Lesson 1 10 min

Welcome: Your Application Strategy

Understand how AI fits into college applications — what it can help with, what schools allow, and how to build a strategy that covers essays, activities, and financial aid.

College applications have more moving parts than most people realize until they’re in the middle of it. The Common App alone has 6 sections. Top schools add 2-3 supplemental essays each. Financial aid requires its own application. And everything runs on different deadlines.

This course breaks the process into manageable pieces and shows you exactly where AI can help — and where it shouldn’t.

What You’ll Learn

By the end of this course, you’ll have:

A balanced college list of 8-12 schools matched to your profile and goals
A compelling personal essay that tells your story in your authentic voice
An activities list organized into a coherent narrative of growth and impact
Recommendation letters requested strategically with materials that help your recommenders
A financial aid strategy covering FAFSA, scholarships, and aid negotiation
A decision framework for comparing offers and committing confidently

How This Course Works

Each lesson covers one major component of the application process, with AI prompts you can use immediately.

Course structure:

Lessons 2-4: Build your application — college list, essays, activities
Lessons 5-6: Support materials — recommendations, interviews, financial aid
Lessons 7-8: Evaluate and decide — comparing offers and committing

The AI ethics rule: AI helps you think, organize, and polish. You write every word that goes on your application. This isn’t just about following school policies — it’s about making sure your application sounds like you.

The Application Component Map

Component	Weight in Admissions	Where AI Helps
GPA & transcript	Very high	Can’t help (your grades are your grades)
Test scores (if required)	High	SAT/ACT prep tools (LearnQ.ai, Khan Academy)
Essays	High	Brainstorming, editing, structure — NOT writing
Activities	Moderate-high	Organizing narrative, describing impact
Recommendations	Moderate	Helping you prepare materials for recommenders
Demonstrated interest	Moderate (40% of schools track it)	Research prompts for school-specific knowledge
Interview	Moderate (where offered)	Practice questions, response structuring

✅ Quick Check: Which component of your application is the ONLY one entirely in your control right now? (Answer: Your essays. You can’t change your GPA retroactively, and test scores require months of prep. But your essays are being written right now — they’re the highest-impact component you can still maximize. This is why the essay lessons in this course are the most detailed.)

Key Takeaways

AI is a thinking partner, not a ghostwriter — schools check, and AI-written essays lack the personal voice admissions officers seek
Admissions officers spend 15-20 minutes per application; every word in your essay must earn its place
Strategic AI use: research (school comparison), organization (deadline tracking), brainstorming (finding angles), and editing (polish)
The application has multiple components, each weighted differently — essays are the highest-impact element still fully in your control
This course follows one rule: AI helps you think and polish, you do the writing

Up Next

In the next lesson, you’ll build your college list — using AI to research schools, compare programs, and create a balanced mix of reach, match, and safety options.

Knowledge Check

1. A classmate uses ChatGPT to write their entire Common App essay. What's the risk?

No risk — AI essays are good enough to get into any school Major risk on two levels. First, admissions officers read thousands of essays — AI-written text is generic and lacks the specific personal voice they're looking for. Research from Cornell shows AI essays are 'highly uniform' and easy to distinguish from human writing. Second, most top schools explicitly prohibit AI-generated drafts. If detected (and schools are adding detection tools), it could result in application rejection or rescinded admission Small risk — just run it through a paraphrasing tool to make it undetectable

2. You're applying to 10 colleges. How should AI fit into your application strategy?

Use AI to write all supplemental essays — they're shorter and less important Use AI for research and organization (comparing schools, tracking deadlines), brainstorming (finding essay angles, identifying activity themes), and editing (grammar, clarity, structure) — but write every essay yourself. Your voice is the one thing AI can't provide, and it's the thing admissions officers are looking for Don't use AI at all — it's too risky

3. Admissions officers spend an average of 15-20 minutes per application. What does this mean for your strategy?

Keep everything short — they're just skimming Every word matters. In 15-20 minutes, they review your transcript, test scores, activities list, essays, and recommendations. Your essay gets maybe 3-5 minutes of focused attention. This means: open strong (first sentence must hook), be specific (vague = forgettable), and don't waste words on clichés they've read a thousand times. AI can help you identify and cut weak openings and generic phrases Quantity over quality — apply to as many schools as possible

Answer all questions to check

Complete the quiz above first