For most college seniors Common App has been the most useful resource when applying to college. Around 900+ schools are Common App compatible and aim to create less stress on high schoolers. The Common App was created by Joshua J. Reiter. It was created to simplify the admission process by having all the colleges in one place. Senior Cameron Sauceda states that “Common App was extremely useful. Everything I needed to do was right in front of me, even if it was very tedious.” The process on the website is very detailed and thorough. Some of the perks of the app are that you can write one college essay on the app that will automatically be used for all of your applications. All other personal questions that would need to be filled out to apply for schools only need to be completed once and from there it is copied to every application so that each school you apply to can see. This helps so you don’t have to fill out the same questions over and over again for every school on their complicated websites.

As useful as Common App is there are definitely still some flaws and quirks that need to be straightened out. Senior Kailey Treiber spoke to me about her process using Common App saying, “All the steps can easily get jumbled and I didn’t realize there was an order to follow.” Within the app, there are a bunch of questions that need to be filled out and some aren’t fully shown unless you know what you are looking for and know where you need to find them. When using the common app you need to make sure to go into every school on your college list and make sure you look at their questions and follow their checklists. The Common App is one of the most useful tools when applying to college but it still has some quirks it needs to work out.