Does anyone have a good college essay organizer template to recommend?

Keeping your college essay process organized can be a lifesaver, especially when you're juggling multiple supplements, deadlines, and drafts. One of the best ways to manage everything is by creating a spreadsheet that tracks key details for every school and essay. Here’s how you can set up an organizer that covers the essentials:

Create a new Google Sheet and build columns for:
- School Name
- Prompt
- Deadline
- Word Count Limit
- Current Word Count
- Draft Status (Not started, Brainstorming, In progress, Editing, Finalized)
- Brainstorming Ideas/Notes
- Link to Document (so you can go straight to your essay draft for each prompt)
- Submission Status (Submitted, In progress, Not started)

You can freeze the top row for easy navigation, color-code for deadlines (e.g., red for this week, yellow for next), and use checkboxes for status updates.

For personal brainstorming, some students add a second tab with a running list of potential essay anecdotes or experiences, and use columns to match them to prompts where they'd fit best. This helps you visualize where you can reuse essays or unique stories.

As an example, let’s say you’re applying to UCLA, Stanford, and Northwestern. On your sheet, you’d have a line for each essay prompt with its specific requirements. For instance:
- ‘Describe an academic subject that inspires you’ | UCLA | 350 words | 11/30 | In progress
- ‘Roommate essay’ | Stanford | 250 words | 1/2 | Not started

If you prefer a template, searching “college essay tracker Google Sheets template” will turn up some public options you can copy, but sometimes making your own is better since you can customize for your workflow.

For essay drafts, you can keep all documents in a single Drive folder and link those directly in the spreadsheet. Some students find it helpful to bookmark the spreadsheet in their browser so it’s always one click away.

This system helped me keep my drafts and prompts straight—especially when I realized I could tweak one essay to fit two different schools! Taking the time to organize now will make your applications much less stressful. Let me know if you want help outlining your first sheet, or need tips on how to brainstorm for specific prompts.