Brilliant … But Bouncy

The Miracle is Called the Common Application.

After seeing nearly a hundred colleges, and going back to officially tour a couple dozen of those, Dylan narrowed down his list of favorite colleges. He planned to apply to only six.

Six, I thought, was a sufficient number. Interestingly, he dropped all the “party” schools as a prerequisite to his official visits. And he rather randomly eliminated another handful without returning to do the in-depth tours. Dylan knew what he liked and what he wanted most, and he was able to decide pretty easily which colleges he most valued.

Because of his ADHD especially, we suggested that he apply to as many colleges as possible before the school year started. This wasn’t an easy task for Dylan, who puts off any anxiety-provoking tasks until the last possible second.

But then … a miracle happened. The miracle is called the Common Application. Unlike my (very) old days of handwritten or typed, snail-mail applications, the “Common App” is a simple, online submission form that is accepted by hundreds of colleges.

Four of Dylan’s six chosen colleges accept the “Common App,” so he started completing it. He filled in the appropriate boxes sometime in late June. Then, when the “Common App” became live – meaning, colleges would start accepting applications – Dylan needed only to finish filling in the rest of those boxes and click “submit.”

So he did. He discovered that one college required something entirely out of date and unnecessary. That college happened to be at the bottom of his list of six, so he dropped it from the list.

Down to only five applications, Dylan panicked a little bit. His fall-back school was gone – so on what would he now fall back? Would it be community college? Or was there a different option?

The Common App stepped up to the task. Dylan noticed that some of his college choices had no fee to apply. Some did have a fee, but at least one of his favorites was free. So he thought, “I wonder if any other colleges are free.”

According to the Common App site, there are three hundred and thirty – yes, 330! – colleges that not only accept the Common App but they also have no fee to apply. So Dylan had only to choose a few schools from the many he’d seen, decide which ones would be worthy fallback schools, and put them on his list to apply.

It took him an hour, and he had applied to three new fall-back schools. He also found one “free” school that is going to send us gallivanting around the country again, since he hadn’t yet seen it and it is a great school, so we want to visit. But for the most part, everything was so simple that Dylan had applied to six colleges by mid-August.

Unfortunately, two of his original choices don’t accept the Common App, so he is still working on those. The goal – the one I’ve set for him so that he can concentrate on music auditions in the fall – is that he will have applied to all the colleges on his list (now nine) by the end of September. Then, when his friends are scrambling to apply during winter break, we can do something fun with our time.

Of course, there are still SAT scores to be ordered, transcripts to be requested, and the ever-elusive teacher recommendations to attain. But for the most part, Dylan is well on his way.