Every summer, in homes across the nation, a rising senior opens the Common App, stares at the blank fields, and freezes. So in two recent Road2College webinars, I sat down with Ellen Whalen, a veteran independent college counselor who has reviewed hundreds of applications and edited more than 2,000 essays, to walk through the Common App section by section.
What follows are her tips that made me stop and think, “I’ve never seen anyone else say that.” Here are ten of her best.
1. Write your one-sentence story before you touch the app.
Before filling in a single box, decide what you want a college to remember about your student. Admissions officers read fast and boil each applicant down to a short note in the file, something like “future engineer, Eagle Scout, community activist.” Ellen calls these “pointy students,” the ones with clear depth in an area rather than a little of everything. If you nail your sentence first, every section can reinforce it instead of pulling in ten directions.
2. Use every character, including the title line.
Most families know the 150-character activity description is precious space. Fewer realize the 50-character position field is real estate too. Instead of writing “Eagle Scout” and stopping, Ellen fills that line with the beginning of a description: what the student planned, built, or led. You have those characters. Spend them.
3. Capitalize your activity titles so they pop.
This is the tip I quote most often, and I’ve never seen it anywhere else. Ellen puts activity titles in all caps on purpose, noting that the Common App gives you almost no formatting to work with. You can’t bold, you can’t highlight, so capital letters are one of the few tools you have to catch a tired reader’s eye. In her words, “it’s just to have them pop.”
4. Order and group your activities to show depth.
Order matters, and so does grouping. Put your most important activities first, since readers study the top of the list most closely and skim the bottom. Then cluster related activities together. If your student is aiming for engineering, keep the robotics, the tinkering, and the physics-project entries near each other. Four related activities in a row read as genuine depth, not scattered dabbling.
5. Count the things you already do that don’t feel like “activities.”
Some of the strongest entries never happen in a club. Caring for a grandparent, watching younger siblings, working a part-time shift, taking apart appliances at the kitchen table, all of these show maturity and character. Ellen suggests students spend a week jotting down what they actually do each day. Parents are often the ones who remember the detail that turns into a standout entry.
6. Turn “Future Plans” into a narrative moment.
Buried in the education section is a career-interest question with an “Other” option that opens a 100-character write-in box. Don’t waste it on a single word. One of Ellen’s sample students didn’t just write “mechanical engineer.” He added that he wanted to create devices to make the world more accessible. That one line makes an admissions officer curious to keep reading, and it quietly starts the student’s narrative.
7. Preview everything the way an admissions officer will read it.
The Common App’s preview button shows you the actual document a college receives. Ellen walks families through the app in preview mode for a reason: what looks fine in the entry fields can read very differently once it’s assembled into the running application. Review it there, and print it out if editing on paper helps you catch what your eyes glide past on screen.
8. Track down your high school profile.
Colleges read your student’s transcript alongside a document called the high school profile, essentially your school’s resume. It shows how many AP courses are offered, how grades are distributed, and where your student sits in context. Google your school’s name, check the counseling page, or ask the counselor directly. Seeing it helps you understand exactly what a college sees when it reads your student.
9. Keep the Additional Information section lean, and don’t upload your resume there.
This section is genuinely useful for context: a few more lines on an Eagle Scout project, a scheduling conflict that explains a missing course, a link to a maker portfolio. It is not the place to re-list everything your student has ever done. And uploading a resume into it, Ellen warns, is a common mistake. Save the resume for interviews, scholarship applications, and giving your recommenders something concrete to work from.
10. Start now, but leave the college-specific sections alone.
Your student can open a Common App account today and begin filling out the main sections. Come August 1, the app will ask whether you want to roll everything over into the new cycle, and you say yes. Here’s the catch most families miss: the individual college sections and supplemental essays do not roll over, so don’t start those early. Getting a jump on the common sections buys breathing room, and good writing is really rewriting. Rushed applications are where students accidentally submit an essay with the wrong college’s name in it.
One last thought, and it’s the one I end every webinar with. As you build a beautiful application, keep the money conversation going in parallel. The rules around financial aid and student loans are shifting, so sit down as a family, set a realistic budget, and focus on schools you can actually afford before the acceptance letters arrive.
And hold on to Ellen’s most reassuring reminder: “The average college acceptance rate is 73%.” There really is a school for every student. Your job is simply to help yours be seen clearly.
