Recently, I had the great pleasure of presenting at the International ACAC annual conference on a topic near and dear to my heart: student motivation. The presentation, alongside Katie Leishear-Davis and Phil Abraham, focused on a specific project we have implemented in various ways at our schools called the “junior project.” I have not found a tool as effective in boosting motivation – as well as engagement and agency – as the Junior Project, an activity that I learned about during a Third Thursday discussion from Katie. As a result, we worked together on creating a version of the junior project that worked for my particular school, which we implemented this past semester for the first time. What follows is a brief outline of the junior project, a preamble to the SENIOR PROJECT, which features the prompt I want to share here.

Many students, for a variety of reasons, do not direct enough energy consistently into the college process. As a result, confusion and stress grow, feeding even more into their detachment and procrastination. In the end, their lack of motivation hurts their processes and their opportunities. However, the Junior Project is an excellent way to combat these tendencies and impulses… and we hope the Senior Project will be just as effective!

The Junior Project is a student-led initiative designed to enhance student engagement and agency in the college search process. As part of this project, students are tasked with recording their work with the college counseling office in a slide deck of their own design. This slide deck is then presented by the student at the required parent meeting toward the end of the junior year. In short, the college counseling office provides a skeleton framework outlining basic expectations of what is required, and the student does the rest, ultimately leading their parents and college counselor through the slide deck. (Given the challenges of mandating parents to come in for a meeting, we required that students share their presentation via email with their parents and cc their college counselor to ensure that parents were informed.)

As we designed the basic template of our slide deck, we considered those objectives we hold for all students, regardless of their destination, that we desire for students to achieve by the end of their junior year and then focused on those seemingly important for the family meeting. Here is the template we came up with, plain and simple, although we, of course, encourage students to put some effort into presentation and style. We also provided them with several samples, provided by Katie: sample A, sample B, and sample C.

Throughout the time between our sharing of the project and their delivering their presentations in family meetings, we will continue to guide students toward progress on their slide decks.

So, in light of the enormous success that we found the Junior Project to be, we could not help but consider what a Senior Project might look like, particularly given all of the unique challenges that seniors face particularly in the opening months of the school year. Consequently, we are piloting a version of this in which students will similarly be provided a blank slide deck with a different set of instructions with the expectation that students record their presentation and share it – again cc’ing their college counselor – with their parents. While I expect to write more about the senior project later, once it has assumed a more complete form, during our presentation at IACAC, I shared a bit about the Senior Project and one component in particular, the application timeline mapper. It requires students to know their final (or near-final) college list along with their intended application deadlines to work, but it essentially plans out what components of which applications students should be working on on what dates in order to meet the deadlines. Here’s the full prompt:

As a high school senior, you are applying to several universities, each with a unique application type and official deadline. The universities are:

Oxford University (Regular Decision, October 15)

ENTER UNIVERSITY NAME (APP TYPE, UNI DEADLINE)

Your goal is to complete and submit all applications two weeks before their respective deadlines, as per your school's 'TWO WEEK RULE'. I am to create a comprehensive schedule for you in a table format, indicating the 'UNIVERSITY', 'PHASE', 'START DATE', 'DUE DATE', 'SUBMISSION', and actual 'DEADLINE'. The 'PHASES' include 'APPLICATION', 'SUPPLEMENT', 'SUBMISSION', and 'DEADLINE'.

The 'APPLICATION' phase requires 5 days.

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The 'SUPPLEMENT' phase takes 3 days. 
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You can start working on the applications from August 15.

There's a break period from October 7-15 during which you can work on two tasks per day.

Keep in mind that you have:

a major Math assessment on September 21, which requires exclusive preparation for 3 full days prior;

ENTER NAME OF COMMITMENT, DATE OF COMMITMENT, AND DATES UNAVAILABLE FOR WORK HERE.

Assist me in generating this college application timeline, ensuring all tasks are sequenced properly and all deadlines are met.

As you can see, there are several components of the prompt that you must have students edit and flesh out based upon their individual situations. In an effort to save some text, I’ve added some other universities to apply to and some other commitments but have left the remainder the same. Here is what ChatGPT kicked out:

Pretty amazing! This mega prompt has constructed a timeline for students to get all of their applications done in an orderly fashion according to a plan. It should be noted that this prompt also incorporates a “two week rule” for applications. However, as with the length of the components, which are crudely identified only as “application” and “supplement,” all of this can be edited to accommodate individual needs.

Finally, as a bonus, it is possible to get ChatGPT to produce a .csv file that you can upload into Google Calendar (or any other calendar format you require). Try this:

Export this table into a .CSV according to the formatting requirements so that it can be uploaded into Google Calendar.

We are still toying with how best to incorporate this all into our formal programming in relation to the Senior Project, but this is certainly a handy tool for college counselors to share with their students!