It was a nice autumn day and senior Blanka Bak was just getting home from school. After a stressful day, a lot of people would go and relax, but not Bak. Instead she spent the next four to five hours working on her three most important supplementals for her college applications. 

Bak decided that her research for these supplementals would include a professor she would like to work with, three clubs she would like to be a part of, why she chose her major and a specific class she would like to do. Since she did this for each of the nine schools she applied to, it took up a lot of time and was hard on her. 

“It was really mentally challenging to just stay on top of everything,” Bak said. 

The college application process is long and hard for many seniors. For a lot of schools, it can take months to complete the application for the different deadlines. The college application deadlines are Oct. 15, Nov. 1, Nov. 15, Jan 1, Jan. 2 and Jan. 15. Certain schools also require test scores, supplemental essays and a resume to apply. This step is where Bak found herself struggling. 

Bak plans to double major in mechanical engineering and motorsport engineering with a minor in Spanish. To try and avoid stress with the deadlines, she completed her applications four months before they were due.

 Bak not only chose to rewrite her original application essay, but she also had to write all of her supplemental essays in the span of one month to fit her timing of everything. Supplementals are additional essays that give colleges a better insight into if a student is a good fit for the school. They usually require some sort of research about the college and its majors and extracurriculars.

For Bak, the entire process was very difficult. She claims to only have made it through because of support from her teachers, family and friends. 

“There were days that I would just completely break down,” Bak said. “It was really just a difficult process for me, but thankfully I had my parents and my friends mentally supporting me through it.”

As a chronic procrastinator, Bak thinks that getting as much homework done during school gave her more time at home to work on college applications. Purdue University was Bak’s most challenging application because it’s her dream school. She spent a little more time doing research for her essay to make sure it is the best it could be. Bak also recalled, University of Wisconsin-Madison and University of Washington being some of the hardest. Because Bak wasn’t as familiar with these schools as she was with others, she needed to dedicate more research time when writing their supplementals. 

Senior June Ardito also went through the process of applying for colleges. Although, Ardito’s process was a little different. She wants to major in musical theater, which requires a  more in-depth process. While she still writes essays, she also has to record pre-screen videos of herself singing and dancing to send in as well as supplementals. 

Ardito’s process has taken two to three months so far to complete the college applications for the 11 schools she applied for. 

Because musical theater is such a selective program, Ardito says that some colleges only pick 20 students out of 1000 entries. This leads to a long and hard process for every candidate, including Ardito. 

First, she had to send in her college application and pre-screen videos. Then, she found out if she was rejected or accepted to the college. Finally, the audition process determines if they made it in the musical theater program or not. Just because a student gets into the school doesn’t mean they made it into the program. 

One thing Ardito tried to do throughout her process was stay calm. 

“It definitely helped [to talk to friends] because they understood what you were going through because they were going through the same thing,” Ardito said. 

One thing that Prospect does to help seniors with college applications is provide feedback on their essays. A team of five English teachers help with this. For the past four years, teachers Matthew Love, Tim McDermott, Michael Andrews, Jill Corr and Elizabeth Beer all for their “sixth assignment” to help seniors on their essays. All full-time teachers teach five classes and then an additional “sixth assignment” where they are a study hall teacher or hall monitor. These teachers decided to help on essays instead. 

The most notable teacher is Love who has helped seniors for about 20 years with essays. Love came up with this team because he wanted students to tell their story with their own voice. He also wanted to help seniors with this because the process is stressful and not many people are qualified to help. 

“With the lines of equity, we think it is important if we can offer something as a school free of charge to help them with this one crucial part of [the application process] that really only a handful of people in this building know how to help with,” Love said.

He enjoys helping with these essays because there is no grade, no rubric and “[students are] doing it for the right reasons”. He also thinks that getting help from a team like his is beneficial because they know what colleges are looking for and they have helped so many other students with completing their essays. 

To ensure he remains reliable, Love goes to conferences hosted by college admissions and reading articles online to stay up to date. He also keeps samples of past essays that demonstrate what seniors should be looking to achieve. He has also realized that expectations for college admissions haven’t changed in 20 years, so a lot of things he learned in the past are still relevant now. 

Love enjoys helping students especially because he didn’t have help like this in high school and he thinks that it’s important that students have a resource like this team of his. 

“It’s a really exciting process because everybody has a story in them and they just need some help bringing it to light,” Love said. 

Bak’s and Ardito’s advice for students is to develop good time management skills. For Bak and Ardito, preparing over the summer for their applications really helped them when it came time to start writing the essays on top of doing school work. Both of them also did a lot of their homework at school to ensure they had plenty of time after school to write essays. Love also proposes a more intimate strategy for overwhelmed students. “Be yourself, sound like yourself, be honest,” Love said. “Don’t try to impress anybody. Be the truth to yourself … tell your own story in your own voice, that’s the key.”