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Katy Payne she/her
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August 1: the day that incoming high school seniors all across the world rush to open their Common App account. The last 12 years of my education should have prepared me for this moment, right? But now the time has come and I have no clue how I want to spend my next four years.
The Common App has two main sections to fill out: the Common App itself and college-specific questions. So far my approach has been to answer all the quick questions first and end with the longer written pieces. I started with the Common App.
The first several sections are a lot of data points like your address and your SAT score(s). The next section, the activities section, I find to be a little more stressful. Opening this section, you get to list up to 10 activities you have participated in as a high school student. While this may seem like an easy feat, I feel a lot of pressure is put on this section. Activities should be listed in order of importance. Be descriptive, but don’t waste space listing every achievement; you don’t want to put your admissions officer to sleep. Describe the impact you had and what you did with the club, rather than the club itself. All within 150 characters. And while I want this section to be perfect, I also know that there’s someone out there writing their descriptions with AI, and how am I supposed to beat a computer? And so I put it off.
My next step within the site is to move on to the college-specific questions. Each school you add to your list has its own dropdown menu in the “My Colleges” tab. From here you can find each college’s additional questions, add your recommenders, and complete any supplemental writing pieces that may be required. Common questions asked by most, if not all, colleges include whether or not you want your test scores considered, where you plan on living your first year, and what you intend to major in (a question I’m not sure I quite know the answer to).
Once I commit my answers to the page, or the screen I guess, I am ready to move on to the writing portions. And this is where I’m currently stuck in my application process. I know exactly what I want to write about, but every time I face that page I freeze. Through every part of this process I know that I have to be on top of my game — I’m applying to competitive colleges. For years I’ve heard that the essay will make or break my application, though, so now the pressure is really on. Even as I just throw words at the page to get started, there’s a worry in the back of my head I’ve had since roughly this time last year.
You see, in November 2022, ChatGPT made its grand web debut, and since then it’s been abused by students. When I wrote a paper about admissions and chatbot AIs last year, I asked it to write a college admissions essay for me just so I could see if it was worth being concerned about. The essay it wrote was quite good by my standards, which started me thinking. “If I think it wrote a good essay that’s bad by a college’s standards, then I’m a bad writer, but if it does actually write a good essay — one even better than I could write — I’m still a bad writer,” I stated in the paper. This thought echoes in my mind every time I open my personal statement. Every time I go to write a supplemental piece. Every time I try to write my activities descriptions. You’ll never be as good as that compilation of code. And it kills me.
I’d love to tell you how I’m overcoming this thought, but I’m not sure I am, or if I ever will. At the end of the day though, the essays still need to get done, so I sit down and I write whatever I can think of relating to my topic. Tying it all together is a task for another day. My brain isn’t a supercomputer after all. Even though it seems that with all these supplemental writing prompts that some schools seem to think it is. My first deadline was November 1. The clock was ticking.
Ideally my final August as a high school student would have been spent with my friends, but we were all busy crafting essays, visiting campuses, and doing test prep. We no longer talked about the latest show from Taylor Swift’s Eras tour, but instead where we plan on applying and what we think we want to major in. We stopped laying out in the pouring rain or staying up late talking about McDonald’s Grimace shakes or caffeinated pancakes. We started asking when each other’s first deadlines are or how to add running start courses into your Common App. I mean I procrastinated this piece by going down a rabbit hole of MIT student blogs, and I bet there’s plenty of other prospective first years doing almost the exact same thing. We are consumed by the college application mill. Hopefully it spits us out whole.
