How to Create a College Application Schedule
You might be thinking to yourself why you should create a schedule… after all, it’s just a few applications, right? 🤔 Well, not really. The college application process is a demanding, highly intensive process if you’re giving it your all (which you should be!).
Creating a schedule is the single most helpful thing you can do to set yourself up for success. And I don’t mean success as in “you’ll get into this school or that school”—I mean success as in you’ll be able to put your best foot forward across all of your applications, without succumbing to an overwhelming amount of stress and anxiety.
❝ As the old adage goes, failing to prepare is preparing to fail. ❞
To create a successful schedule, you first need to have your college list put together. This includes not just the schools you intend on applying to, but also scholarships, specialty programs (if applicable), arts or research supplemental pieces, and your early application strategy. Truth be told, you can even craft the first draft of your schedule without this piece fully aligned, but it’s better if you have it buttoned up.
So, what are the elements of the schedule? 📋
There are a lot of moving parts to the college application process, and it’s far too easy to miss something or run into unexpected problems if you don’t think about things ahead of time. Things you’ll want to be thinking about are:
The Common App / UC Application / CSU Application, etc. demographic information, and class schedules
The personal statement
Your extracurriculars and activities section
Financial aid applications
Letters of recommendation
Supplemental essays for each school
Arts/research supplemental portfolios
Creating a resume
Scholarship applications
And of course let’s not forget you have to think of the entire application strategy, how to portray yourself, and how to ideally optimize your chances of acceptance. With so many moving parts, this is why we say it’s critical to have a schedule. If you plan ahead of time, it reduces the uncertainty of knowing when to work on each school, when to complete certain tasks, and how to avoid last-minute procrastination.
Typically, we recommend starting bright and early with the application process, ideally as early as the beginning of July (or even earlier if you’re up to it).
While the Common App doesn’t open until early August, there’s a lot of planning you can get done beforehand. You can finalize your college list, research potential scholarships, gather your activities list, brainstorm your potential essay topics, and of course create your actual schedule. By the time August comes around, you should already be knee-deep into application season!
For most students, another key tip we suggest is to try and aim for around 1 application per week starting from August. At this pace, you should be able to do just over 20 different applications without ever having to do more than one set of supplementals in a given week. And for most students, that’s probably more applications than is even necessary, which means if you maintain this pace, it simply gives you the ability to take a week off when things get stressful, busy from school, or you get sick. In other words, it's a built-in buffer.
Once you know the deadlines, work backwards. Early applications shouldn’t be started in late October; they should be drafted, edited, reviewed, and finalized weeks earlier. The goal is to set internal deadlines before the official deadlines. While you don’t have to submit them weeks in advance, it doesn’t hurt, and we always suggest submitting your applications no later than 2-3 days before the official deadline. You never know what might happen, so no need to tempt fate.
Lastly, we suggest you use a tool to keep track of this schedule like Google Sheets, Excel, Smartsheet, or something similar. If you want your own copy of our schedule/tracker to use, fill out your email below and we’ll send you one so you don’t have to start from scratch! ✅
