Essays start in June — groundwork juniors can do now

The Common App opens August 1, and fall of senior year is a meat grinder — six classes, applications, deadlines stacked like planes over an airport. What a junior banks in spring, senior-fall them will weep with gratitude over.

Bank these three things

• The activities list in real sentences. Not "cricket, 4 yrs" — what you did, what changed because you did it. Ten entries, drafted casually now
• Two teacher-rec asks before summer. Teachers cap how many they write; June askers get October yeses
• The 30-minute brain-dump. Twenty questions, voice memo, no editing: hardest thing you've done, a time you changed your mind, what you'd fix in your school. That transcript IS the personal statement's raw material

None of this feels like writing an essay. That's the point — the essay assembles itself from parts you collected while life was still calm.