7 Things You Should Know about the 2019 Common App
7 Things You Should Know about the 2019 Common App
Accepted by over 750 institutions—including Stanford, Duke, Williams College, and Caltech—the Common App opens in August each year for students around the world to begin their applications. For the most part, it is an intuitive platform that presents you a centralized place to complete up to 20 applications.
Six sections of the Common App (Profile, Family, Education, Testing, Activities, and Writing) are sent to almost all schools on your list, with a seventh section (Courses & Grades) sent to a fewer number institutions, like USC, that require it.
The first six sections ask you to report detailed information—including your birthdate, name of your school counselor, test scores, parent’s occupation, and top 10 activities. In the Writing section, you can upload a personal essay of 650 words or less and then are allotted another 650 words to discuss anything else of importance.
Each college has its own supplemental questions you must answer, which ask about things like your major of interest, how you learned about the school, and preferred residence plan. Some colleges also have their own essay questions and short answer responses.
As you begin your applications this summer, keep in mind these seven things about the Common App.
1. Don’t Wait Until August
The Common App opens applications for fall 2020 programs in August, but it’s important you make as much progress throughout the summer as possible so that you lighten your work load in the fall. While you won’t be able to fill out basic information sections about your personal background, school information, and test scores, you can take a crack at essays. Common App prompts for the personal essay are already out, and you can find questions for individual school’s supplements on their website. Click through these links to read some examples of college specific supplements: Pomona College, Princeton, University of Michigan.
2. Fill Out as Much as You Can Early
Once August does come, do not wait until the day of submission to complete the basic information sections. These are straightforward, but they take time to fill out because you’re asked many specific details about your personal and academic background. Some questions may even need the help of your parents and counselor to answer.
Be sure to complete colleges’ supplemental questions early on too. Because schools have no uniform method of presenting their inquiries, with some listing essay prompts under a “Writing Supplement” section and others embedding them in the “Questions” portion, it is easy to miss a required essay if you do not carefully review each entry in the supplement. In fact, some responses only populate after you have answered a question—such as the optional Yale engineering prompt.
Get the easy work done early on. You’ll free up mental space knowing it is taken care of and avoid surprise essays.
3. Don’t Type Free Responses in Text Boxes
Typing your essays and short responses in a word document and then pasting them into the Common App’s text boxes is your safest bet. The Common App has many great functions, but word processing programs are specifically built for you to write essays and store your work.
Google Docs, Microsoft Word, and Pages are fantastic options, and they will allow you to easily edit, spell check, and revise your essays. Even for responses that are a few characters long, we recommend copying over the prompt in a word document and drafting your answer there.
After you paste your responses into the text boxes, you may have to add back in any necessary formatting such as bolded or italicized words that did not carry over. Watch out too for strange symbols that may have appeared in words with accents like café or touché.
4. Be Mindful of Character and Word Limits
At the bottom, right-hand corner of essay text boxes, you can usually find the word limit for a prompt. Word limits are important to find out because they frame what kind of essay you will ultimately write—a 500-word narrative will have different structure than a 150-word story.
Sometimes, however, you must find out the word or character limit of a question yourself. Ten out of thirteen of USC’s short responses, for example, have a 100-character limit, but this is not noted anywhere in the Common App. To find out, you might type words into the small text box until you hit the limit, then copy and paste that into a word document to find out how many characters you are allowed.
5. Complete Sentences Aren’t Needed for the Activities List
In the “Activities” section of the Common App, you are allotted 50 characters to note your position and organization of an extracurricular and then 150 characters to describe your responsibilities and accomplishments. Due to the brevity of the list, complete sentences are not necessary. In fact, you should likely aim to write descriptions similar to resumes, starting with a strong verb and quantifying your achievements where possible.
6. Preview PDFs of the Application
A secret tool: you can generate PDFs of different application sections by clicking “Preview” in the top, right-hand corner, to the left of the Instructions and Help toolbox. These PDFs show what your application will look like to admissions officers. There is quite a discrepancy between how the line spacing of essays appear in the text box and the final PDF, so be sure to use this tool to correct typos and formatting issues. When you finish every section and click submit, you’ll then have the option of generating a PDF of your whole application.
7. Not All Schools Use the Common App
It may seem like all colleges accept the Common App because of how popular the platform is. But Georgetown, MIT, and public research university systems, like the University of California, use their own application forms. If these schools are on your list, be sure to create an account on their website and review all the application components. Oftentimes, it will parallel the components of the Common App; however, there may be some nuances that require a slightly different approach.
The expert admissions consultants at Wise World Prep have helped hundreds of students maximize their potential of being admitted to their top choice colleges and universities. Over 20 years, we have successfully guided students through each stage of the application process – from choosing competitive high school courses to building an appropriate college list to drafting winning essays to writing persuasive update and appeals letters. We would be happy to answer your questions and partner with you to create a successful admissions roadmap.
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