Thanks to the Internet and perhaps even the common application, which is accepted at hundreds of educational institutions nationwide, applying to college has gotten easier for students. But actually getting accepted to a school is much harder these days.
"You've got more kids applying to more schools, thinking this will improve their odds," says Steve Cohen, co-author of the book Getting In! The Zinch Guide to College Admissions and Financial Aid in the Digital Age. "But most kids hurt their chances of getting in without even realizing it."
To help students improve their chances of being accepted to their first-choice schools, we asked experts to outline what others have done wrong in the past.
This post originally appeared on The Street.
Treating every application the same
While more and more colleges and universities are allowing students to submit the common application, most still require students to submit supplemental information or answer additional essay questions as well. Other schools still prefer to use their own application.
Whatever the case, students should tackle each application or supplement separately, since answers that might get them into Brown University might not net them acceptance into Harvard (or vice versa). Also, similarly to how a cover letter should be tailored to the company you are looking to work for, students shouldn't recycle essays or answers to other application questions that don't illustrate why they are a good fit at that particular college.
"You're always going to have a better shot of getting into a school if you make a personal connection with the admissions office," says Craig Meister, former admissions officer and president of Tactical College Consulting. "The people who want to do the least end up with least acceptance letters."
Forgetting to proofread your essay
Maybe it's because they're so focused on coming up for a good answer to the question or because they're so overloaded with work senior year, but many students submit their college essays without proofreading them.
According to Jennifer Louden, senior associate director of undergraduate admissions at Loyola University in Maryland, while punctuation and spelling mistakes abound, it's even more common for an essay to arrive completely devoid of capital letters.
"[Students] write it as if they were sending a text message," she says. It's important to give your essay a good combing over before sending it out to the admissions office.
Fast-forwarding through the directions
Another telltale sign that your application was more or less a rush job is to not answer a question the way a college is requesting it be answered.
For instance, Meister cites a question on the common application that asks students to list their current course load by formal title and credit value. If the student only lists the course title or simply describes it by its generic name, they are illustrating that they aren't detailed-oriented or that they don't care enough to read through the entire application before submitting it.
"Colleges are looking for reasons not to accept you," Meister says, and incomplete or faulty responses could easily be one of them.
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