College application deadlines can sneak up on you while you're busy whiling away your senior year and planning your dorm room decor. Designing and maintaining a college application checklist will help ensure you are systematic about writing admissions essays, sending deposits, finishing applications and meeting deadlines.
Instructions
1. Make a columnar chart, whether you choose do it by hand or in a computer spreadsheet format. You'll need a column for your checklist, along with a column for each college to which you're applying. Title your columns appropriately. For example, column one might say "Tasks," while columns two and three say "College 1" and "College 2."
2. Brainstorm what needs to be done to complete your college applications. You will need to get high school transcript copies, begin thinking about essay topics, look into scholarships offered and find out about financial aid deadlines. You may also need to schedule SAT or ACT tests or get copies of your scores, get letters of recommendation and send application fees.
3. Create rows within your chart for each application task and plug in final topics from your brainstorming session. Label a separate row for each task. Labeled tasks include items like "Contact College for Application Requirements," "Obtain Transcript Copies," "Schedule Admissions Interview" and "Select Essay Topic."
4. Visit a website such as FastWeb.com (see Resources below). This type of site is designed to help make sense of the college experience, and you can get ideas about what to put on your application checklist and format it to make it more user-friendly.
5. Check with the admissions office at prospective colleges, or look at their websites to see if they have an existing application checklist. Consolidate the lists from each school into a master list that you can use to keep track of everything in one place.
6. Use your checklist after you've labored over making it! Checking off and dating each application task for your schools of choice will simplify your life and ensure that you don't get denied admission or financial aid due to a missed deadline or a silly oversight.
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