You’ve always known the time would come to apply to colleges and universities. Maybe you’ve taken difficult courses and participated in extracurriculars in order to round out your resume. Perhaps you’ve made a list of schools you plan to apply to, and organized them by your first and last choices. Maybe you’ve completed your four years of college and are anxiously awaiting commencement day. But for one reason or another, you’ve missed one of the deadlines for college or graduation. What now? If you’re wondering what happens if you miss the deadline for a college application, look no further. Here, we’ll provide some encouragement and advice on how to move forward after a missed college application deadline .
Whether it’s homework, an essay, or an application, missing a deadline can be a nerve-wracking experience. While some people may be aware of the situation ahead of time, most people are taken by surprise by missing a college application deadline. Students will frequently get bogged down by their current responsibilities, only to log into a college application portal to find that a deadline has been missed, and applications have been closed. The first thing you should do is to not panic! Missing a deadline is not the end of the road for you. Don’t do anything rash, like deleting the work you’ve put in so far, or complaining in a social media post. You may still have the opportunity to salvage the situation.
Instead of reacting out of frustration, first, try and determine why the deadline was missed. There are many good and bad reasons to have a missed college application deadline. For instance, you may have known the deadline was coming, and simply procrastinated until the last minute. You may have not begun the application until a few hours before its deadline, and were unable to assemble all the materials of the application—transcripts, letters of recommendation, essays, etc.—before the deadline. Or, due to disorganization, you may have completely lost track of completing the application and forget it under an avalanche of other priorities. In any of these situations, you’ll need to come to terms with your error and take responsibility for it.
On the other hand, there could have been a valid reason for missing an application. If you missed a college application deadline because of a technical error in the college’s system, this was outside of your control. Similarly, if you experienced a significant life event during the time of the application process, such as illness, or the death of a loved one, it’s understandable that the application fell by the wayside.
