While senior year is full of activities, like senior sunrise, decision day, and senior clapout, it isn’t all fun and games. A lot is happening during senior year and it isn’t the time to slack off. There is a lot to do, especially during the first trimester.
College applications are a large portion of work that needs to be done on top of schoolwork. There is a general recommended timeline that should be followed for the college application process. Over the summer, college lists and activity lists should be finished. Know where you want to apply and the amount of essays that have to be written. Drafts of your main essay should also be done near the end of the summer. The entire essay doesn’t need to be complete, but having a general idea will make the first trimester so much lighter. It doesn’t need to be perfect, but you can’t fix something that doesn’t exist.
Once CommonApp opens in August, add all of your schools and start writing their supplemental essays. Usually, most schools don’t change their supplementals, but they can, so make sure you’re writing for the correct year. After you apply to all of your schools, it’s mostly waiting.
Just because it’s senior year, doesn’t mean that your grades don’t matter. Schools will still see all of your grades at the end of the year as well as first and second trimester grades during the admissions process. Additionally, many seniors still need a credit to graduate, like an economics class or physics, and you should make sure that one class isn’t what prevents you from graduating.
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