College Countdown

HISTORY -- 

The journey our family took in getting our oldest through the college application process was exciting and stressful, exhilarating and exhausting.  We made our fair share of mistakes along the way. For these reasons, we decided to share our shortcuts with other high school families in our school district.

The basic form of the College Countdown timeline came from discussions with these other families. We were all stumbling along in our own journeys, hitting some steps while missing others. As the checklists and countdown spread from family-to-family, parents and educators suggested to me to pull it together into a book. The reason was so that no other family would stumble along in the dark, which makes the journey so much longer and stressful than it is already.

The first book, Taming the Paper Monster: The College Game (And It Starts in 8th Grade!), attempted to pull together all those pieces of paper a family accumulates into one place to help make it easier to get all the steps done in the proper order. As more families and teachers gave me additional hints and tricks, I’d add them to the next version of the book. Taming the Paper Monster evolved into the current College Countdown: A Parent’s and Student’s Survival Kit for the College Admissions Process. A note to the evolutionary process is recognition to Tracy L. VonGruben who provided the artwork in Taming the Paper Monster.

As you discover the hints and tricks of the trade, share them with your friends and high school guidance counselor. Share the wealth. It pays dividends! As you discover your own individual hints and tricks (and you will), please share them with me [see "Sign In, Please" section of the website] so that I may share them with other families in a future edition of College Countdown. I hope you enjoy this book as much as I have enjoyed putting it together.

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