My son is a freshman in high school. He attends a private international school in Seoul, Korea. It’s a pretty good school but my son wants to attend boarding school in the USA.
Since he’s a freshman today, he plans to apply next year when he is a sophomore and start attending his Junior year.
I understand that it’s a little late to start attending boarding school but we are where we are and unfortunately don’t have a time machine so we’re trying to make the best of it. I haven’t seen much about applying to boarding school later in High School. My son has friends who applied this year and will start as sophomores though.
If he doesn’t get into boarding school, he will just continue to attend his international school here in Korea so not getting into any school is ok (albeit will be a bruise to his ego).
Target schools: Since his fallback is to just attend international school here, he would like to aim for the top schools only…Choate, Exeter, Andover, Deerfield, etc. so probably something like 3-5 of the top schools.
His main reason for wanting to attend boarding school is that with college admissions relying less and less on standardized testing, they will likely rely more and more on grades and strength of High School (i.e., everyone has a 4.0+ but a 4.0+ from a top boarding school will be better than a 4.0+ from a no name public school, etc.). His college goals are schools like Harvard, Stanfurd, Penn, and Cal (the last 2 are because I went there).
GPA/Tests: He is a straight A/A+ student. Next year he will be taking 2 AP classes. He is studying for the SATs and will take the SAT in August 2021. His stretch goal is to score a 1550 but we’ll see what he actually gets. He is scoring ~1450 on practice tests today and will be studying all summer taking an intensive SAT prep class. He will also be taking the PSAT in the fall.
Extra-curriculars: He plays soccer and swims but he’s not at varsity level (as a Freshman).
Interview: My son isn’t the best at this but I’ll help get him prepared. I’m a college admissions interviewer for Penn so I’m somewhat familiar with the process at least at the college level.
Financial aid: He is planning to apply for financial aid but I’m not sure if we will qualify (not sure what the thresholds are). Any ideas? i.e, if I make too much to quality for aid anyway, maybe we should just not apply for aid? I think I’m in that gap where we’re not poor but we’re also not super rich either so affordability is an issue although not a deal breaker.
Anyway, since we’re pretty new to this, I read as much as I can in other threads but if anyone has any advice, thoughts, insight, etc. I’m eager to learn as much as I can to help prepare my son before he applies next year.
RVD.