Helpful advice for applying to college

helpful advice applying to college

With so many moving parts in the college admissions process, it’s easy to get overwhelmed by everything you need to do as you start applying to college. It’s likely that at some point, you’ll stress about deadlines and feel overwhelmed.

Check this out: Tricks to help manage stress and stay positive

It usually starts with innocent and well-intentioned questions and ends with you in a panic.

adults: "what are your plans for summer? where will you apply to college? me: panicked honk deer
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But it doesn’t have to be that way.

I mean, don’t get me wrong. In terms of dealing with stress, you’ll learn things about yourself that you never knew during the college application process. This is supposed to happen, so don’t worry *too* much.

But try to think of applying to colleges like preparing for a marathon. Marathoners build endurance and participate in a ton of short races before marathons. They don’t just show up to the Boston Marathon start line the third Monday in April and expect to be able to run 26.2 miles without training for months beforehand.

Breaking down the admissions process into easy to manage chunks (working towards a marathon) will keep you focused and organized and help prevent you from getting emotionally drained.

I’ve broken down some things you should know about applying to college (any college, not just UMass Lowell) *and when* you should complete these milestones.

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I’ll give you some pointers on what should be accomplished from the time you begin your junior year in high school to the time you submit your last application as a senior.

In the next series of posts, you’ll figure out how to work through the marathon that is applying to colleges. You’ll learn how to compile a list of colleges that you’ll thrive at, when you should ask teachers for letters of recommendations and more.

Here are the links to all the blog posts in this series so you can get to them easily:

This is an eight-part series, and I plan to publish new posts on Fridays. I’ll update the links here as they go live. Sign up to get notified when I publish the next post in this series.

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