College Application Timeline

Since you’re likely to have a lot on your plate during this time, it’s important to take an honest look at which areas you need to prioritize and determine whether you have the capacity to take on any additional commitments. For instance, if you need to focus on a particular class and bring up your overall GPA, it’s best to hold off on SAT/ACT prep until your study schedule is a bit more manageable. If obtaining a leadership position doesn’t seem viable, then lightening your commitment in that club to free up more time to work on your passion project might be the wisest choice. What matters is that you’re dedicating the right amount of time to the right commitments and approaching the spring with a strategy that works best for you. Below are some details to help you plan your course accordingly.

Since you’re likely to have a lot on your plate during this time, it’s important to take an honest look at which areas you need to prioritize and determine whether you have the capacity to take on any additional commitments. For instance, if you need to focus on a particular class and bring up your overall GPA, it’s best to hold off on SAT/ACT prep until your study schedule is a bit more manageable. If obtaining a leadership position doesn’t seem viable, then lightening your commitment in that club to free up more time to work on your passion project might be the wisest choice. What matters is that you’re dedicating the right amount of time to the right commitments and approaching the spring with a strategy that works best for you. Below are some details to help you plan your course accordingly.

Now that you have a game plan for your curricular and extracurricular involvements, you’ll want to work in some time to put together a list of roughly three safety, five to seven match, and five to seven reach schools. Since these categories are defined in terms of where your test scores and GPA sit relative to a school’s average, taking the SAT/ACT before the summer will prevent you from having to completely remake your college list later on. The criteria you’ll want to base your list off of cover a lot of ground, so we’ve compiled guides to top colleges and universities to guide you through every part of this process. Consider reaching out to your guidance counselor, your family members and friends to begin a discussion about colleges, and start perusing different schools’ websites to get an understanding of what each has to offer.

A great way to continue your research is by checking out our How to Research Colleges page and College Planning Worksheet. In your college search, you’ll also want to learn about individual programs, majors, or unique opportunities offered by different schools.

Next, schedule any visits to colleges you’d be curious to see in person and think you might want to add to your college list. If being physically present isn’t feasible, don’t fret! Campus Reel is a fantastic resource that provides virtual campus tours, day-in-the-life reels, and plenty of other informational bits shared by actual, current students. Make sure you’re all up to speed with How To Make the Most of a Virtual College Tour. Additionally, you can register for live information sessions on colleges’ admissions websites. If you can’t attend a live session, you can likely find a pre-recorded session on the school’s website or on YouTube. You can also find out about important events by signing up for schools’ newsletters or adding yourself to their contact lists. Since there are several colleges that track demonstrated interest, it’s best to stay in the loop with opportunities where you can show face while also learning more about whether the school’s a good fit for you.

Visiting schools in person is a great way to get a sense of what the campus and its surroundings are like, as well as take advantage of the opportunity to speak to current students. Most schools have registration for campus tours publicly available on their admissions website, but calling the school’s admissions office directly is a great way to discuss any special requests or questions you might have. For more information about planning and embarking on your college visits, check out Command Education’s Guide to College Visits!

Summer is a great time to take advantage of opportunities you wouldn’t otherwise have access to during the school year or at your high school. It’s also an opportune time to demonstrate ambition and interest in a field or subject matter, and to develop professional or academic skills.

While some summer programs set their application deadlines through Junior Fall or Winter, there are still more than enough programs, internships, and research opportunities for you to look into and apply to during the spring. You can read Command Education’s guide to summer opportunities here. Start by researching opportunities through the lens of your intended course of study or profession, and compile a list of opportunities that you would realistically want to participate in. Write down all of their deadlines, and plan to finish each application about a week early in case you need to make last-minute edits before submitting.

If you’re interested in interning in a specific field but can’t find too many official internship programs to apply to, you can seek an opportunity on websites like LinkedIn and AngelList, or by networking, hosting informational interviews, and sending cold emails. In the event that none of these work out, there are plenty of volunteering opportunities and online courses to look into that will show colleges you’ve been proactive during your summer.

Spring of junior year is also a great time to ask for letters of recommendation for your college applications. For tips and tricks about who and when to ask for letters of recommendation and how to get these conversations started, whether with a teacher, supervisor, coach or advisor, check out our Common App 101: Letters of Recommendation resource, complete with email templates and a step-by-step guide. You can also read our Brag Sheet Guide to learn about the materials you should have prepared for your recommenders when you ask them to write letters on your behalf!

Working on your college applications when you’re not devoting time to your other summer commitments will be your most optimal move during the summer preceding senior year. Start by making sure you’ve secured a seat for any standardized tests you plan on taking over the summer. It’s critical to know where your scores fall relative to the schools’ averages in order to make amendments to your college list as needed, or determine whether or not you’ll have to test again in the fall.

By junior summer, you should have embarked on visits to at least some of the schools on your lists, and if you were unable to do so, attended a virtual information session or campus tour. Use your free time during the summer to take an inventory of what you liked and disliked about the colleges you have researched and visited. Try to keep these reflections focused on specific attributes of the colleges rather than the schools themselves—did you discover you liked smaller schools? Colleges that are located within cities? Programs that have specific research opportunities? As you narrow your college list and decide which schools you intend to apply to, use these reflections as the guiding metrics for finalizing your list.

Now that you have your application materials organized, it’s time to get writing! But before we jump in, it’s worth noting that writing your personal statement can be incredibly time-consuming and can drag into the fall if not written in a timely and intentional manner. Below, we’ve outlined some guidelines for how to streamline this process and get one of the most important components of your college application finished before senior year even begins.

It’s highly important that these components of your college application are finished before your Senior Fall, so that by the time school starts, you’ll have ample time to focus on college-specific supplements as well as your senior year coursework. Having an established understanding of the story you tell through your personal statement will also serve to inform what you should and shouldn’t write about in your supplemental essays, and it may even inform which colleges to remove from your final list and which ones to add. Maybe you’ll come to realize that you’re not as interested in biology as you’d previously thought, or that applying to schools in rural areas doesn’t make the most sense for you if your personal statement is about how much your urban upbringing has developed your love for international relations. In any case, take the summer to truly understand yourself in the context of the schools you’ll be applying to, and have a nearly finalized college list before things pick up again in the fall.

Now that you have your application materials organized, it’s time to get writing! But before we jump in, it’s worth noting that writing your personal statement can be incredibly time-consuming and can drag into the fall if not written in a timely and intentional manner. Below, we’ve outlined some guidelines for how to streamline this process and get one of the most important components of your college application finished before senior year even begins.

It’s highly important that these components of your college application are finished before your Senior Fall, so that by the time school starts, you’ll have ample time to focus on college-specific supplements as well as your senior year coursework. Having an established understanding of the story you tell through your personal statement will also serve to inform what you should and shouldn’t write about in your supplemental essays, and it may even inform which colleges to remove from your final list and which ones to add. Maybe you’ll come to realize that you’re not as interested in biology as you’d previously thought, or that applying to schools in rural areas doesn’t make the most sense for you if your personal statement is about how much your urban upbringing has developed your love for international relations. In any case, take the summer to truly understand yourself in the context of the schools you’ll be applying to, and have a nearly finalized college list before things pick up again in the fall.

This is the final stretch! In the fall of your senior year, prioritize making a schedule for completing each college’s application materials, including supplemental essays, scholarship applications, and unique additional application materials. To make sure you stay on track, your schedule should be detailed and realistic, and take your school work, activities and any life events that you’ll need to attend to in the coming months into account. Here are a few steps you can take to make this process as organized as possible:

This is the final stretch! In the fall of your senior year, prioritize making a schedule for completing each college’s application materials, including supplemental essays, scholarship applications, and unique additional application materials. To make sure you stay on track, your schedule should be detailed and realistic, and take your school work, activities and any life events that you’ll need to attend to in the coming months into account. Here are a few steps you can take to make this process as organized as possible:

One of the benefits of writing so many essays is that the process gets easier with each supplement you write. Many schools ask very similar questions using different words, so by the time you get through a few schools, chances are you’ll already know how to approach the essays for the remaining schools. We’ve outlined how to answer some of the most common supplemental essay prompts each on our How to write college supplements page.

Here are some of our top tips for writing supplements:

For more advice on how to write supplemental essays for top schools, check out our College Application Supplement Guides.

As you finish drafting your supplemental essays, it’s important to ask a second reader to make sure everything looks good. Send them along to parents, guidance counselors, teachers, mentors or other trusted adults—whoever they are, they should be people who know you well and who will give you honest feedback about your essays.

Do your best to have each application ready for submission a few days before the deadline. In the event you’ll need to make some last-minute edits or tweaks, having a few days to spare offers a useful safety net and some breathing room. Also, application portals and websites are known to crash almost every year, so submitting early will help you avoid this altogether.

As your application materials circulate through the review process throughout the fall, you may hear back from colleges that either highly encourage or require applicants to sit for interviews, either with an admissions representative on campus or with an alumnus in the applicant’s local area. However, some schools, such as Swarthmore, will expect you to contact them to set up an interview. In the latter case, simply contact the school’s admissions office or register on the school’s website if there’s an option to do so.

An interview is another opportunity to show what you have to offer while taking the time to ask questions about the school. For some tips and tricks on acing the interview, read through our guide on Best Practices for Virtual College Interviews as well as our post answering the question, What should I expect from a college admissions interview? As always, make sure to thank your interviewer via email no more than 24 hours after the interview.

If you’re waiting to hear back from the schools you applied to early, you might want to check out our article, Help! Early Decision results are almost here and I’m freaking out.

Most colleges and universities release their EA and ED decisions around mid-December, though some EA decisions come out in January or February. As we previously discussed, EA decisions are non-binding, so you will only be obligated to make a final college decision in the spring. However, if you’ve been accepted into a school ED (congratulations!), here’s a quick to-do list:

If you’ve been deferred to the regular decision application round, you’ll want to send the schools a letter of continued interest to let them know that you’re still considering them as one of your top choices. You can read our guide about How to Write a Letter of Continued Interest.

Whether you’ve been deferred, accepted through early action or rejected through early action or early decision, it’s crucial that you keep working hard on your regular decision applications. For a more comprehensive to-do list to follow when you’ve been accepted, deferred or rejected, take a look at our  complete resource about college responses, here.