Winter break may almost be over, but that doesn’t mean you can’t take advantage of the final days of winter break to prep for college. There actually could be a few more things you need to do, including these.
Finish Up Your Applications
Regular decision deadlines are here. For almost all schools, the deadline comes up on January 1st! Others may have them in the first week of January or by January 15th. Only a few have them sometime in February.
If you haven’t completed and submitted your applications yet, now is the time to. Get those finishing touches and submit it before the final hour – you don’t want to have your submission declined due to technical problems!
Find Out How to Track Your Applications
It will be a little bit before you hear back from the colleges your apply to about acceptance, but now is a good time to figure out how to track your applications. Some schools offer online portals that help you see where your paperwork is in the system and know ahead of time whether or not you’re accepted.
Apply to Scholarships
This is also a great time to find and apply to scholarships. There are constantly new awards popping up which you may qualify for. Keeping on top of them though can prove challenging.
A great way to cut down on the anxiety of the search is to use scholarship databases. These allow you to input data and they will send you the scholarships you qualify for. You don’t have to hunt and peck to weed out pesky criteria. Saving you time on the search, it means you can apply to even more! And many of these databases actually send you emails or notifications when new scholarships become available to you.
College Raptor actually has a scholarship search tool, too, that makes it easier than ever to find the scholarships you qualify for.
Plan Visits to Colleges
You may not have acceptance letters in hand for your college choices yet, but you should be thinking about visiting the schools in the near future. What dates work for you or your family to visit? You’ll definitely want to plan a trip to colleges you haven’t seen in person yet, too. Virtual tours are great, but there is often nothing like the real thing to help you get the true vibe of a campus.
You should be thinking about traveling to these colleges and universities in March or April, as your acceptance letters start rolling in and before you’re required to make a decision on May 1st.
Even though you may have your college applications in, that doesn’t mean you’re done preparing for college. There’s a lot you can do in the next few days that will help you plan the next few months. And once you have all that out of the way, you can start thinking about your plan for actually attending college!
