How we help you fill out the Common App

 




By Rajkamal Rao  

Image Credit: Rao Advisors LLC.

The University of Texas will continue to accept the Common App (along with ApplyTexas).

Many parents ask our help to assist their teenagers in filling out college applications - primarily the Common App.

You generally need our help to complete the form for only one college. We will record the Zoom call and let you refer to the recording for the other universities on your list. We require the presence of at least one parent throughout the call, with no exceptions.

Before we get on the call, several preparatory steps must be completed.

1.   We should be in WhatsApp communication with your teenager through a group. The group name should follow the format 2025_JohnStudent, assuming a 2025 graduating class.

2.   We should have completed your long-form resume review.

3.   You should already have completed the formalities to have your high school transcript sent to the college under consideration. Every school follows a different process - but this post should provide you with some guidance.

4.   You should have already sent your SAT/ACT scores to the college unless you want to exercise the test-optional feature. Self-reporting SAT scores on the Common App is entirely different from sending official scores from the College Board.

5.   Filling out the Common App. The Common App has two parts to it. The common section - including static information like name, address, contact information, social security number or Tax Identification number, information about the high school, the self-reporting of the SAT scores - is common for all colleges. We ask that you fill out as much information here as you can.

It would help if you filled out the FERPA section on the Common App to request that recommendation letter links be sent to your recommenders. For this step, you would need the recommender's name, title, and email address (this also applies to school counselor recommendations). Your teenager must have keyed each item from the reviewed long-form resume (in step 2 above) into the Common App Activity Section. (See note below).

The second part of the Common App is the college-specific information (such as first and second-choice major, start term, and supplemental essay responses). Here also, try to fill out as much information as you can. For some schools, such as Texas A&M, you will be asked to self-report your high school grades (SRAR). This task can take up to two hours - so we recommend that a parent assist the student in accurately making the clerical entries.

The SRAR is a crucial step in college admissions and a university will not consider your application until it is complete. Because of the manual nature of the data entry process, we will not review the SRAR, relying on the parents to validate that this important step has been accurately completed.

Note about the Common App Activity section: The Common App Activity Section severely limits the expression of each activity to an 80-character title and a 150-character description. The best way to deal with this limitation is to copy and paste our reviewed long-form resume content into ChatGPT and explicitly ask it to compress it to the desired character length for both title and body. ChatGPT is excellent at this kind of thing.

Sometimes, ChatGPT exceeds the character length - at which time you can gently rebuke it and have fun. "I said 150 characters!" The output is generally good, but as with all things ChatGPT, you need to review that it makes sense and doesn't take away from the original resume (at least the salient points). Completing the activity section takes time - sometimes an hour - so please have this section complete before the call.

A Note About Rao Advisors Premium Services
Our promise is to empower you with high-quality, ethical and free advice via this website.  But parents and students often ask us if they can engage with us for individual counseling sessions.

Individual counseling is part of the Premium Offering of Rao Advisors and involves a fee.  Please  contact us for more information.