After this week, our juniors will head home with three months worth of opportunities to get ahead on their college applications. Trust me when I say this: if you finish aspects of your college applications before you head back to school in September, you will be much less stressed this fall than if you have to complete them while in the middle of all your classes, practices, rehearsals, meetings, standardized tests… I’ll stop there. One of the biggest recommendations we have is to start writing a couple different drafts of college essays. The essay prompts for the CommonApp and the questions for the University of California personal insight questions have already been published for the 2016-17 application cycle. Although additional essays required by individual colleges won’t be released until August 1st (when CommonApp gets it’s yearly update), you can check out the general application prompts now (see links above) and take a stab at different questions to see which essay you like and want to move forward with.

Need help getting started with your essays? Refer to the slides below from the Essay Writing Workshop this May.

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