Common App Question

[mooooom]

I think I'll be flooding the forum today..

 

I've just been looking at the Common App website, it looks like most of the schools my kids are interested are on the list. But from my once over, the information on it is not sufficient for what we are going to need to submit - for instance the homeschool supplement does not allow for course descriptions and you can only request teacher/counselor recommendations. And then it says on the site that you either submit everything online or print the whole thing out and mail it. Is that what people do if they want to include extras? And recommendations get mailed in?

[Kareni]

We elected to mail my daughter's paperwork. This included a transcript, course descriptions, a reading and textbook list, my counselor letter of recommendation, our homeschool profile plus an additional non-academic letter of recommendation from the man who my daughter's supervisor for three summers of work. Also, two of the colleges to which my daughter was applying required or requested a portfolio of work which we also included in the package.

 

This had the side benefit that I was able to personalize each letter of recommendation to include the school's name.

 

One of my daughter's recommenders elected to mail her letter of recommendation, the other elected to use the online feature.

 

Regards,

Kareni

[Brenda in MA]

I think I'll be flooding the forum today..

 

I've just been looking at the Common App website, it looks like most of the schools my kids are interested are on the list. But from my once over, the information on it is not sufficient for what we are going to need to submit - for instance the homeschool supplement does not allow for course descriptions and you can only request teacher/counselor recommendations. And then it says on the site that you either submit everything online or print the whole thing out and mail it. Is that what people do if they want to include extras? And recommendations get mailed in?

 

Two years ago, I elected to send all of my son's paperwork electronically through the Common App. It took a bit of work to get everything in there in a format that I liked, but submitting electronically saved so much time, paper and postage.

 

Unless they've made major updates to it, I found the hs supplement not to be very useful. I filled in the answers on the first page of it about philosophy, etc., but the second page with the list of courses and materials, I did not use. I just entered "See information submitted with transcript in secondary school report" in each section on the second page of the hs supplement.

 

When you go to upload your transcript into the secondary school report, it can be several pages long. My submission for my son included 1 summary page transcript followed by 8 pages of course descriptions. The guidance counselor letter that you write is also uploaded as part of the secondary school report.

 

My son also chose to use the on-line feature for letters of recommendation. You enter the name and email of the person writing the recommendation, and the Common App sends them an email telling them how to upload their letter.

 

The only things we had to send snail-mail were a couple of extra recommendation letters requested by a few of the colleges. The Common App only lets you submit electronically the number of recommendation letters the school asks for. We had 2 or 3 schools that asked for extra recommendations from homeschoolers. For these, my son just printed out the recommendation letter request form from the Common App website and provided it with stamped envelopes to the people writing the letters. They sent in their letters directly to the colleges. We also had to request hard copies of his community college transcript be sent to the colleges.

 

HTH,

Brenda

[momofgals]

When you go to upload your transcript into the secondary school report, it can be several pages long. My submission for my son included 1 summary page transcript followed by 8 pages of course descriptions.

 

This is what I did, also. I merged the transcript document and course description document into one file and labeled it something like Common App Transcript. That was the document I uploaded for the transcript section. (I'm sure I knew to do that after reading about it here!)

[mooooom]

there are just so many things to prep for!