Over the course of writing thousands and thousands of posts on this blog (personally, about 15,000, although Slope itself has well in excess of 20,000), I take a certain amount of liberty with the topics I choose. By no means are all my posts related to charts or trading. Sometimes I talk about personal (but not too personal) stuff. This will be one of those posts.

This is just an off-the-cuff musing about how much the process of applying to colleges has changed since I was in high school. The reason this is on my mind is that my oldest child is enter the “hot zone” spanning end-of-Junior and start-of-Senior year during which applying to schools becomes a full-time occupation. I suspect I’ll be doing other posts about this adventure as the year wears on.

To set a baseline, I’ll share my experience from when I went through this. It won’t take long, because there wasn’t much to it. There were no consultants. There were no books I read. There were no seminars or college visits or any help at all from my parents. I didn’t do any prep classes, and I received no counseling from the school at all. All I did was take the SAT test, did a desultory job of filling out a few applications……….and I got into Princeton and Brown. (more…)