Travel With Teens and Tweens

For high school seniors, Halloween isn’t just a day on the calendar that provides a reason to dress up and attend parties.  Rather, it marks the deadline for filing Early Decision and Early Action college applications since most are due by November 1st.   For those readers who are not as far down the college application rabbit hole as we, are a little context might explain why tonight is such a scary time for so many teens.

At many colleges, the applicant’s chances of getting accepted can be significantly higher if they make an early application and it can be further impacted by the type of Early Application that is filed.  Specifically:

• Option A: Early Decision is a binding process that generally results in the highest percentage of applications being accepted when compared to any other group that applies to a specific institution in a given year.   Each student can make only one Early Decision application and is bound to attend that college if accepted, as long as the school is able to meet the student’s financial needs as defined by the gods at the College Board CSS Profile and Federal Fafsa programs.  Students are generally informed about the outcome of their Early Decision application sometime near the end of the calendar year while those who file regular decision won’t get notified until as late as April 1.
•  Option B: Early Action applications provide the student with an opportunity to get a decision by mid January or sooner.  They  are not binding and students can file as many as they want, with many students doing several in a mad rush during October.  Early Action candidates can often have an edge over the regular decision applicant pool, although how much of an advantage can vary widely from school to school.

Some schools offer only Early Action, some offer only Early Decision and some offer both – turning the mere act of deciding when to apply into a stressful exercise.

Making  things even more frightening for high school seniors is the fact that Halloween probably represents the peak of academic stress during their senior year.   Most are taking heavy course loads filled with AP and Honors classes and are facing a barrage of end of quarter tests and projects, knowing that many selective colleges will want to see the first quarter transcript.

Halloween Used to Be a Lot More Relaxing

For the average 18 year old who is applying to selective colleges, Halloween means that the Common Application essay has to be cut down to 500 words, the activities resume has to polished until it shines, college specific supplemental essays need to be fine tuned, transcripts, SAT reports and teacher references that were requested months ago need to be on file and the in-person interview has to have been completed.  And of course, it all needs to be done while keeping up those grades and participating in a full range of sports and service work.  No wonder most of them get about 5 hours of sleep this time of year!

By comparison, watching the little ones coming to the door for their candy tonight, I thought back to all those  years when the most stressful thing we had to worry about was finding THE costume and figuring out how to cope with those candy-induced sugar highs.  For high school seniors, Halloween is a whole lot more alarming and complicated than it is used to be.   The good news is that they will get those applications done, just as the early Halloween snow on our lawn will melt in a day or two.

For all the high school seniors out there that are finishing up applications today we wish you luck and hope that a few months from now your email box will be filled with acceptance treats!

Happy Halloween to our hardworking high school seniors from the gang at Travel with Teens and Tweens!