info for your submit-by-mail recommenders. As long as everything's kept straight there, you can focus on just finishing your app before the deadline.

So if you have been without power for the past few days, as I know many in New Jersey and Connecticut have been, you've got time to get your app in.

And if you've just changed your mind and really do want to send out that early app you've been procrastinating on, well, you got another chance to submit.

And you're right. The purpose of these essays is not to talk about them but to talk about you. Your job in all of your college essay writing is to convince the reader that you're an interesting person who belongs in their highly-selective class. You're trying to get them to choose you instead of someone else.

Easier said than done, indeed. So today we direct you to a post written last year that has gotten a lot of traffic: How to tell a college that you're interested.

Always keep in mind that your job is to express what you have that they want. It's already implied that they have what you want - a great education and a raft of opportunities for your future, whatever that may be. Do this by identifying your own intellectual interests and developing them from a personal standpoint.