With the first round of deadlines less than a month away, high school seniors are in the thick of college application season.

Annalee Nissenholtz, St. Louis-based director of college counseling at Interface Education Services, oversees 30 college counselors advising students all over the world. She shared with me some of the most common mistakes her team sees:

-- Leaving your applications until the last minute.

A hastily completed application will never be your best work. Essays should go through multiple drafts, and at least two people should proofread them for mistakes before you press submit.

-- Not building a strategy and theme.

An application needs to tell a specific, individualized story. If you can identify your interests and tell a unique story about yourself, you stand a better chance of being remembered.

-- Writing a generic personal statement.

The goal of your personal statement is to grab your reader’s attention and share information about your life that best shows who you are and why the school should want you on campus.

Application readers do not want to hear about the hurdles your parents and grandparents have overcome, a disappointing loss (or memorable victory) in sports, or a volunteer experience that you've only done three times in your life.

“Your application readers are not therapists. They are job interviewers,” Nissenholtz said.

Another common pitfall is to try to cover too much: “You can’t tell a life story in the personal statement. Stick to one or two main ideas,” she said.

-- Neglecting other parts of your application.

Make sure all sections of your application are written as clearly and cleanly as your essay. For instance, do not use acronyms on your activities list that someone outside your school would not know. Use the “additional information” space on the application to add details about yourself that are not included elsewhere.

-- Waiting until the last minute to ask your teachers for recommendations.

Teachers only have so many hours in the day and are busy writing lesson plans, correcting papers and supervising clubs. Do not be among the last to ask for a letter of recommendation.

-- Focusing too much time and energy on highly selective “reach schools.”

Congratulations if you are one of the top students at your high school. But if you're only applying to top-ranked colleges, remember that you are joining all the students in every high school in the country -- and the world -- who also are at the top of their classes. Be sure to have a Plan B.

-- Using AI to help with essays.

With the rise of ChatGPT and other AI tools, colleges are putting safeguards in place to identify students who may be using AI to write their essays. If colleges even suspect that your work is not your own, you will not be offered a place in the class.

-- Not giving enough time and attention to your supplemental essays.

The colleges that ask additional questions unique to their institution are doing it for a reason: They want to be sure your writing style matches your personal statement, and they want to learn more about you.

-- Not signing up for an interview or a meeting when the admissions representative visits your school.

Many colleges use interviews as a significant piece of their holistic evaluation procedure. Be sure you take advantage of every opportunity to be known to the admissions representative assigned to your school, and sign up for an interview if it is offered.

-- Not following up after your application is submitted to demonstrate your interest.

Colleges want to know they are among your top choices. Even after submitting your application, be sure to sign up for more information on their website. And take a tour -- in person, if you can, or virtually.

-- Failing to have honest conversations about finances early in the process.

Students often don’t fully understand their parents’ finances. It’s important for parents, especially those who are unlikely to qualify for need-based aid, to have an upfront conversation about whether they can afford $70,000 to $80,000 a year if a student is accepted to a highly selective school.

When Rhanita Smith, a senior at McCluer High School in Ferguson, Missouri, started to write her personal essay for a college application, she had no idea where to begin.

“I didn’t know how to sit and just talk about myself,” she said.

Smith, an "A" student, balances participating in Junior ROTC, volunteering as a praise dancer with her local church, working in retail and earning her cosmetology license -- all while still in high school.

Her life changed when she was 11 years old and her mother died. The help she received from her middle school counselor inspired her to want to become a child therapist.

On her college applications, she is focusing on her achievements.

“I don’t like using my sad story,” she said, adding that she'd rather highlight how far she has come.

This year, following the Supreme Court’s decision banning the use of race-based preferences in college admissions, no one reading Smith's application will know she is African American unless she finds a way to weave it into her personal narrative.

Veteran college counselors say they aren’t sure how the changes in this cycle will play out in admissions decisions, and that they will be looking closely at the demographic data when it is released. Despite the years when affirmative action was permitted, Black students are still underrepresented on the most selective college campuses.

Matt Essman, director of college counseling at Mary Institute and Saint Louis Country Day School -- a private institution known locally as MICDS -- said a big part of the racial disparities in higher education are tied to the country's wealth and income disparities. Students whose families are in the top income brackets are significantly overrepresented at the most selective institutions, and the vast majority of families in those top income levels are white.

Schools trying to use income to increase diversity on their campuses face an additional hurdle, Essman said: “This year is going to be more challenging than ever because of the changes in the FAFSA and aid process.”

FAFSA, the Free Application for Federal Student Aid, is the form required to determine eligibility for student financial aid. Normally, that form becomes available on Oct. 1, but this year, it will be sometime in December. Most colleges consider a student’s ability to pay when making admission decisions, but this year, that information won’t be available until two months later than normal.

Smith has already applied to a handful of colleges and plans to apply to several more. Her dream school is Bowie State University in Maryland, ranked as one of the top 20 HBCUs in the country. Wherever she eventually enrolls, the amount of financial aid she receives will be a critical factor.

“I’m not a rich kid,” she said. “I know I will also get a job on campus to help pay.”

Counselors and other experts are doing their best to help students navigate the admissions landscape in this post-affirmative action era.

Jason Lum, founder and owner of ScholarEdge College Consulting, has advised students for more than 23 years. Regarding the recent ruling, he said that in the context of essays and activities, the consideration of race is still entirely permissible.

“The Supreme Court did not say that race is completely irrelevant,” said Lum, who has a legal background. “On its own, race cannot be a factor in decision-making.”

Annalee Nissenholtz, St. Louis-based director of college counseling at Interface Education Services, said college interviews and application videos will be even more important this year.

It’s still critical to be honest and authentic in every part of the application, she says.

That advice hasn’t changed.

During my four years of college, my mom spoke to exactly one other parent whose child attended the same university.

She met the mother of my best friend. They got along well, but they lived in different cities, so that meeting was the end of their interactions. The extent of communication my parents received about my college life was a weekly long-distance phone call from me.

This is not to say that my parents were unconcerned or uninterested in my life at that time. Back then, parenting was more of a hands-off experience. That was especially true once you dropped off a kid at a college campus.

"Good luck and stay out of trouble" was the general guidance given to us.

Now, we can join private Facebook groups dedicated to the school our child attends. I started joining these groups when my kids were in middle school; they were a good place to keep up with school news or upcoming events I wouldn’t otherwise hear about. I also picked up the school gossip through this online grapevine.

Of course, there’s always some drama when a large group of people gather -- especially virtually. Even that could be entertaining to watch unfold.

I did wonder about the parents who volunteered to moderate these groups, though. Did they ever log off?

When our kids moved up to high school and became more involved in extracurricular activities, I joined the parents’ groups for those organizations. That was in addition to the parents’ pages for the high school itself -- both the official and unofficial versions.

Pretty soon, my Facebook feed was littered with posts from parents I didn’t know personally but whose kids shared something in common with ours, even if it was just attending the same school.

I didn’t expect that this firehose of information would keep flowing when the kids left for college, but it has. Surprisingly, the posts from parents have become more frequent, and more revealing, as their children have gotten older. Parents share about their college kids’ social adjustment issues, loneliness, roommate troubles, course scheduling problems and cafeteria complaints.

It’s hard to imagine my own parents knowing such details about my life when I was that age, let alone sharing them with hundreds of my classmates’ parents. I would have died a thousand deaths if they had revealed that kind of information about me.

But we are in a different era of parenting. We are conditioned to be more involved, solving more problems for our children -- even when it deprives them of learning how to deal with their own challenges and discomforts.

I remember getting a horrible toothache during my freshman year: I had to find a nearby dentist, figure out how to get there, get the tooth extracted and deal with the bill and the aftercare. When my daughter had a toothache at the beginning of her junior year, I asked for advice on the parents’ page and had a list of vetted recommendations in minutes.

A recent Wall Street Journal article described how parents are hiring concierge services to “mother” their college students, doing the sort of tasks a mom might have done at home. It seems like these parents are hiring a cross between an emotional support animal and a butler. The extremely wealthy one-percenters among us have always had access to these types of services, but now this level of handholding has trickled down to the masses.

This does both parents and their children a disservice. A huge part of being a young adult is learning how to function independently. While our parents had little choice but to leave us to our own devices, our generation seems to struggle to give our children the same freedom from parental oversight.

To be fair, many of us are now writing hefty tuition checks, adding a greater layer of financial investment to the situation. The stakes for students also feel much higher. But giving them space to find their way through some challenging situations gives them the confidence that they are capable.

It’s tempting to follow the travails of college life through social media posts from your fellow parents, who may be as anxious as you are about letting go.

However, just because you can, doesn’t mean you should.