Why this matters:

Kids tend to ignore their emails. (Perhaps you’ve noticed.)

When you ignore college emails, you miss important information about portals, missing documents, scholarship deadlines, and even acceptance notifications. The hundreds of unsolicited emails from colleges can be overwhelming, but creating folders gives you POWER over your mailbox.

Students, do this:

  1. Go into the email that you use for colleges.
  2. Make a folder for each school you’re applying to. (Click the next to “Labels” in the left column of Gmail.)
  3. In the search bar, type the name of a college where you’ve already submitted your application.
  4. Hit “return” to sort your email so that all your emails from that school appear at the top.
  5. Drag the emails into the folder. (Or go to the label tab at the top of the email and select the folder that way.)
  6. Repeat for each college where you’ve already submitted an application.
  7. Skim the emails in your folders and “STAR” any that refer to your portal or application.
  8. For each school’s portal, bookmark the link and save your user ID and password. (Trick: When you make a password, email it to yourself and keep it with the college’s emails or in a separate email folder you can title anything but “Passwords.” I call mine “Past Tense.”)

Extra credit:

  1. Read the emails you starred.
  2. Skim the other emails in your college folders and decide if the information should be kept or deleted.
  3. Create folders for colleges where you are applying but haven’t yet submitted your application.
  4. Unsubscribe from colleges you don’t care about and delete their emails.

You don’t have to use my system, but I do suggest using some sort of system to manage your o-v-e-r-l-o-a-d-e-d mailbox and take some stress out of these weeks!

Teach your teen to tame their inbox