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We appreciate the hard work the folks at the Common Application have been doing over the past few months as they continue to perfect Common App 4. We eagerly await the day—and we believe it’s coming soon—when its function matches its beautiful form.

But we know everything isn’t perfect yet, especially when it comes to those things that are—as our friend, Patrick O’Connor, associate dean for college counseling at Cranbrook Kingswood Upper School (Mich.) calls them—the “grown up” pieces of the application: the school report, transcript, teacher recommendation, etc. (Those things that grown-ups submit to support students’ applications.)

That’s why today we have launched two special portals at Lawrence—one for college counselors and one for teachers—to use as a back-up plan in case they run into snags submitting materials through the Common Application for their students who are applying to Lawrence.

Counselors and teachers, we urge you to give the Common Application the “old college try” first. If that proves not to work, then go ahead and use the Lawrence University portals.

Now might be a good time to remind everyone that the Lawrence University community abides by an honor code* and, therefore, trusts that the only people using these portals will be those for whom it is intended (i.e., college counselors and teachers).

*No Lawrence student will unfairly advance his or her own academic performance or in any way limit or impede the academic pursuits of other students of the Lawrence community.

Last week was a rough week for many people touched by the Common Application:

• students trying to apply with the Common Application (however, not all students are encountering problems, which is either weird, or a sign of hope that things are getting better, albeit incrementally);
• teachers and counselors trying to submit recommendations for those students (same thing; the problems are not universal);
• parents trying to comfort their kids as they struggled through completion;
• the 500+ Common App colleges who are themselves struggling to help these groups navigate a stressful college application process that has been exacerbated by the Common App’s mechanical issues.

All of this might explain the message that I and my other Common Application college admission colleagues received Friday night from the Common Application’s director of communications acknowledging the poor quality of their communications about the issues plaguing Common App users. The director promised that, from that point forward, they would do a better job communicating about Common App issues (along with the better job they promise to be doing fixing the issues with the Common Application).

True to their word, Monday morning brought some updates from the Common Application. I’ll share below the ones that are relevant for students, parents, teachers, and counselors.

October 21, 2013

As promised, we are sending daily updates regarding system performance and support. We will continue this communication as long as there is news to share.

Parchment. Parchment informed us this weekend that it had completed the work necessary for its counselors to be able to submit transcripts to our system.

Preview PDF Progress. Last night we released a fix to address the problem that has been preventing some applicants from seeing the Preview PDF during the application submission process. As with all new releases, we will monitor this one closely over the next several hours to ensure that it is working as intended.

Help Center Interruption. On Saturday night, the Help Center was unavailable for approximately 3 hours due to a service interruption at the third-party vendor that operates our support software. The vendor worked quickly to identify and resolve the problem, and they join us in apologizing to users who were impacted by this delay. The vendor has taken extra precautions to avoid any future interruption in service.

Editing/Saving Errors. On Saturday night and again on Sunday morning, some students encountered errors when trying to edit and save their applications. None of our internal monitoring indicated a problem, which suggests the issue was isolated to a particular server or part of the system. That would explain why most users did not encounter any difficulty. In all, we received about 100 support tickets on the topic.

I will share relevant updates with you as I receive them from the Common Application, along with any news from our end, as well. If you’re on Twitter, you can follow @CommonApp and get the same updates directly.

Again, if you are a Lawrence applicant encountering problems with your Common App, please connect with your Lawrence admissions counselor directly.

Thank you for your patience.

Yesterday, September 10, we welcomed our newest class of students to Lawrence. For those of us in the admissions and financial aid offices who have worked with these students and their families for months (or even years), we get to experience a joy that might be on par with having our birthdays and favorite holidays all rolled into one event, because seeing the whole class together at the same time is like waking up to find 450 individual presents all waiting for us.

Today, the students all sat for their class photo on the southward-facing steps of Lawrence Memorial Chapel. This photo is always a blast, because it’s usually taken at 11:30 in the morning, and, if the weather is cooperating, like it did today, everyone is squinting right into the sun, like this:

If you look closely in the photo, you’ll notice that our new president, Mark Burstein, has joined his class of new Lawrentians for the photo. (Hint: he’s the fella in the tie behind the purple banner.)

Last night was our New Student Convocation. One of our traditions at this event is that the dean of admissions and financial aid (i.e., the guy writing this post) gets to introduce the class to itself. Below are some highlights about the class, which I shared with them and their families last night. You will see that they are, indeed, a nifty bunch.

OK, now I’ll turn my attention on our reason for being here… which is you. Let me tell you a little bit about yourselves:

The 400 or so of you who are first-year students represent one of the largest freshman classes in Lawrence University history. You have come to us from nearly 300 high schools and home schools. Worth noting is that 260 of you are the only ones from your school, which makes you the majority. So get out there and start meeting each other.

17 of you are transfer students who have come to us from colleges as near as the University of Wisconsin right here in the Fox Valley and as far away as Bronx Community College.

In addition to our degree-seeking freshmen and transfers who become Lawrentians today, 25 of you will be with us for just this year as part of visiting exchange programs in China, Spain, the Russian Federation, and Waseda University in Tokyo, Japan. We are happy that you are all here.

…

You hail from 30 states and 25 countries.

Our largest contingent—about a quarter of you—comes from our home state of Wisconsin. The next largest groups come from Illinois, Minnesota, California, New York, Colorado, Michigan, and Washington state.

About 10% of you have a parent, sibling, or some other relative who attended (or is currently attending) Lawrence. Some of you have several generations of Lawrentians in your family! That’s pretty exciting.

But here’s another exciting thing: about 10% of you are the first ones in your family to go to college.

A handful of you are so-called “non-traditional students,” in that you are either married, have children or graduated from high school a number of years ago.

…

You new Lawrentians have had an impressive array of experiences.

Some of you have overcome extraordinary health challenges, and the fact that you’re with us today as new college students is… well, the term “miraculous” is often overused, but not so in this case.

One of you has been educating Boston-area youth about food, farming, and hunger through a service-learning group you led.

One of you played the unwitting role of guinea pig in our new online deposit system when you tried, failed, tried, failed and finally succeeded in paying your deposit to attend Lawrence this fall.

One of you dazzled me and hundreds of other parents at the Einstein Middle School honors night last May with your saxophone solo on Pure Imagination from Willie Wonka.

One of you is a mother of three children between the ages of 7 and 11. Please allow me to introduce you to a room full of potential babysitters. [Note: This student sought me out later to tell me how her kids feel famous now!]

One of you shared with your Lawrence admission counselor that you knew the Lawrence University Honor Code word for word. And because we trusted you, we didn’t make you recite it.

One of you volunteers on a mushroom farm, and is particularly enamored with a glow-in-the-dark mushroom which you described as “cool but poisonous,” so you are trying to find ways to turn it into a jack-o-lantern or a night light.

One of you, a dedicated swimmer, would drive nearly two hours each way five times a week to train.

One of you created the Nerd Club at your high school, so that students who don’t feel they fit in elsewhere would have a club to join.

One of you founded a Dead Poets Society at your school in Amman, Jordan—so you could go beyond what you learned in class and even create your own works.

One of you is a world-class pentathlete (that’s fencing, swimming, show jumping, and a biathlon of pistol shooting and cross country running). You represented Team USA in Hungary and competed against athletes from 30 different countries.

One of you in this class of new Lawrentians happens to be the 16^th president of Lawrence University.

It’s a great group of students, and they will do well here.

(P.S.: I look forward to seeing many of them at the Lawrence University football game vs. Lake Forest Saturday night.)

Today is the big day, launch day of the brand-new Common Application for 2014. It’s a launch that promises to create a better user experience for students applying to the more than 500 member colleges (including Lawrence) that use it.

Like so many product launches before it—including the infamous live-TV event where Bill Gates experienced the blue screen of death during his own presentation—today’s launch of the new Common App has been going less smoothly than I suspect our friends at Common App (or their hundreds of clients and thousands of college applicants) would like.

For example, if you search for “Lawrence” on the home screen, Lawrence University does not return in the results (even though our fellow Lawrences, Sarah and Saint, do).

Keep in mind that this is day one of a new way of applying to colleges using the Common Application.

Day two will be better.

And day seven will be even better than that.

Until then, we will Keep Calm and Avoid Employing Overused Internet Memes.