LAST MINUTE TIPS FOR Regular Decision -5 days to go!!!!

In no particular order, here are some tips for you if you are applying for RD.

- If you were deferred or rejected from your ED, EA, REA college, do not assume that you are going to get into these schools or similar schools. It's best to have some realistic options on your college lists like soft targets or targets. It's better to apply to a couple more targets and have somewhere good to go in the Fall vs. settling for your safeties.

-A few cycles ago, you could easily distinguish between a hard reach, reach or hard target school. Now with extremely low acceptance rates, there are now 31 colleges with sub-10 % admit rates versus 20 3 years ago. Some colleges that were safeties or targets for some strong applicants like Tulane, NEastern, NYU, Grinnell, and Colgate are now "reaches" for most. So you have to rebalance your college list to include some colleges that are in the 25%-40% acceptance range to safeguard your chances.

-Find the smartest people you know and have them read your main college app essay and your supplementals. Not submitting your best-written work is often the fatal mistake people make which can be the deciding factor in getting admitted or not. Although this is only 650 words or 150-300 words for supplementals, if you don't make your essays memorable leaving the reader with a strong desire to advocate for you, your application will struggle when it arrives before the committee for a vote. Do not assume that your strong grades, course rigor, test scores and ECs matter more than your essays. The world we now live in is different post COVID-19. Top colleges get more perfect GPAs and TEST scores than seats available, the decision to admit or not often comes down to who the committee and the reader thinks has the more compelling story.

-Go through your 10 ECs with a calculator. If your 10 ECs add up to more than 4000 hours, to me that is a big red flag because there are only 105-110 weeks of HS (7 semesters) and no one is going to believe that you are spending close to 40 hours a week on ECs in addition to attending school, homework, eating, sleeping, exercising and chores.

-Review your Additional information section thoughtfully and carefully. Everyone in college admissions knows that COVID-19 created learning loss, periods of depression and anxiety, and a drop in test scores and grades. Therefore, do not waste their time trying to convince them that you would have had all 5s in your APs instead of 3s or a 4.00 UWGPA instead of a 3.6 UWGPA. Or that you have only 2 ECs, not 10 because of COVID-19. This is not what the additional information section is for. Nor is it a place for you to further explain in detail all your awards, honors, and ECs. The main objective for the add'l information section is to allow you to share something new that is not evident in the rest of your application that you feel will give context to your application such that not divulging this, would not be an accurate portrayal of your narratives. So if there was a death in the family, you were hospitalized for a severe illness, you had to move because of a hurricane or one parent was incarcerated for domestic violence or something completely out of your control, this is where you give AOs some context to your application. It is not a venting box or a place to upsell yourself in addition to what you have already provided. If you won 2 gold medals in Alpine Skiing, you do not need to use the Add'l info section to share all your national titles, state titles, regional titles, and Brand endorsement contracts you have because AOs will assume there was a long uphill battle of races, and training to get to where you are.

-If you were deferred, wait as long as practical to send in your LOCI because you want to include NEW information. New information means changes in your grades, changes in your test scores, new awards, new honors, new scholarships, or outcomes from ECs that show more intellectual vitality or curiosity than revealed in your ED,EA,REA application. So send in your LOCI 1 month prior to the decision date but not later than that.

Good luck with your RD applications!!!! And happy new year.