Seniors work tirelessly throughout the summer and fall writing essays for their top college choices. Some brave the process alone or choose to hire tutors, while others use their parents to produce quality pieces of writing describing their background, identity or another aspect of themselves. When that last word is typed up and the essay is finally finished they can only now take a breather—or can they?
The daunting task of filling out the Common App, the Coalition Application or Universal College Application is something that a lot of students do not anticipate. The process for the Common App isn’t too hard to follow: Applicants enter their general information on the Common App, then put in their personal essay on the Common App section. After this, students must go into each college and answer the specific application info and answer any other supplemental essays or questions. The biggest problem is how students are bombarded with a plethora of questions about their family members, current classes, grades, and even the size of their school that become repetitive and tedious to fill out.
During my application process, I found myself putting in information I had already entered earlier in the Common App section. I reentered information about my parents and some questions got even more specific, asking for the official title of my parent’s jobs.
Let’s not forget about the college specific questions that do not show up until you start the application for a college. Some colleges will ask students to fill out their family information a second time, occasionally more in depth than previously. There are colleges who ask about a parent’s employment or where they went to college. It begs the question: Do colleges need to know all of this information?
In some respects, yes. It can be helpful for a college or university to analyze what kinds of applicants they attract but the questions can quickly become redundant for students who’ve answered them five other times. Common App could make all colleges use the general information that all applicants on the Common App must enter in order to reduce repetition.
Hidden inside these questions can also be questions specific to your major. Some colleges will ask applicants to say what major they are interested in and to write up an explanation as to why they want to pursue this field. This creates an additional longer-form question that students will have to answer apart from the main essay and supplementals.
I had to answer major-specific questions that jumped out at me while scrolling through applications. For any university, even the smallest question can impact an applicant’s admission decision which leads to unnecessary stress over a two to three sentence response.
The stress of applying to college can affect the mental health of students and lead to negative impacts in performance at school. It can create a cascading effect in student’s lives and it’s something that needs to be considered for college applications.
The questions on the Common App and college-specific applications are necessary but repetitiveness needs to be eliminated and the process could be streamlined by doing so.