If you are a high school student who wants to study abroad, it’s time to get serious about your college applications. You may feel like you still have some time, but your college application process actually started a few years ago. Every extracurricular, class, volunteer activity, standardized tests, and internship you’ve done and plan to do in high school is building your college resume and giving you talking points for your application.
To help increase your chances of getting into the colleges of your choice, we picked five the best 5 out of strategies that can ace your college application, suggested by the U.S.News.
Much of what goes into the hard choices college admissions officers have to make is beyond students’ control, such as whether institutions are prioritizing matters like diversity, legacy applicants, or athletic recruiting in a given year. So it’s crucial to know all about everything you can control and learn how to “position yourself throughout the process,” says Eileen Feikens, director of college guidance at the Dwight-Englewood School in New Jersey.
To that end, U.S. News asked guidance counselors, private counselors, and the people making the admissions decisions for tips on navigating the madness:
1. Get an early start and finish strong
Colleges want to see that you’ve focused from the start on getting the best possible education your high school has to offer. “You really need a four-year plan,” says Katherine Cohen, whose IvyWise admissions consulting company begins working with some families as early as the end of the student’s eighth-grade year. “High school shouldn’t just happen to you. You need to proactively make the most of your time there.”
If you want to take calculus in your senior year, which many selective colleges like to see, you generally have to start with geometry as a freshman in order to end up in pre-calculus when you’re a junior. If it took you awhile to get on track, consider making up lost ground in summer school or by doubling up on math, science, or foreign languages in your junior and senior years. “We like to see candidates who turn things around,” says Kevin Dyerly, director of admission at Whitman College.
2. Challenge yourself responsibly
While grades remain the single biggest factor in admissions decisions, strength of the curriculum is an ever-closer second. In the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s most recent “State of College Admission” survey, 66 percent of staffers said they assign considerable weight to degrees of challenge. Thank the evidence piling up that high schoolers who take more demanding classes are more likely to succeed in college.
So planning your course load becomes a balancing act. You want to take the most rigorous courses you’re eligible for and are interested in—without sacrificing your health or social life.
“So many families say, ‘I’m going to have this many APs, is that enough?’ but that’s not the right question, because there is no magic number,” says Greg Roberts, dean of admissions at the University of Virginia. “You need to ask … things like: Where are my strengths? Where are my interests? … What are the top students taking? Which AP classes are more challenging, and which are not?”
Admissions officers will glean the answers from the “profile” of your high school that your counselor submits with your application, which outlines curriculum offerings, demographics, and grade distribution.
But she was taken aback by all the time and effort it took to present herself to each and write all those essays while “making sure my schoolwork was going well and still trying to hang out with my friends on weekends.” Indeed, a recent study by the College Board showed that the vast majority of students report that the more colleges they apply to, the more stressful the experience is. Perhaps because of that pressure, overapplying can actually hurt your chances.
“It’s tough to put together a personal, genuine application that shows commitment to a particular school when you’re applying to 20 different places,” says Jeff Pilchiek, the director of guidance at Westlake High School in Austin, Texas. “It’s much better to be an exceptional applicant at six schools than an average applicant at 12 or 20.”
High schoolers aren’t the only ones who have to deal with unpredictability. Because colleges now have such a tough time figuring out how many accepted students will actually show up on the first day of classes, many are being more strategic these days about using the wait list, taking a number of students from it in order to improve their stats.
“Don’t regard that letter as a polite denial,” advises author Peter Van Buskirk, former admissions dean at Franklin and Marshall College. Many enrollment officers, he explains, “are saying if they have to admit four to five students in regular decision to enroll one, maybe [they] ought to take more students from the waitlist, where they only have to admit maybe four to get three.”
He recommends staying in touch with the admissions office and making clear that you’ll attend if you’re accepted, then sending in new grades and honors and even visiting again.
5. Be true to yourself
All through his time at High Tech High International in San Diego, classmates and teachers kept telling Nathan Roberts that he should aim for the Ivy League. So he put Harvard and Yale University on his list, even though he sensed he’d be happier at a smaller liberal arts school.
After visiting Carleton College, Roberts realized it was the ideal place for him, with its excellent neuroscience program, small classes, personalized attention from professors, and focus on providing need-based financial aid. “I knew I could get just as good of an education there as anywhere else,” says Roberts, who was wait-listed at Harvard and Yale University but withdrew once he visited Carleton, where he’s now thriving as a junior.
As for Kira Gressman, she spent the week after getting her rejections moping around and feeling sorry for herself. She then took another look at her only option—the University of Colorado–Boulder honors program, where she’s now in her second year—and realized that it was actually a great match. She saw that there would be “lots of opportunities for me to succeed and to make a contribution to the world at Boulder.” And that, she says, is “what I really want from my college experience.”
Source: U.S. News
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If you are thinking about applying for financial aid in any college, just go for it. Everest Education published an ebook called “U.S. Financial Aid for international students” that guides students in every detail about that process. To get the full version of this e-book, please register here.
While grades remain the single biggest factor in admissions decisions, strength of the curriculum is an ever-closer second. In the National Association for College Admission Counseling’s most recent “State of College Admission” survey, 66 percent of staffers said they assign considerable weight to degrees of challenge. Thank the evidence piling up that high schoolers who take more demanding classes are more likely to succeed in college.
