The College Admissions Scoop: Don't Procrastinate - Finish Your College Applications Now!

By Marilyn G.S. Emerson and Jana Jett Loeb

A Note to Parents: As you encourage your student in completing their applications, feeling confident that they are making the best use of their time is likely a concern. Though you probably remind them frequently to keep up to date on their work, it might help for them to hear an outside perspective. Hopefully the following post will give your student a good sense of how to avoid the pitfalls of procrastination.

As you probably know, procrastination is not a great strategy for completing your college applications—or anything else, for that matter. While it makes sense that you need time to think about how to best present yourself within the application, and that sometimes you need to take a break from the work, it does not follow that waiting until the mood strikes you (inevitably, 11:30pm on December 31st) is a productive approach.

The first thing to know regarding procrastination is that even if you are impressed with what you can pull off at the last moment, admission officers will sense that your application is lacking in foresight and substantive effort. Because the deadlines for applications are months after materials first become available, readers will wonder why you weren’t able to take advantage of the considerable time allotted to you in putting together your application. If you do not use that time, your ability to present yourself as genuinely and comprehensively as possible will suffer. This means that admission officers will not have as solid of a grasp on who you are and what you have to offer to their community. It also suggests that you are not a responsible student, and you can probably imagine why that would reflect poorly on your ability to make a positive impact in the university classroom.

But there are some more practical concerns regarding procrastination, as well. If you are submitting at the last minute, you’re unlikely to be the only student doing so. Submitting online at the same time as tens of thousands of other students makes you vulnerable to internet troubles, uploading problems, or system failures. Also, as you finish up your application, you are more likely to make mistakes or miss areas to correct if you are rushing to finish everything on time. Those little details are very important to admission officers, and if you forget to spell check your essay or take the tracked changes off your activity sheet, it will reflect poorly on your application as a whole.

Perhaps the most important reason to be timely with your application, however, is that it gives you the chance to relax about the process. Being timely doesn’t mean that you aren’t still working on finishing touches in late December, but it does mean that you have been responsible enough in compiling your application that you feel confident that you are submitting your finest work. You deserve to be proud of what you have submitted, and you deserve to relax when it is all done. If you make use of all the time you have and avoid procrastination, you will experience the feeling of considerable accomplishment and relaxation when you finally click “submit.”