It's an ambitious goal, but I intend to try hard, and it would be really awesome if I achieved it. (Oct 16 is the last day of fall break, so it'd give me one real break day, and would greatly decrease my stress for the following 2.5 school weeks.)

New Betting Policy

For this personal goal market, I'm trying something new — instead of only betting YES, I will not bet at all, but will instead subsidize the market. I will also try to provide updates in the comments. Hopefully, this means the market will be somewhat accurate, and I can take actions with the motivation of "moving the market".

Resolution Criteria

To resolve YES: I must have everything done — such that I could simply paste my essays, question answers, activities, honors, etc. into the app and hit submit. (Rec letters don't count since they're mostly out of my control now. Portfolios do count if I decide to submit one.) While I'm sure I will further revise my essays and such after October 15, I must be satisfied with what I've got — there can't be any parts where I'm like "I know this is bad" or "I know I have to change this." They must also satisfy the word/character limits, at least according to Google Docs.

If I technically have everything done, such that it superficially meets the above criteria, but I know I'm not satisfied with one or more drafts (even though they were good-faith attempts as opposed to stream-of-consciousness or keyboard-mashing), then I will resolve 50%. Otherwise, I will resolve NO.

The Task Ahead

I will likely early-apply to two colleges, a private school with lots of supplementals and a public school with almost none. I am leaning toward submitting a puzzle portfolio to the private school. I may still change my mind about which colleges to early-apply to. The real deadline is like November 1st.

• For the Personal Essay, I have a draft, but it still has clear areas of improvement. This will take many hours of work, but I see the path forward. It's one of the two key things to watch for this market.

• For the supplementals, I have ideas of what I may write for most of them, but I haven't done most of the actual drafting yet. Again, will take many hours of work, but I see the path forward. If I switch colleges, then that changes the amount of supplementals I have to write, which probably makes it harder (since I haven't been thinking about them as much) but not necessarily. It's the other of the two key things to watch for this market.

• For the puzzle portfolio, I will use puzzles I've already constructed, so I'd have to curate and blurb them. This could take a variable amount of time depending on how much I end up reusing words I've already written. It might matter for this market, though it's not as likely.

• For the activities and honors sections, I have a spreadsheet with a tentative list and descriptions. I'll do some more fine-tuning, but I find it hard to imagine a world where I have all the writing done but the market resolves NO because of this.

• For the random other application stuff to fill out, I've done the bulk of it, but there's some other stuff I have to enter. Again, though, this is a task with clearly defined scope, so unless I encounter something that requires an unexpectedly large amount of thinking, this will also not be the problem for this market.

If you have any questions, you can ask! I reserve the right not to answer them for privacy reasons, though.

General policy for my markets: In the rare event of a conflict between my resolution criteria and the agreed-upon common-sense spirit of the market, I may resolve it according to the market's spirit or N/A, probably after discussion.