As if the college application process wasn’t stressful enough, the recent glitches with the common app website frustrated students across the globe. Pressing the submit bottom is supposed to be the easiest part of the process; however, the common app site has made that impossible. Because over 500 schools use the common app site as a way of application submission, almost every student was affected by the technical difficulties, especially students who intended to apply by early action deadlines (which was not forgiving).
It seems as if the common app site punished all of the over-achieving students who had all of their applications ready to go by the first early action date of October 15th. After harping over not only their common app essay, but the supplemental essays that came with each school, editing and re-editing each essay at least four times, and having every teacher and relative proofread and comment on the quality of the work, one would figure that the stress of the applications would be over. On the contrary, the stress just began.
On Octber 14th, as I pressed the ‘prevew and send application’ button, the wait and frusturation began. I sat in my mother’s office for hours, watching the circle spin in the middle of my page waiting for the pdf of my application to load. I didn’t load. It did not load on Internet Explorer, Google Chrome, Mozilla, or any other server. It did not load on my mother’s PC or her colleague’s Mac. My deadline of my top/dream school was a day away and I could not submit my application because of a website crash. Needless to say I was more than panicked and was ready to cry.
The common app ‘help’ component was no assistance. It made helpful remarks such as “We are aware of current submission issues, we are doing our best to fix such problems.” This was so no assurance to prospective students who knew the propblem would eventually get fixed, and were more concerned about meeting their deadline. As a relief, everything was eventually settled. Emails from many colleges were sent assuring students that deadlines would be extended due to the technical difficulties of the common app site.
This would have been more comforting had the email arrives 10 hours earlier when all the students were in the heat of their stress. Yet, it can be assumed that all are thankful for the extension.