Here are your first steps in this entire process whether you are an Early Launcher or a senior:
1️⃣ College visits
I am a junior–or a super eager sophomore–and I want to get started NOW.
What should I be doing?
🗝️ Visit a large school and a small school on the same day with your parents.
So, let’s say you are a sophomore, and you are eager to be doing SOMETHING. Let me state the obvious: if you have an older sibling going on college visits, tag along.
Think about it.
The focus will be on them, not you.
You can fly below the radar and go on those walking tours and start listening to your gut. What campus excites you? Which college leaves you flat?
I taught at a private independent school in Indianapolis for the final ten years of my career where students were eager to start early.
In their sophomore year, we took all of them out to one large school and one small school back-to-back so they could simply start thinking about the aspect of size of campus when they were looking for overall fit. We might go to Indiana University and Hanover in one day. Or Xavier and the University of Cincinnati.
🗝️ If you are the oldest of the siblings in your family, propose going to visit a large school and a small school with your parents for the day.
🗝️ Create a master Google document or spreadsheet listing all of your schools and the criteria that matter the most to YOU.
Your list of items you value may include size, beauty of campus, quality of school in your prospective major, Greek life, housing, counseling, athletic program, etc. This will be extremely important for those of you applying to a large number of schools. You may well include columns for college visits, school contacts, etc.
🗝️ Create an email solely for college emails.
These emails are extremely important. If you give colleges and ETS your regular email address, vital emails regarding scholarship offers, email contact with admissions, etc, may get lost. When and if you take the SAT and/or ACT, you will write down your email used exclusively for college. Important: occasionally, my students had personal email addresses that were not appropriate for college correspondence.
My favorite example is a young man who had an email that began with “wtf.” I burst out laughing before pleading with him to come up with a neutral email address for the college application process. His personal email address may turn off some admissions officers; they may not have the same sense of humor that you have.
🗝️ Determine whether you are going to take the ACT and/or SAT.
Carefully review your master spreadsheet of your schools and see what their stance is on these tests. If you do plan to take these tests, you need to decide how/if you are going to prep for them. Are you going to take a class? Hire a tutor? Buy some practice SAT and ACT books from Amazon and create a schedule to take the tests?
🗝️ Develop a relationship with your high school counselor.
This person is going to help you every step of the way. The earlier you get to know them, the better your college application process will go. If you are at a large school where you have 2 counselors for 1200 students, you need to start scheduling meetings with them in your sophomore or junior year. Why? He/she is going to be writing your counselor recommendation. Be personable. Be genuine. Ask them about the college application process.
🗝️ Write a resume now and examine it as an admissions person looking for holes in your resume.
A common hole I see is community service. How are you giving back to your community? Are you tutoring younger children? Spearheading a Habitat for Humanity build in your senior year? Leading a blood drive? You don’t want to realize in August of your senior year that you haven’t done enough to give back to your community.
Figure it out in your sophomore or junior year and tackle it now.
Here is a link to a sample student resume.
🗝️ Teacher recommendations.
You won’t ask teachers to write recs for you until either the second semester of your junior year or the start of your senior year, but you can be thinking about this before then. If you were lucky enough to have a teacher twice over your four years of high school, that is ideal. A couple of my colleagues taught primarily freshmen and juniors, so if a student took that teacher’s course in both 9th and 11th grade, that teacher can address her growth over 3 years.
If you truly struggled in a particular class—APUSH, Chemistry, Physics, etc—and you came out on top after a rough patch or a challenging semester, that teacher can speak about your growth in a single semester or a single school year.
That’s powerful.
Perhaps you have a special connection with a teacher because he/she was there for you through a difficult period in your life. That teacher knows how this life event impacted your performance in the classroom and in other aspects of your life.
Final thoughts:
This step-by-step guide has been invaluable for my students, and it will help you feel organized and will bring clarity to the college application process.
Students who stall getting started lose themselves in either acute avoidance or overthinking without action.
Why do parents hire me? Because I provide a series of intermediate deadlines for my clients giving us plenty of time for multiple revisions. It removes the mystery and the overwhelming feelings of being overwhelmed.
If you are simply using this website as a resource, my hope is that this blog gives you a clear roadmap on managing the process. You can do this. You attack this daunting process by breaking it down into a series of steps.
As I always told my students before a timed writing for AP Lit or when they were feeling stressed about their college apps, you've got this!
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