Arun and I had originally intended to have our updated
Common App guide for sale within two weeks of the new application’s August 1
release. Clearly, we didn’t hit that
deadline. I’ve gotten lots of emails
asking when our new guide will be ready, and I now feel confident in reporting
that we will release it for sale in the first week of October. If you’re interested in the reasons why it’s
taken us this long, read on.
There are three reasons why our new guide has been
delayed:
1. This year’s Common App is a completely different version, and
it had some technical difficulties in the weeks that followed its release. I don’t fault the Common App folks for that—there
are often glitches with any new technology.
But that particular element was out of our control.
2. The new Common App is no longer a one-size-fits-all app—it
adapts many of the questions to the applicant’s previous responses. This is a
good change. It means that many of the questions
only appear if the prior information you entered necessitates them. But this also meant that our guide had to
address those changes, and that’s taken us much longer than we expected.
3. Our previous guide
included lots of advice about submitting the application as well as actions you
should take post-submission. We wanted
to wait until more of our students had submitted their own Common Apps so we had
experienced that part of the process ourselves before we wrote about it.
We’re sensitive to the fact that many students are facing
deadlines for early admission, and we want to have our new guide available to
help you. But we also didn’t want to add
to the stress of the process by releasing a guide that didn’t accurately
address all of the new app’s subtleties.
We’re trying to walk the line between releasing something later that’s
perfect and something sooner that’s not quite good enough. We’re really
proud of our past guides and want this version to be even better.
We really appreciate how patient people have been and promise
that we’re hard at work finishing up our new version. Thanks for bearing with us. And please stay tuned—we’ll have our new
guide available shortly.