Planning for Summer

 It’s June 4th. For most of you, summer has begun and you are gearing up for all kinds of serious fun: camps, travel, jobs, internships, relaxation, exploration, lots of outdoors time, and hopefully, a ton of unstructured lounging about.
Before you get totally lost in your new routine, keep in mind the following: there are three important steps you will want to take before you return to school mid August. The time to start on these steps is now. I highly urge you against procrastinating until August to do this work; this will put you at a disadvantage in your applications and significantly increase your stress levels.
In this blog, I’ll help you plan and execute so you can start your work on your applications and still enjoy your summer.

The Timeline
You have between now and August 1st to complete these items.
Busy Work

• Finalize your college list of no more than 12 colleges. Put in time to research your colleges. Use the Fiske Guide (or any other Guide), Niche and Unigo, to get an overview of each college you are considering. Explore the website of each college. Search the categories of student life, core requirements, majors, undergraduate research, summer opportunities, study abroad and career guidance. Evaluate the majors that interest you. Ask yourself these questions. What is the curriculum? What courses are offered? What are the research areas of the professors? Figure out what piques your interest and make note of it. Choose colleges that genuinely inspire your intelligence and excitement to learn and do new things.
• Fill out a Common Application. Yippeeee!! Starting this year you can create an account that will not be deleted come August 1st! Go ahead and take advantage of this access and fill out your application. This is easy and fast. You can do this work at anytime: at night when you want to relax, at the airport, in the car (if you have portable WiFi).

Essay Work

• Write your UC Essays. Please see this worksheet from UC admissions to help you develop your UC essays.
• Write your Common Application Personal Statement. Here are the prompts. Tip: Take one of your UC essays and develop it further into a 650 word essay that answers one of the Common Application Prompts.
• Determine how you can re-usue your Common Application essay for The Coalition application. The Coaltion essay prompts are here. Use essay prompt 5 on the Coalition which allows you to write an essay about any topic of your choice. That is an easy solution to this problem. Because the Coalition is new and we do not know how it will hold up under massive use, I highly recommend refraining from sinking a lot of time into understanding and adopting it. Your time will be used more wisely on making sure that your UC Applications and Common Applications are in the best possible shape.

Summer Tips

• Have fun!
  • Don’t work on your college application materials in the usual places. Instead, go to Philz Cafe or Green Library or Mitchell Library, or any other cafe, library or park. This not only gets you out of your ‘routine head’ which can lead to flat, unproductive writing, but also it allows you to reflect on yourself from another perspective.
• Bring a friend who is as disciplined as you are. The two of you can work together as long as you set the rule to work for 2 hours on your applications.
• Get disciplined. Discipline makes regular work easy. Set aside 1-2 hours each day to do this work. It is easiest to do this if you set a fixed time each day. Early morning and late night generally work for most. It may be that you are best at doing easy tasks in the morning and the more creative work of writing in the evening. Follow your own rhythm and style, but set it up as a regular time. This way your brain will know when it is time to work and it will rev up for you.
• Use a timer. Time your work periods. This will help you to bracket your work hours and to be more productive and efficient with your time. In my experience, when students know they have to finish within a certain amount of time, they find it easier to focus. If you generally do not work well under the pressure of time, then give yourself extra time or skip this exercise.
• Use brainstorming and automatic writing. Don’t try to produce the best answers to your essay prompts immediately. It is important to explore and just write and see where you go with your thoughts. So first of all get lost in just writing things out. See what you write about. The unconscious and creative parts of the mind come out when you just let go to write and play. See what you say. Then come back and choose a part of your writing that you like and that reflects well who you are.

Alright! That’s it! Wishing you all a fantastic summer. If you don’t expect to get to any of this work before August, or if you imagine that you’ll only get part of it done, I highly recommend to you my August Camp Application. See below for details.