Hey, it’s Seth again! I am procrastinating finishing something for teaching a class tomorrow and have decided to write this blog while I do so. (It’s late, I really should do this, but that’s something I can just regret my decisions tomorrow)
Speaking of regret, I have thought a lot (like a lot) about my college decisions process and what went well and what didn’t go well.While there are all the ups-and-downs of admissions and struggling with the anxiety and fear of failure, much of my negative experience with the college process came from annoying applications.
In the beginning of my applications process, I was inefficient. I had one google doc with a resume and I edited it over and over. As time went on, I grew a little more organized but still I have thought that I would do it differently. Below are just some of the tips that I would keep in mind (I hope to have a tutorial/guide later). Also, disclaimer: I used google drive to organize my files, but there’s many ways you can do this as long as it works for you.
1 - Repetition isn’t bad. I feared over-cluttering my google drive so I didn’t want to have too many resumes or lists of achievements. Chances are you’re not super close to the drive limit (and if you are how?? That’s wild lol). Regardless, I would recommend having a copy of every resume, every list of achievements, every essay, etc.
2 - Redundancy isn’t bad. (Get it?) One thing I learned to do more is putting in copies of 1 file in various places. I would make a folder for every application with the essays and resume I used (or I tried to), then copy this resume file into a resume folder so that they were all together.
3 - One file. Everything. Have one file where you keep most of your information together. Any information you’ll probably repeat a lot and might forget should be here. This might be more important for scholarships, but family income, house value, rent payments, mortgage costs, etc. etc. Keep a lot of information that matters in one place so you can access it for different applications easily.
4 - Save Your Applications. Everytime you are about to submit, SAVE. If you can download the PDF, do it. If you can’t and there’s a review page, press CTRL+P and then save a PDF to your computer. This information might be useful in the future. SAVE!
The information above might not be super useful yet (I plan to upload some of the information from my own applications to help, but if you’re struggling or feeling overwhelmed when applications start, remember to take baby steps. Rather than start three applications, find out what information you’ll need for them. Write down your extracurriculars (how much time you spend), your awards, and more. This will help set you up for a smoother, less stressful application process.
Seth Robles, MIT 2027
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