Advice

I’m a ninth grader at the moment and my dream is to go to stanford. What is some advice you can give me?

Do what you love, and do it well. Keep yourself grounded. Remember that there are PLENTY of schools other than Stanford that can give you an amazing education and wonderful experiences. And lastly, don’t spend your whole high school career trying to “game the system”: taking classes or participating in activities simply to check off a box to make yourself a viable Stanford (or any university) candidate. It WILL backfire. If you can look back in four years and say confidently that you spent the past four years learning and doing what was right for YOU, you will be successful regardless of where you end up.

Another piece of advice: don’t idolize a school. Every school has its faults. And, at the end of the day, if you followed your passions and become the best version of you over the next four years and still aren’t accepted to Stanford, you’ll be able to say you gave it your all and stayed true to yourself, and you’ll know that it wasn’t meant to be. After all, the best school for you is the one that wants you as much as you want it.

Good luck! That advice sums up my high school experience, and I was a completely unhooked applicant. Headed to Stanford this month!

Thank you so much for the advice! Also I would like to ask something. I took a high school course last year in eigth grade and I got a b because I didn’t really take it too seriously (not studying for quizzes etc) and if it does get put in my gpa do you think Stanford or any school will care about it since it happened in 8th grade

Advice? Don’t dream.
Educate yourelf to what Stanford or any other target college values and looks for. That is often more than just what you want or what you want to do. The best source of info is the colleges, themselves, what they write and show, the sorts of students they feature and brag about.

Your grades from eighth grade won’t matter at all (even if they’re on your high school transcript).

Apply to one or two Honors Colleges which have good programs in your areas of interest.

Three pieces of advice:

  1. Don’t get fixated on any dream school, especially one as hard to get into as Stanford.

  2. Follow your passions and dig deeply into things that you love.

  3. Get off CC and don’t come back until your senior year (or summer between junior and senior year).

@stannystu22’s advice is spot on.

@stannystu22 “Your grades from eighth grade won’t matter at all (even if they’re on your high school transcript).”

No, but they set you on a course load in high school that is critical to success applying to the top colleges 4 years later like Stanford. You want to “master” many courses in middle school like math, english/literature, and foreign languages so you have a great foundation once you attend high school which means getting A’s in these middle school classes. The "A "on your transcript is just a by-product of having the knowledge and skill set to continue to the next level course.

So to say that middle school grades don’t matter at all, is really misguided IMO. It all matters…

Perhaps I shouldn’t have made such a decisive blanket statement (I also missed the detail about the class being a high school course). What I intended to get across is that a single B will rarely, if ever, be the one factor to push a student from the “admit” pile into the “reject” pile.

Middle school grades don’t matter. In fact, I told my kid to ignore grades in middle school and just enjoy learning and read books he enjoys. He got into Stanford REA.

The grade doesn’t matter in itself per se, but the fact that you say you didn’t take the class seriously is a bit more of a red flag in my mind. You’ll need to be incredibly motivated academically to get into Stanford, so never underestimate the difficulty of a class even if you think it’s beneath you!