This one’s for the seniors. Together, we crawled our way through freshman year, stumbled through sophomore year, began a run that quickly turned into a sprint during our junior year, and now we are nearing the finish line. But before we take our victory lap, there is still some hard work to be done; we probably want to get into college.

This final task is inherently what we have been training for all these years, but now that the time has actually come, where do we begin?

As a senior myself, I’m figuring it out as I go–passionately employing the “fake it ‘til you make it” method. Grateful that there are people out there that actually know what they are talking about, I spoke to Naperville North counselor Charles Koch about what first semester seniors should be doing to help prepare for the college application process.

According to Koch, the best place to start is Naviance–a student resource provided by NNHS that allows prospective college students to explore options throughout their high school years (but hopefully you already knew that). 

The first thing you should do when you log onto Naviance is fill out the list of “colleges I’m thinking about” so your counselor can send updates when a representative from a school you are interested in is giving a presentation at NNHS. 

That’s another thing– you can browse from a list of over 200 schools that are sending representatives to NNHS throughout the year to meet with students who are interested in applying.

Once you begin looking into actually applying to colleges, you can move schools from the “colleges I’m thinking about” list to the “colleges I’m applying to” list. That is the list where you can request to have your transcript sent directly to the school when you have completed that application. Important side note: in your senior registration packet, you should have received a transcript release form, and according to Koch, it’s a pretty big deal.

“It needs to be signed by a parent and turned in because without that we cannot send anything to schools,” Koch said. “It is absolutely essential to get that turned in.”

The next thing about Naviance that is extremely beneficial is the surveys. According to Koch, there are several surveys students can fill out to help teachers and counselors write letter of recommendations.

“If you have not already talked to teachers about getting recommendations, you want to talk to them now to see if they are willing to write one. They will be able to use the information from those surveys to write a more appropriate letter,” Koch said. “The whole idea is for you to reflect on the survey and the questions so that when they are writing a letter, they are painting an accurate picture of who you are.”

On Sept. 10 and 11 in senior English classes, counselors will go over this information and more in great detail, but getting a jump-start on some of the basics of Naviance over this Labor Day weekend might be a good idea. According to Koch, when it comes to the college application process, sooner is always better than later.