Marie Guarnieri

Junior year is the exact moment college prep starts feeling incredibly real — and it's easy to feel like you need to do everything at once. I promise you don't. This post walks through exactly what has a real deadline this fall: demystifying the PSAT, sketching a spring testing plan, locking in recommendation letter writers, building a rough college list, and — if your child has an IEP, 504 plan, or is neurodivergent — starting the accommodations conversation before winter break arrives.

High school runs on borrowed structure with bells, reminders, and check-ins that quietly do a lot of organizational work for students with ADHD. College removes that structure almost overnight. This post lays out a four-step system for rebuilding it: extracting every deadline from every syllabus, consolidating them into one master calendar, translating that into a realistic weekly schedule, and running a quick weekly check-in to keep the system from falling apart by October.

If you have a rising junior or senior at home, summer is the perfect time to start visiting colleges. You can fold visits into road trips, take your time exploring each campus, and start building a real sense of what fits. Yes, campus will be quieter, but tour groups are smaller, admissions staff are more accessible, and you'll have time to actually explore the surrounding town. Here's a practical guide to making summer college visits count.