 Hello, my people, I'm Meacham. I'm your college counselor. And today we're going to show you how to get organized for your applications for colleges in the United States. So we're going to be working with our applications requirements tab today, and I'm going to show you how to fill this out and stay organized so that you can apply on time and have the best results possible. Deadlines are super important. We need to know what kind of application system that the university uses. Okay, so they have a rolling admission policy. There is no set deadline. We're not going to mark any early decision or early action plans because they're not going to have those deadlines if they're a rolling admission university. In fact, there won't even be a regular deadline for these colleges that use rolling admissions, but that doesn't mean that you can just apply whenever you want because there might be deadlines for financial aid and scholarships. You must have everything in by December 1st to be automatically considered first scholarships. And that means that is the deadline that we want to use. And even though this says December 1st, I would encourage you to apply even before that because what that means is that people that are applying before December 1st are getting admission results and possibly getting that scholarship money. And if you wait until December 1st to apply, there might not be a ton of money left for you. If there's financial aid requirements, who also want to keep an eye on the deadlines for that, complete it as early as possible. Cannot stress this enough. Applying early is one of the most important things you can do, especially when you need large scholarships or financial aid you've got to apply early. The easiest way for us to figure out whether they're supplementals or rec letter requirements is to go to the common app and see what our application says. We're gonna go ahead and add a college. All we gotta do is go to my colleges, add a college, type in the name of that college. I'm gonna type in Pittsburgh here since I'm working with that one. So now I can go back to my colleges. I should see University of Pittsburgh. It does not actually require any other recommendations from teachers or others, but we can see that they do not require any rec letters. So that's cool. I know that it's a test optional school because I looked that up already when I looked up my admissions criteria here. I also just want to get their percentage scores. We're gonna put our scores above here just so that we can kind of have a reference point. I suck at math, but I know I'm great at English and I know like my score would be about a 1260. So I'm gonna go back to the common data set. So 640, 640 is the low 25. So that means that it's a 1280s and then their higher numbers is like a 1470. My SAT score is gonna be pretty close to what their low end range is. It's not gonna be an amazing score for them, but it's an optional university. So it doesn't freaking matter. If you're an international student, you're gonna need to worry about this English test. Search for the University of Pittsburgh. English proficiency, that's the phrase. English proficiency, that's what you wanna look for. And sure enough, we've got the information about the TOEFL IELTS and Duolingo test, which they accept. I usually recommend the IELTS 7.0 IELTS with subscores of 6.0 are also competitive. The overall that they're looking for is a 7.0 with a 6.0 section minimum recommendations. Now we gotta look at the application platform that we're gonna use. I've added coalition and applied texts in here since some people are gonna use those. Some universities may only use their own applications. If you don't see them in Common App, you don't see them in Coalition App, that could just be because they have their own app. You could also choose to apply with their own app instead of Common App or Coalition App. That is one way to show a little extra demonstrated interest and it might not be a bad idea. But I'm gonna keep it on Common App here. Once I have completed all the questions in Common App, I can mark this off and I will be ready to apply. But what about another university? What about a more selective college that has some of these other things? Well, let's go ahead and put one in here. Carnegie Mellon University. So we do have early decision, regular decision, early admission and transfer deadline. So let's look at the early decision deadline first, November 1st. And there's also an early decision too. Honestly, if you're doing this, you're making a mistake. You should always be targeting the first early decision rounds. That is November 1st. And I'll check off this box because they do have it. What about their early action deadline? So, oh, this is for a year early. This is totally different. While you're in your junior year, fancy. You're literally just so OP at high school that you could apply early here. So, okay, well, don't worry about that. For now, that doesn't really matter. We've got a regular decision instead, which is January 3rd, okay? So we're gonna put that in here. If there's ever an early action or early decision deadline, you should always try to apply for that deadline. Even if you're not going to apply early decision to this college, you should be trying to target that deadline. The earlier you apply the better and the last thing you want is to be one of those thousands of people sending their application on January 3rd. Those are people that make bad decisions in life. Don't be those people. Another trick you can do is, if you know the website, you can type in site, colon, the name of the site, and then space, and you could say like scholarship deadline and we're only gonna get results from the official website. So that could be really useful. For financial aid, November 15th for the early decision applicants, regular ones is February 15th. If I know that I'm gonna do this as an early decision applicant, then I would go ahead and say here, November 15th. If I am comfortable applying regular decision even though I shouldn't, I'm gonna go ahead and say February 15th. I could apply January 1st and then I need to get all this done by the February 15th at the latest. If you're doing that, you're probably not gonna get a lot of aid. You definitely should be trying to apply early because the early bird gets the money. No, there are no merit-based scholarships. Everything here is need-based aid. There is nothing to worry about here. There's no scholarship deadline. I wanna go to Common App. Teacher evaluations, one required and there's one optional and other evaluations, one optional. So that's interesting. That means there's three letters and anytime we have the option to send them, we should send them. We always wanna send the maximum amount of things on our applications. There is a writing supplement. Three supplementals, make a comment and go ahead and like, you know, leave this comment with what those prompts might be or that there are three supplementals. I can just make a little note of that so I know what I gotta get done. So it does say it is test optional, which is good. And we're gonna see what the latest data sets available. Section C, because that's where all the good stuff is. Test scores are just considered here. So that's a good sign. Again, the SAT is not that important anymore. The percentiles are like 1500 and 1560. Like these are really high scores. If I have my 1260, I'm probably gonna just apply optional. I'd rather play the 30% chance of being an optional student than play the 70% chance of sending a score that's this much lower because that's probably gonna hurt me more than it helps me. English language proficiency section. Okay, 7.5 overall will give consideration to those with sub-scores of 7.5 and above. So that's a really high IELTS required if you're not great at English. Carnegie Mellon's gonna be tough. This university's requirements are a little stricter. We have higher SAT scores. We have more rec letters. We have supplemental essays. And we have tighter deadlines. We gotta go by November 1st. Don't fall into the trap of being like, oh, I can probably apply January 3rd. That means you're likely not gonna get much. This is how you stay organized with your applications. You need to fill this out for each of your universities and make a plan. Are you gonna apply early decision? What's the deadline? Are you gonna apply early action? What's the deadline? When do you need to have your financial aid or your scholarship applications done by? The earlier you do this stuff, the better. The most important thing here is that you have these deadlines and that you get everything done by the earliest deadline possible. Even if you're not an early decision applicant, you apply by that deadline anyway. So hopefully this will help you out and keep you organized for your applications. If you've got questions about some of these things, then I hope you stick around and keep coming back to the channel because I'm gonna be talking more about how to get better rec letters, how to write great supplemental essays, why you need to apply early and more. Subscribe to the channel if you wanna learn more about those things and have a better chance of getting into the college of your dreams. Thank you so much for watching and I'll see you next week.