College Guidance: Help Us Help You

The college application season is now in full swing! Some deadlines have already passed and many others are approaching. Thus, we want to remind parents and seniors of our requirements and procedures and of your responsibilities to the colleges and to Darlington.

If we are to do our best work on behalf of our seniors, it is critical that these be observed:

• All applications must be submitted to our office 30 days before the deadline set by the college.

• There are only 22 work days remaining before January 1!

• All materials for January 1 and January 15 deadlines were due to our office by last Friday, November 4. Unfortunately, many of our seniors failed to meet that deadline.

• In order to be as understanding as possible, we are extending that deadline - but only through this Friday, November 11 - so you must turn them in now if you wish to appy to any colleges with a January 1 or January 15 deadline. Next week will be too late.

• If you do not meet our deadlines, we cannot guarantee that your teachers, college advisors, or our office will be able to complete our parts of your applications by the deadlines set by the college.

What does this mean for you? Simply put, it is not necessary for seniors to complete all of their applications this week. What this does mean, though, is that seniors must do the following by Friday:

• Come to our office, meet with Mrs. Crawford, and fill out an application folder for each January 1 or 15 application they plan to submit, including listing the teachers whom they plan to ask for recommendations.

• Meet with each teacher/recommender and let him/her know colleges and due dates, if they have not already done so.

Several special pleas:

• Remember that we are assisting 138 seniors, each of whom deserves our full attention and best efforts. These seniors will submit in the neighborhood of 1,000 applications for us to process.

• Please do not call us at the last minute and request us to complete an application after our deadline has passed. Essentially, you would be asking to "break in line" ahead of your friends and classmates who submitted their materials to us on time.

• Parents, please do not call or email us to ask if materials have been sent. The time spent responding to those questions is time that we cannot spend on processing you senior's materials. If seniors meet our deadline, we assure you that we will get everything done on time.

• Likewise, please do not call or email the colleges if their status check does not show receipt quickly. They are dealing with thousands of applications and need time to process them. One admissions dean told us last week that it takes her office approximately two weeks from receipt to fully update files. Just today, we received this email from a college: "Due to the high volume of credentials we are receiving, there will likely be a delay between the time we receive the credentials and when they are matched to the application."

• It is important to know that with electronic submission, while we and your teachers will be preparing our materials while you are working on your application, we cannot actually submit our part to the college until the student has submitted the completed application. At that point, the student must bring us the printed confirmation that the application has been received so that we can then submit our part. It goes without saying that this must be done well before the college's deadline.

Please be assured that we want to do our utmost to assist our seniors and their parents in this process. Please understand, though, that just as doctors and dentists cannot possibly see all of their patients in a short period of time, and CPA's cannot complete tax returns for all of their clients in a two or three week period - neither can we or the teachers and college advisors write all of our recommendations and process all of our seniors' applications without ample time to do a good job. Therefore, it is imperative that all of our deadlines be met if we are to serve our seniors effectively.
 
Many thanks for your cooperation and understanding during this - our busiest -  time of the year!