Stay Organization Strategies for High School Students For College Applications
Systems for Organization Strategies for High School
Wouldn’t it be great if you could do a quick search and find:
- The name and email of a teacher who said they would provide a reference but left the school?
- How about the camp supervisor from the summer between your teen’s freshman and junior years–do you remember his name? Is he on FaceBook?
- Can your daughter reconnect with the professor that she met when she was debating for Model UN?
- How about someone your son met that studied music at his first choice university?
I know that in our household we did not keep all of the information in one place. Most families and students don’t think about it as summers end and, students and important connections go their separate ways.
Why Evernote Works Great For This Long Term Project
As important as what to collect is where to collect it, how to organize it and how to tag it so you can easily find the information or document.
I want to make this super simple, inexpensive and sharable by both students and parents so I am going to recommend Evernote.
I use Evernote and I love its simplicity. Evernote can capture and recall almost anything you wish to find by using searchable tags. You can save and share photos, scans, web pages, contact information, documents, pdfs, and more.
You can have notebooks for each year, each activity and your own unique set of tags. Searching is simple and quick, saving you hours of time and frustration.
Your son or daughter can be responsible for keeping his or her own information, or you can work as a family to keep it up to date.
You would be amazed at how people from around the globe use Evernote. Check out this old but very useful article on Lifehacker article, I’ve been using Evernote all wrong heres why its actually amazing.
Where should you start?
Before you even download Evernote you should have a family discussion with your teen to answer the following questions:
Do they understand why it is important to capture their achievements, contacts etc?
- Will they be responsible for keeping Evernote up-to-date?
- How would they like you to be involved? Maybe a quarterly review of information in Evernote to see what might be missing?
- Will you need their help learning to use Evernote?
- Will you work together to set up a list of tags?
Getting into a selective college is a family affair. It is a commitment that should start early. Having a detailed, searchable source of important high school data at your fingertips can be indispensable.
