Common App Guide

In this post I'm going to go over how to...

Set up your account with the Common Application
Venture into the Common App and understand the key elements of your profile and the platform
Search for schools, add them to your list of schools, and see their requirements
Check for supplemental essays
Find the Common App essay section of the application and upload your essay.

Hopefully you will come back to this guide whenever it's time for you to make your account. It's really not that hard! It's like any software, really. You have to spend an hour poking around, but then you should be ready to roll.

Mastering the Common App: A guide that maybe no one asked for directly but, hey, here I am writing it and you're reading it (hi!)

I haven’t been in high school for awhile – ten years.

So by now, there may be some required class students take that teaches them everything they need to know about the Common Application.

This rundown is for anyone who missed class that day, or spent the class playing fortnite, or just didn’t get the message.

To really grind home the message, I’m going to open up a Common Application account and show you how to go through the process, step-by-step.

Before we get going, though, a definitional note for the noobest noobs:

The Common Application is an online platform used by hundreds of schools across the country to receive and evaluate student applications.

The Common App is the centralized space where you upload a common personal essay (the infamous Common App essay), your demographic information, and all the good stuff that goes out to every school you apply to. (This will occasionally include school specific supplemental essays.)

It’s also the place where you pay for your applications and actually hit “send.” So, all in all, it’s your home base for the college application.

Now, let's begin.

Step #1: Creating an Account with the Common Application

Ok, first things first, let’s make an account.

Navigate to the Common Application website, here: https://www.commonapp.org/

Navigate to the top-right of the screen, where it says “create an account.”

Pic of Dashboard login 📷

Ok, I figured out how to make an arrow button in Google Docs. This is good. Let’s keep going.

It’s time to create your account. I’m signing in as an educational professional. When you do this, you’ll be selecting “student."

Once you pick the right category, you’ll be taken forward to the next page where you’ll be asked to fill out a bunch of information about yourself, your family, and when you plan to apply to school.

Fill this out as best you can, accept the terms of use, and hit “Create your Account” at the bottom of the page.

Pic of Login / account creation 📷

Step #2: Venturing Into the Common App

Alright, our account is live!

After you hit the “Create” button on the previous page, you should be taken directly into the main Common App dashboard.

Because I signed up as an educational professional, it’s given me a “practice account.” But you can’t really tell. For all we care, my account looks the same as yours will when you create your student account.

This is how it looks when you finish your account and log in for the first time.

Pic of Fresh login 📷

In the top-right of that screenshot you can see my login information. I have a sample ID from the Common App (my Common App ID, or CAID).

(This is an important number to keep on hand. I recommend writing it down somewhere physical. Or if, like me, you only use paper as a way to look busy in meetings, a note on your phone will do. Hell, text your mom if that's best.)

If you click on the gear icon in the top right, you have the option to change your contact information – your email, password, and communication preferences.

Sidenote: A big part of the “deal” with the Common Application is that they communicate student information to schools.

That means that, if you create an account on their platform (which you kind of have to do), the Common App will be sharing your information with its member schools by default.

After you create your Common Application account, you will notice that random schools start to hit you up through your email. If you’re annoyed by this and want to stop hearing from these schools, you can simply change your communication preferences by using the gear.

On the right-hand bar, you’ll notice some FAQs and resources in the “need help” section.

Also, the Common Application recently added a chat function. So if you’re completely lost, you can communicate directly with a staff member at the organization. I haven't tried this. Check it out and report back.

Aside from those features, however, 95% of your life on the Common App will unfold in the central dashboard pictured above.

This is where you can view your schools, fill out the various sections of the Common App, search for colleges and universities to apply to, and gain access to some financial aid resources.

Let’s take a tour through each of these tabs. Instead of going in order (that would be too easy), I’m going to go through them in the order that a student might use them.

For this, I’m going to assume that you have a school list in mind already. No judgement if you don't. It's just easier for the sake of the example to assume that you do:)

Step #3: Search for a school

Once you’ve created your account, head over to that central dashboard and click on the tab that says “College Search.”

Once you do, you’ll be presented with a search bar and, below that, an alphabetical list of all the Common App member schools.

Pic of college search 📷

Let’s add a school to our list. Because I want to show a somewhat more complex case, the school I’m going to select is Columbia University.

Sidenote: There is also a button that says “more filters” below the search bar. If you don’t know the actual name of your school but prefer to search for schools based on pre-defined criteria, you can use this button to narrow your list accordingly.

I don’t actually think this “more filters” tab adds much value. You may be able to refine your search, but the Common App provides almost no qualitative data about the schools in its list.

This is unlike, say, an organization like Niche.com, which can help you get a clearer sense of a school’s strengths and weaknesses.

Where I DO see the value of this button is in narrowing your search down to schools that don’t require tests, for example.

If you are a terrible test-taker and you are limiting your choices to test-optional schools, then maybe you can get some value from this function. Again, however, there are other sites that do a better job. Overall I think Common App should invest in their own platform and make it so students can do ALL or most of their school research without leaving. If you're reading this, Common App, let's talk.

When you punch in “Columbia” to the search field, it will bring up every school that matches the search criteria. Like so 📷

Folks, I can't tell you how many schools in the US have similar fucking names. So when you add "columbia," make sure you're really adding "columbia," if you know what I mean.

Go ahead and click on Columbia University. You don’t need to hit the "+" button yet, but you can if you’re sure you want to add it to your list.

Before I do, I want to explore Columbia's basic college profile.

Step #4: Exploring College Profiles

Once we click on our school, we can see all the required application components.

Pro tip..... If you're trying to figure out any application info (deadlines, required supplements, etc.) go HERE. Don't Google it and look for your answers on a third-party site. The Common App is your single source of truth for most logistical/application questions.

The school dashboard allows us to look at a few pieces of information at once. These include:

The contact information for the admissions department
The school’s application deadline
Information about the fees required to apply to the school
The standardized test policy for the school
A list of other components required for admission, such as mid-year reports and teacher evaluations.
The writing requirements for the application, including optional college questions and required writing supplements.

Take a look at this really zoomed out but comprehensive picture 📷of the school summary dashboard to see everything the Common App shows you in the school dashboard.

Step #5: Adding and completing an application

Kk, Columbia looks good. Time to add it to my list. Go ahead and smack that “Add to My Colleges” button at the bottom of the Columbia University school profile.

Now, scroll up. Click the “My Colleges” tab on the dashboard. You should see a list of colleges that you’ve added to your profile. For me, the only one there is Columbia.

Here's what this looks like 📷

If I click on Colombia, I'm taken to a new page where I can complete all the requirements for the school.

Requirements will be a mix of information unique to the school and common across all schools. This is where you can view the unique essays and university question section. We'll get to that in a second.

The "common" areas focus on demographics. When you upload these once, you shouldn’t have to do it again. They should be transferrable from school to school.

Here’s a sample of a specific question section that you may or may not need to fill out, depending on the school.📷

These section of the application are usually easy to complete, requiring you to input answers in multiple-choice fields. As you progress through each sub-section, you will advance on to the next one automatically.

Tip: Try to fill out the demographic question sections well before it is actually time to submit the application. It will save you time and a headache when you’re down to the wire and need all the time you have for your essays.

The school-specific writing sections are next. They look like this. 📷

Here, depending on the school, you may find required prompts that you must complete as part of your application to that particular school. Not every school requires these additional answer sections. But it's really important to go through EACH of your schools to check.

You will notice that each prompt box has guidelines on character and word lengths. You will not be able to write more than the box allows.

Pro Tip: Recently the Common App added Google Drive connectivity. If you keep your files in Google Drive, you may prefer to upload them to the application directly. Just make sure that the final files are clean and presentable. These are the essays that the admissions council will see.

Columbia alone has six supplemental essays. That’s an uncommonly high number. Still, you should make sure you know exactly how many supplementals your schools well in advance of your app deadlines. Not doing so can put you in a deadly crunch at the last minute.

Step #5: The Common App Section

So far we’ve gone into detail on how to complete the unique requirements for a given school.

Now let’s jump back a second and focus on the general information that the Common App aggregates and distributes to all of your schools.

Go back to the main tab in your dashboard, hit “Common App.”

You’ll come to yet another section of (oh, joy) personal information fields. Here's this section. 📷

Contained in this section are a few bits of core demographic information as well as some more complex sections.

The first of these is your “activities” section, otherwise known as the extracurricular section of the common app.

This isn’t the time or place to talk about how to approach the extracurriculars section. (I will post a guide to this section soon. When I do, I’ll update this page with a link to the post.)

The other section that’s really important here is the “writing” section. (They're all important, but this one is crucial!)

This is where you will upload a copy of your Common Application essay. The essay is up to 650 words long and will be sent out to most every school on your list...

Pic of the writing section 📷

This section has a few key areas. It shows:

The schools on your list that require the essay.
The schools that don't
The current year's Common App prompts
The actual text box at the bottom where you paste or otherwise connect your essay.

So, just to reiterate...

The Common App essay is your big personal essay, and it's part of the "Common App" section. The individual supplementals are sub-sections for your schools, and need to be added in the "schools" section.

Final Thoughts

Boom, that's about 90% of what you need to know about the Common App.

I didn't go into excruciating detail on the many demographic sections required in the "Common App" section of the Common App. But those are mostly self-explanatory.

These will take a couple hours to fill out and you will NEED to give your parents/guardians some time to answer several sections. You'll need to know their college/grad school graduation details, some info about household income, and other sensitive stuff.

Hopefully you aren’t feeling more overwhelmed now than you were when you started reading. The Common App seems like a handful, but it’s actually pretty straight-forward.

Here’s a condensed version of what we just covered, which amounts to 95% of what you need to know about the Common App.

Set up an account and search for schools in the dashboard tab.
Click on schools to check out what each requires, or sort by special criteria to narrow your search.
Complete each school profile separately (unique writing questions and more)
Complete the Common App general section (information provided to all schools)
Pay (didn't really cover this part but, trust, you'll discover this section when you go to apply lol)
Hit send!

It’s not hard but a lot to learn in a relatively short span of time. You got this.